http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/07-1
When Obama sought to placate his angry supporters after he voted for
the Bush/Cheney FISA-telecom immunity bill last June (after vowing the
prior December to support a filibuster of any such legislation),this
is what he said (h/t notavailable):
[The FISA bill] also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight
over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant
retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this
provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.
So candidate Obama unambiguously vowed to his supporters that he would
work to ensure "full accountability" for "past offenses" in
surveillance lawbreaking. President Obama, however, has now become
the prime impediment to precisely that accountability,repeatedly
engaging in extraordinary legal maneuvers to ensure that "past
offenses" -- both in the surveillance and torture/rendition realm --
remain secret and forever immunized from judicial review.Put another
way, Obama has repeatedly done the exact opposite of what he vowed he
would do: rather than "seek full accountability for past offenses,"
he has been working feverishly to block such accountability, by
embracing the same radical Bush/Cheney views and rhetoric regarding
presidential secrecy powers that caused so much controversy and anger
for the last several years.
On a very related note: last night, The New York Review of Books
published the full report of the International Committee of the Red
Cross (.pdf), which documented in detail the brutal torture to which
the 14 "high-value" detainees whom we disappeared into our CIA "black
sites" were subjected and demanded "that the US authorities
investigate all allegations of ill-treatment and take steps to punish
the perpetrators, where appropriate." As Scott Horton notes, the ICRC
does not call for investigations and prosecutions easily, but rather,
"only where the evidence of criminal conduct is manifest." Yet
Obama's handpicked CIA Director, Leon Panetta, continues to demand
that there be no investigations of any kind, let alone prosecutions.
As a CIA spokesperson told the New York Times yesterday in response to
the ICRC report:
Mr. Panetta "has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based
on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be
investigated, let alone punished." The C.I.A.'s interrogation methods
were declared legal by the Justice Department under President George
W. Bush.
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