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Haven't had a chance to view the link, Mickey ... but in answer to your title question: Yes. Period.

I'm not liking Obama these days ... he needs to grow a pair and be about justice and the rule of law. Period. But he's just part of the whole crooked system (complicit w/ the Fed in hiding $2 TRILLION of no-interest loans to banks that they have no intention of making public; and Obama staffs the Treasury w/ the same kinds of thugs who allowed the deregulation paving the way for looting of the nation's people ... all for greedy, personal gain -- I could go on, but I won't -- just too darn depressing. What really can one expect, though ... men of integrity in government are rare on the earth. Re: Obama ... hate to admit it, but I've been had.

Naomi, I understand feeling disillusioned with some of Obama's decisions. It is unthinkable that this nation would allow torturers to get away with their crimes against humanity. Torture victims don't need Obama's "reflection" about what they suffered.......they need retribution against all those responsible for torturing them.

By refusing to prosecute, Obama has made himself complicit in their crimes. And he has refused to vindicate America from the shame of being an unrepentant nation that tortures.

As usual, Mickey, you communicated what was in my thoughts in a much clearer way than I did. Wow: "By refusing to prosecute, Obama has made himself complicit in their crimes. And he has refused to vindicate America from the shame of being an unrepentant nation that tortures."

Nuremburg trials come to mind and how U.S. politicians were fully supporting those who tortured the Jews. Wasn't that event to set the rule for justice in the world?

The Justice Department, without Obama, can call for impeachment or some form of punishment for Bush and Cheney, or so says a few lawyers who are pushing the buttons. But there are so many guilty parties that are hiding under cover, including the CIA and infamous Homeland Security "insiders" and these having detroyed records etc., it would take another hundred years to get anything done in the way of justice. And the Right Wing should carry this burden forever as it can't be undone. History will not be kind to their hatred and needless death toll.

Obama seems to be standing his ground against the Repugnuts who are swinging their fists at him. They especially don't like Obama's friendliness to foreign leaders in rebuilding America's reputation in dignity in the world and building peace instead of wars.. And they fail to mention how past Republican president Bush have "kissed" the Saudi king, Nixon giving auto's as gifts to communist Russia, and Republican politicians who didn't open their mouth about the U.S. whorehouse in Cuba. (heard that one on Hardball). So I suppose that whatever the Repugnuts throw at Obama, he has enough "balls" who helped him get elected to throw it back in their face.

pss... what's hurting America is unskilled labor having no place to go. So what should people do? Maybe go to trade schools instead of community colleges and state universities?

Naomi, I think if enough people keep this torture issue in the public eye, and pressure both Congress and the White House, we may at least get a Special Prosecutor. If you have a strong stomach, read the four torture reports just released by Obama........unbelievable what was done in our names.

Other nations, and the UN too, are calling for retribution. Obama's grandfather was brutally tortured by the British during an uprising in kenya, and spent two years in a British prison. This fact makes Obama's willingness to let American torturers off the hook even more inexplicable. But I'm afraid that, as always, politics overrirdes justice.

Seems Cheney is getting more nervous as Americans are demanding investigations of those who tortured. He can run but he can't hide his personal reponsibility. Bush hasn't peeped out from uncover either.

Obama has left an open door for criminal prosecution if it is pushed by the legal eagles who truly believe in justice and in representing American interest of justice.

As the process could go on for decades here, maybe some foreign intelligence people will arrest and hold Cheney and Bush and others who are guilty of torture should they step outside the U.S., and then try them and convict them and keep them. We don't need them here.

It really is horrific how Bush and Cheney just mercilessly tortured those poor guys.

Maybe, instead they should have had the military fly a plane into one of their Mosques.
It wouldn't be torture, because they would have almost all died instantly. I can just see it now.
All the little baby parts lying around, heads and arms of mothers and children. But hey, they weren't tortured. Of that we can be proud..

