The Huffington Post has the story, via Memeorandum:
MoveOn.org is set to launch an aggressive new ad campaign calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the use of torture during the Bush administration and even raising the specter of targeting former Vice President Dick Cheney.I'm frankly tired of this fake debate. The release this week of the Bush Justice Department memos has shown the degree of judicious care with which U.S. officials sought to protect the rights of suspects undergoing interrogation.
The ad, to premier on the web and blasted out to the group's five million members, is the strongest push yet from the progressive group on this front. Set to a dark voice, the narrator asks whether a double standard is in place in terms of who has been punished for the authorization and use of torture.
As today's Wall Street Journal makes clear, "contrary to the claim that the memos detail 'brutal' techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture."
Throughout 2008, we saw a huge buildup on the left for "toture trials" against top Bush administration officials (see, "From Impeachment to War Crimes: The New Revenge Against BushCo"). The latest push by MoveOn and all the other leftist "war crimes" extremists is simply the latest stage of this campaign. The place for this to end is in the current White House, and it's interesting that the Barack Obama administration is "now open to theoretical torture investigations," precisely when a majority of Americans backs Tea Party protests against Democratic big-goverment taxing and spending policies.
But we'll just let MoveOn's new attack campaign be a symbol of the total leftist hypocrisy on the Bush administration's policies on interrogations, and on American foreign policy in the Bush years altogether.
MoveOn.org was formed in 1998 as a lobbying group to support President Bill Clinton against GOP investigations into his personal conduct and corruption. "MoveOn" takes its name from the group's modus operandi. The organization "started by passing around a petition asking Congress to 'censure President Clinton and move on', as opposed to impeaching him."
So just behold the plastic standards and moral bankruptcy here. President Clinton was impeached for his controversies arising from the Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones scandals; and the president was ultimately impeached for perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of office. Irrespective of the motives or outcome of impeachment, there's no question as to whether President Clinton personal actions completely defiled and dishonored the office of the presidency. Perhaps the Clinton scandals did not rise to the level of "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors." Reasonable people can disagree. But what's not in disagreement is that the George W. Bush administration's handling of terror investigastions is being held to entirely different standards of scrutiny and burdens of proof by relentless BDS sufferers
And the evidence is clear: The United States did not torture, while President Clinton did indeed have sex with that woman.
Why isn't MoveOn now calling on the Obama adminstration to move on?
Justice, fairness, and human rights are not at issue here. A rank power grab by one of America's greatest domestic enablers of terror is.
MoveOn.org needs to move on, for the sake of the country, if not for its own credibility, since it has very little of that worth preseriving.
Related: Kenneth G. Davenport, "Obama in Wonderland."
Pretty soon, the leftards will have "torture" defined down to plopping a camel-washer into a chair and asking him questions.
ReplyDeleteWussified candy asses who are unwilling to support causing discomfort to captured terrorist scumbags in order to save the lives of innocent Americans aren't worth the oxygen required to keep them alive.
-Dave
It's not just the torture (as if war crimes were not enough), it's the allegation that the torture was used to elicit confessions that could be used to justify a war in Iraq that we should never have entered into. Along with lies about WMDs, mobile weapons labs, aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds, drones flying across the ocean to drop chemical weapons on us, etc. one could certainly make a case for treason.
ReplyDeleteIf they hadn't water boarded KSM, Los Angeles would have been hit, the irony is that some of the left might have been victims.
ReplyDeleteThe calling for "trials" is madness. They acted in the best interest of the country. If the left is insistent, then perhaps we should prosecute Clinton for giving away rocket technology to the North Koreans, The acquisition of 500 FBI files of their political enemies (worse than what Nixon did), the "accidental" deaths of close to 44 associates, or perhaps we should look into Al Gore's miracle money from a Chinese Buddhist temple. How 'bout Diane Fienstien's husbands sudden wealth this week. Harry Reid made an unusual killing in real estate, how 'bout him? I'm sure they're mired in corruption because they had the country's best interest at heart. Let's call for an investigation on Barney Frank and Dodd for causing this recession in the first place. If Move-on is concerned with justice, perhaps a little introspection is in order.
