There Is A God

And his name will hopefully be Eric Holder. The Office of Professional Responsibility at the justice department has release a report stating that criminal investigations into torture should be reopened. (They were closed by Bush.)

From the NY Times:

"Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry."

He better or America is definitely doomed to repeat its past.

Update: And he did it. Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate torture. The only problem is that he has put limitations on the prosecutor. Allowing him/her to only go after the torturers. Which is unfair. The prosecutor also needs to go after the officials and lawyers who conjured up this whole mess to begin with.

Pelosi Taking Tortue to the Next Level

I am not quite sure what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing. She has raised the stakes on the torture problem but I am not sure if it was on purpose. On Wednesday, she said the CIA had lied to congress about whether or not waterboarding/torture was being used back in 2002. She says that the CIA did not inform her about torture when the CIA says they told her directly.

I don't know who is right but for Pelosi, a veteran politician, to say that the CIA "lied" is big. Politicians who get to this level generally do not make eronious statements. They are always calculating for a goal they have in mind. The only goal this brings about is an investigation and she called for one.

The problem is that Obama has already said he doesn't support this. So what is she doing? Is she defending herself and her word by calling the CIA liars or does she really want a truth commission. Who knows.

The Post has an article on the subject:

"Pelosi's performance in the Capitol was either a calculated escalation of a long-running feud with the Bush administration or a reckless act by a politician whose word had been called into question. Perhaps it was both."

There is another question. Why is the GOP attacking her? The GOP is viciously attacking Pelosi only increasing the call for a truth commission. The last thing the GOP needs is a commission investigating the Bush's toture policy and who was complicit.

Overall, this is all very confusing.

The Torture Damn is Breaking

Bush used torture and all his attempts at covering it up are coming out. The disclosure of the legal memos  showed that they tortured one guy 183. Jesus christ. This was not for information. It was payback.

Now, The Times shows a history of how the torture came about. And not because they needed info. The history started about a couple of months after 9/11.

"In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned."

No one stopped to say "Hey, maybe this is illegal or immoral or just wrong."

Then there's the stupidity of the players:

"They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was 'a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,' a former C.I.A. official said."

Obama needs to have an independent investigation into this whole thing. He NEEDS  to clean the closet on this one and many others. I hope this investigation will spill over into an investigation into wire tapping as well.

Yep, They Tortured

Coming out from the post is an article saying that a judge finally admitted the Bush administration tortured. 

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national...

and the judge, Susan J. Crawford, further said

We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,

Now that a judge has found that Bush tortured people, will we get a prosecution? Probably not.

His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Which makes absolutely no fucking sense.