Yesterday I wrote about "The Lucifer Effect and how lieberman and graham don't want you to see anymore naughty pictures. Now Obama has once again caved on transparency:
http://open.salon.com/blog/markinjapan/2009/05/11/tier_1a_philip_zimbardo_nuditydegradation_not_gratuitous
Obama decides to fight release of abuse photos
President Obama has reportedly decided to reverse an earlier decision to comply with a court order and release 44 photos of detainee abuse to the ACLU. The president met with his legal team last week and told them he'd reconsidered the earlier decision, which the Justice Department announced in April, in a letter to a judge overseeing a lawsuit filed by the civil rights organization over a Freedom of Information Act request.
Obama is reportedly concerned that the release of the pictures, which depict abuse that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush administration, would endanger American troops still deployed in those countries and elsewhere. An unnamed White House official told ABC News' Jake Tapper that the president "believes that the national security implications... have not been fully presented to the court" and directed White House Counsel Greg Craig to argue against the release on those grounds.
As I noted in an earlier post, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs appeared to suggest that this move was in the offing at his daily briefing on Tuesday, when he declined to comment on questions about the decision.
― Alex Koppelman
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/05/13/obama_photos/
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Geneva Conventions, we don't need no stinkin' Geneva Conventions 'cause we's americans and we does whatever to hell we want anyway.
Ahhh, why not just join the "it's only been a 111 days sickophants and call it a new day in america. SSDD.
The funny thing is that he is caving to the argument that releasing the pictures will inspire some muslims to join radical groups and attack Americans.
Yes, of course it will inspire more hatred of America, but is that necessarily bad? When we do bad things, shouldn't we have to bear the consequences of those decisions? That's what transparency is all about - not hiding our evil deeds, but by exposing them hoping that we won't go down the same path again in the future.
So essentially what we are saying by not releasing these videos is, sure, we tortured women and children including making mothers watch as their kids were sodomized, but it would be unfortunate if someone harmed our soldiers because of it.
I don't want American soldiers harmed, but I also think covering up war crimes ultimately will hurt us in many other unseen ways.
It would seem that when we most need leopards and lions like Washington or Lincoln or FDR to undo the evils of jackals and hyenas like Bush and Cheney, we are instead left with the mild-mannered mayor of a small town who's afraid to upset the local chamber of commerce and even the old mayor and his craven sheriff who got run out of town on a rail. God help us.
I've already expressed my disgust with Obama about this on my torture posts, and here's another where I call him out:
Enough: An Open Letter to President Obama
I sense another post coming on from me.
It would not rile up the world any more than it is now riled up. He might be protecting the low level soldiers. I guess it was a choice between being court martialed for not following orders or do this crap but . . . that is their problem. They don't deserve the president's protection.
“I don’t want to retry Nancy Pelosi — that’s not my goal — but if you’re going to accuse these people in the Bush administration of being evil and committing a crime, then if she was told about [interrogation tactics], I want to know what she was told,” Graham said during a break in a hearing on Bush-era interrogation practices."
How many other D's were in on this? Stay tuned.
And it isn't a mere 44 photos, it is thousands of photos and 4 video tapes of children being raped in front of their mothers. monkey fingered, dugg, reddit.
and that's why i am so disappointed in rwnutjob. democrats were denounced for trying to call the administration to heel as it conducted an illegal war and violated the geneva conventions. i want everyone involved to be investigated because my values haven't changed. the most terrifying thing to me, is watching regular people applaud cynicism when we live in a democracy. why don't you call and demand prosecutions of the democrats you think were involved? why don't you write about their responsibilities?
or is that someone else's job, while you are too busy writing about gassing the poor? or advocating for segregation?
seriously?
Cons are apparently sworn to some secret Black Hand oath never to question or speak ill even of the worst of their tripe -- forgive the typo, I mean tribe. They lap up every pile of puke thrown up by Rush and Cheney without questioning a word of it.
Liberals, on the other hand, believe it is their duty as citizens to tell their emperors their buck naked. That's a part of citizenship duty that gets left out of the education of rightwingnutjobs.
The fact that Dems control things now, and some of us Liberals are calling for these investigation makes the narrow-minded Cons think we don’t realize that complicity of the many of the Dems, and that we are ONLY calling for investigations and prosecutions of the neocons, when what we really want is to see ALL the bastards brought to account, regardless of Party affiliation.
This is, as you say, a principle that is well beyond the comprehension of most who support people like Bush/Cheney et al.
Tom and Rick 99% of the left wants to only go after Bush/Cheney. There are but a few folks on either side of the isle that understand that everyone must pay or we are all going to suffer.
They ALL must pay, and now, that includes obama, too. One Man of courage, I beg for, but seemingly there are NONE.
Silence IS complicity.
I know this is hard for you to accept given the proclivities of rightwing lemmings, but the majority of liberals don't care one whit if it's Republicans or Democrats, as long as people in high places are prosecuted for their involvement in torture. What you can't comprehend is we want the precedent established and want it made plain to future Democratic Presidents as well that they're not above the law, and that we will not tolerate torture.
I'm gonna take a wild guess that you are among those who think the President not only has the right but the duty to do whatever he deems necessary to "defend" the American people -- from the consequences of their professed values.
And nothing in the street, looks any different to me...
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
The best way to prevent harm coming to soldiers is to get them the hell out of war zones—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
The inability of our "leaders" to understand that hiding the evidence from the US public doesn't mean that our current enemies don't already know what's going on. This is what happened when Nixon started bombing Cambodia "in secret."