Dave, people officially classified by our federal government as "suspected enemy combatants" are classified as such because they have not been determined to be "terrorists". I know these are big words so just try sounding them out.
ReplyDeleteBlack and white thinking went out of vogue in this country on January 20th. If you're incapable of utilizing the useless, quivering mass of jelly located between your ears to do anything beyond using moronic pejoratives like "leftards" then don't expect anyone else here to take your ass seriously, son.
rbosque, Bush's White House announced that they had broken up the LA Tower plot in 2002. KSM wasn't captured until March 2003. Get your facts straight before you run your mouth (or in this case, keyboard) in public, chief.
Rbosque, I'll go ahead and agree with you. If any of the allegations you make have any basis in reality, bring on the prosecutors in those cases. Have to say that pretty much all of it sounds like the hoo-hah over Obama's birth certificate, though.
ReplyDeleteWho will avenge Vince Foster's death?
Asking MoveOn.org to "move on" is like asking the latest storm front to "stop raining". It's just about the same level of cognition.
ReplyDeleteHow do some of these people walk upright?
ReplyDeleteLet's try some nuanced thinking for a bit. After 9/11 (remember that, when a lot of Americans died suddenly?), the people charged with protecting American citizens had to make a lot of decisions with ramifications up to and including the sudden deaths of thousands more American citizens. They made these decisions based on incomplete data, without full knowledge of all of the potential consequences of action, or for that matter, consequences of inaction. This is what adults do, they make decisions, sometimes when all of the choices are bad, and you don't really know what you're getting into.
For the last 8 years there have been no mass attacks on United States soil. If you remember, immediately after 9/11, it was commonly assumed by almost everyone that more attacks were coming. Everything about the conflict we found ourselves in had to be defined. The Bush administration did exactly that, deciding what interrogation techniques would be acceptable and legal, what would be done with illegal combatants picked up out of uniform while engaged with our military forces, who otherwise were entitled to be shot out of hand according to the Geneva Convention.
Noticeably absent from this discussion was Congress, which let the administration take the lead. If Congress believed, based on the briefings that their leaders were getting, that certain methods of obtaining information were unethical, they could have introduced legislation to make such methods illegal. They only became involved in the process after the executive branch had outlined procedures for dealing with detainees. The Supreme Court managed to insert themselves into the fray by finally deciding that the military tribunals that the administration had established and Congress had amended should be halted before they had actually run through the entire process.
Now we have armchair quarterbacks who have benefited from not being attacked for the last 8 years who want to feel smug and morally superior to the people who actually were responsible for the decisions they were making. No hard decisions for them about how far they could legally go in order to protect American citizens. They get to ankle-bite the entire time, first because they would not be held responsible for failure, and now because they have a childish desire to inflict suffering on their political opponents.
The Bush administration did exactly that, deciding what interrogation techniques would be acceptable and legalIt was not up to the Bush administration to decide what was legal and what was not. They used techniques that were already defined as torture. And torture is against the Geneva Conventions (i.e. the law).
ReplyDeleteThere is no conceivable way you can prove that torturing people has kept us safe. Do you give other countries such as Iran, Syria, Egypt, whomever a pass to torture to keep themselves safe? Or is that a right reserved to the United States?
Chris, I just put one foot in front of the other. You seem to have confused me with some sort of troglodyte.
ReplyDeleteIn the wake of 9/11 a lot of people made snap decisions concerning the safety of this nation, and the vast majority of them can be spared the blame for the overreactions they committed to.
And you're right to indict Congress (a Republican congress, for the record) for letting the Bush administration take the lead. The (majority appointed by Republicans) Supreme Court weighed in all too late as well.
Now armchair quarterbacks like myself have not been attacked (mostly by benefit of not being geographically located anywhere near a terrorist target, as are the vast, vast majority of Americans) and are now in a position to judge the actions of those who "kept us safe" during this time. There are no "hard decisions" for me because I did not choose this as my profession.
Yet I'm still an American, which means that I still have the right to talk shit about those who were responsible for protecting this country whilest having the responsibility to not torture enemy combatants in my name as a citizen. Am I wrong?