But, no...we had to use that terrible water board that didn't leave a mark on them. No wonder we're so hated in the world.

But, if we're going to prosecute them, we may as well get Nancy too. She was briefed about it before it happened, and approved it, as well as many other liberal democrats that want to prosecute Bush/Cheney.

clean'

No dumbass, our government should have had politicians with enough sense who would have gone after BL, and not have conspired to pre-empt a war on innocent people before 9/11 ever ocurred. If you think Bush wasn't put in office by people who conspired to start a war on Islam, then you really need to do more research on the subject. What does it tell you when the Religious Right were pumping strongly for war with Iraq and Iran publicly and in their pulpits at least a year before 9/11? These "Christians" lied and it is these same Christians who are still supporting "water-boarding" and other torturous astrocities. It's shameful, it's cruel and inhuman. And sad to say, they love it.

IMO, Bush, Cheney, Rumpsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitch, Powell and others who orchestrated their war, deserve the death penalty for treasonous acts on American people. Americans are dead due to the lies. Nothing but lie after lie from Bush and his religious party politic. And their sadistic love of torture is simply that. Sadaism. If nothing is done to punish these MF's, then our justice system is useless and America can not be trusted in any foreign or domestic policy.

Why should foreign nations now trust American politicians? Or Americans? I don't even trust these religious sadists myself. Especially you Cleansword. You pretend not to know what torture is, and want to excuse the ugliness and physical pain of it, and disregard the high treason of Bush and his sending American soldiers to their death.

Do you know the definition of "high-crimes and misdeameanors", "treason", "acts of sabatoge against the American people" defined as America?

Do you even know what your talking about?

All the evidence pointed to Iraq as having Weapons of Mass Destruction. If the evidence was faulty,
it was the fault of the Clinton administration. He virtually stripped the CIA and other intelligence agencies
of their ability to get on the ground intelligence.
Bill Clinton himself said that Iraq had WMD's. But, he was too busy trying to bury the Monica Lewinsky
scandal that he didn't want to get involved in a conflict with terrorists.

When the twin towers were attacked the first time during Clinton's administration, he preferred to call it
a law enforcement problem, not a terrorist attack. Of course, that emboldened the terrorists. They again attacked American interests.
And Clinton would say "Now, stop that, or we're going
to put a caterpillar in your cell when (if) we catch you, or even worse, we're going to pour some water on on your head."

The terrorists don't care if you are a Republican, democrat, independent, liberal or conservative.
They hate America, have
always hated America, and won't stop until they bring America to it's knees. WE didn't have another attack on American soil while Bush was President.

The reason for that is that we took the battle where the terrorist live, and kept it away from where we live.

The fact is these "enhanced interrogations techniques" worked.
The information that we gained from these "tortures" helped foil an imminent attack in
Los Angeles, potentially killing more men, women, and children.

It's obvious that you care more about the comfort of the terrorists than you care about
the safety of innocent American citizens.

By the way, Bill Clinton had the opportunity to get Bin Laden, and he turned it down. Citing "Legal problems". Apparently, he didn't have enough sense to go after "BL"


clean'

One last question..

if a terrorist had information which could save the lives of your family, would you object to harsh interrogation to save them?

Ah yes, it's all Clintons fault none of it can be laid at the feet of the president whose watch it was now can it?

I don't remember me saying it was all clintons' fault.
I did say that he has to share some of the blame for the 9/11 attack. That is, treating it as
a law enforcement problem rather than what it was, an act of war against the United States.

clean'

It seems that Cheney may not be the only one nervous about a full investigation..

Secretly briefed, Pelosi did not object to waterboarding in 2002
12/09/2007 @ 9:53 am
Filed by John Byrne


Pelosi would later boot sole objector to program from chance to chair Intelligence Committee


Two senior Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- were briefing on the CIA's program to use waterboarding on terror suspects in September 2002 and did not object, according to Sunday's Washington Post.

