Obama is just trying to bridge those partisan divides
Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race — and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.
Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted — but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”
The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.
You can read the actual quote from the Messiah at Philly.com. But, hey, he doesn’t want to come off as not trying to bridge the partisan divide. I’m not sure how, since he has said and promised absolutely nothing for those one the right.
And I am not surprised at all that the most liberal Senator in Congress cares more about some belly slaps and taking an Islamic terrorist’s teddy bear away being torture, or, as they put it, being mean, then actually fighting the war on terror. You know, those folks who want to kill Americans and destroy the Western way of life, replacing it with Sharia law and a world wide caliphate.
I wonder if these leftist elitists understand that when a group such as Al Qaeda plans to attack the USA, they are going to typically pick an area that is Blue, as most big cities tend to be.
These people never can move on.
Oh, BTW, Will Bunch, who wrote the article, and is apparently employed by Philly.com, also has a diary at Daily Kos. I have to wonder about the propriety of doing that. And, yes, if one of the few Conservatives in the media was posting at a conservative blog not owned by him or her, that would be wrong.
Trackposted to Is It Just Me?, Rosemary’s Thoughts, third world county, DragonLady’s World, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Celebrity Smack, , Conservative Cat, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
If you’re for giving our government the right to imprison people without warrant and the right to torture detainees just come out and say it. Equating controlled drowning and other tortures with “belly slaps” is nonsense. Torture’s torture. Detaining people all over the globe (including those with American citizenship) might be a wonderful idea but it certainly doesn’t agree with the Constitution. As for the need for all this stuff because of the enormous threat of dying from a terrorist attack, objective evaluation of risks (see John Mueller’s work on the issue) shows that our risk of terrorism while sitting in front of our computers is roughly equal to that of getting hit by an asteroid–not exactly the type of threat that makes me want to hand over all my rights to the government.
I do not see what we do to detainees, otherwise known as members of the same group that killed 3,000 of our fellow citizens, as being torture. Why do you care about them more then protecting Americans?
Let’s think about this for a second. We gave Jeffrey Dammer a full trial and all his rights until he was convicted and yet we had good evidence that he was cutting up little kids and eating them. On the other hand, the famous picture of the hooded Iraqi with electrodes attached to him (who we now know was tortured in other ways as well) was arrested FOR BEING AT A PROTEST AND ON SUSPICION THAT HE MAY HAVE STOLEN A CAR. He didn’t kill 3,000 people. At the worse, he stole a car. What makes you so sure that some administration in the future isn’t going to decide to take one of us out (if it isn’t already), not give us a trial (we could be a suspected “combatant” after all) and torture us. Myself, I don’t want my government to have that right. I guess I’m more “conservative” than you on this issue. I want to conserve my rights and always am very wary of handing any right over to Uncle Sam.