In the long-ranging article, which seemingly takes the lawmakers and the Bush Administration to task by discussing the practice's emergence in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian states, a Pelosi aide said the Speaker remembered discussion of "enhanced" interrogation techniques and "acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."

"In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody," the Post wrote. "For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."

"Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill," the Post added. "But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said."

Democrats have since been vehement critics of the practice, piggybacking on public outrage to a practice many have described as torture -- including 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain (R-AZ) who was tortured in the Vietnam War.

Only Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) -- then the second-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who would supplant Pelosi in 2003 -- formally objected. Harman, who was set to lead the House Intelligence Committee when the Democrats retook the chamber in 2006, was pushed aside by Pelosi when she took over as Speaker, in what was seen as an element of personal rivalry.

"Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the committee's top Democrat in January 2003, disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program," the Post notes. "Harman said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA's program because of strict rules of secrecy."

"When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath -- one of secrecy," she said. "I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything."

None of the other lawmakers briefed raised formal objections. Those lawmakers included former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), former Sen. John Rockefeller IV (D-WV), former Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KN).

"Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support," the Post added. 'Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,' said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. 'And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.'"

Read the full Post story here.

http://www.ask.com/bar?q=who+knew+about+the+torture%2C+and+when+did+they+know+it%3F&3F&page=

Who Are You Calling a War Criminal?
The dangers of making simplistic historical comparisons

David Harsanyi | May 6, 2009
It's fun to be idealistic in a world of moral absolutes. I know because I'm a columnist. But when we start discussing history, things always seem to get complicated.

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart learned this recently when debating the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' president, Cliff May, about the harsh interrogation techniques administered during the George W. Bush administration.

When May asked Stewart whether he also considers Harry Truman to have been a war criminal for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the host answered yes. A few days later, however, Stewart apologized for his blasphemy, saying Truman's decision was, in fact, "complicated."

Things were indeed complicated. They are always complicated.

That's the point.

Please, don't get me wrong. For numerous reasons, I'm ecstatic that the United States triumphed over the forces of jackbootery during World War II. But staking moral claims on old wars is a bad idea for either side of this debate.

In fact, if Barack Obama believes, as he recently stated, that the nation "lost its moral bearings" under his predecessor, he will have a hard time defending any presidency.

After all, if waterboarding is a war crime, the dropping of an atomic bomb on a few hundred thousand innocent civilians surely deserves some serious consideration for rebuke. At the very least, it's a fair topic for discussion.

Just as surely, Franklin Roosevelt's presiding over the destruction of Dresden, which caused 30,000-40,000 civilians to be incinerated, is at least as terrible as long-term sleep deprivation.

If Bush deserves war crime status for holding terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay (which Obama has yet to close), then we safely can say that FDR merits more of a historical lashing for the forced internment of 100,000 Japanese-Americans to "war relocation camps."

If Bush is a war criminal for denying terror suspects habeas corpus, then what is one to make of Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus for all American citizens during the Civil War? Or of President Woodrow Wilson, who backed the Espionage Act, which forbade Americans from using "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government?

Because, if we buy the argument that the ends never justify the means, we can't give presidents passes. If you argue that times and morality have evolved, that situations have changed, or that some causes are greater than others, then you're offering up distinctions, and you should accept some, as well.

The need to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been debated for decades. When President Bill Clinton backed the NATO bombing of Serbia—at least 500 civilians were killed by NATO, according to Human Rights Watch—he claimed that the bombing was necessary to "deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians."

If that argument sounds familiar, it is because it is utilized all the time. Did the bombing of Serbia, Japan, or Iraq save lives in the long run? Did the waterboarding of prisons save Americans from terror acts? I just wish a proponent would say, "We can't know for sure."

At this point, I can hear Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men encapsulating the opinion of many: "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said 'thank you' and went on your way."

We shouldn't be on our way. In fact, history gives us a template to evaluate the complexities and morality of war.

And there are few absolutes.

http://reason.com/news/show/133346.html