Dem Candidates Will Prosecute Torturers Or Not?

October 31, 2007

One Malcolm Nance, who has personal experience on the issue, explains why Waterboarding is Torture… Period.

The Democrats and the Democratic presidential candidates seem to be against applying such obviously illegal and amoral methods.

That is fine.

But can someone please ask them how they will handle those U.S. people who recently ordered, supervised and applied such illegal torture?

Under the standards of the Nuremberg Trials all three of these groups should be prosecuted, jailed and, under U.S. law, probably put to death.

What is Obama’s, Hillary’s and John Edwards’ stand on this issue?

Posted by b on October 31, 2007 at 21:19 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Froomkin: We currently face the prospect of a choice in 2008 between a party with no convictions and a party with convictions that are not based in reality. That’s not a good choice.

Yep: link

Posted by: b | Oct 31 2007 22:04 utc | 1

it has been clear since the begiining that the us & its puppets are guilty of all the four counts instituted at nuremberg as an international jurisprudence
Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace
War crimes
Crimes against humanity
Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace
any methods used in the commissioning of those crimes are equally illegal
it is also clear that the war(s) against the people will continue under any other administration. the ‘democrats’ behaviour before their president & against their constitution have proved that beyond any question. through multiple dissimulations, deceptions & deceit – the psychopathological character of the u s empire has become increasingly apparent even & especially to its allies
while in the 60′ & 70’s the left thought it was consolidating its victories what was in fact happening was the construction(s) of the institution(s) of fear
a fear that forbids any prfound questioning or even thought. naomi kleins thesis accords with that – that the right has always created an enironment of tension & fear to advance the most horrific of their agendas – whether it is in the areas of health, housing & education or it is in the venture of imperialism
this environment of fear forbids both humanism & decency & rewards its opposite
as victor jar sd:

what horror
the face of fascism
creates
they carry out their plans
with knife like precision
nothing matters
to them
for them
blood equals medals
slaughter
an act
of heroism
these people who meditate on ‘smallwars’ should be aware of the skills taught at the school of americas & the integration of that teaching into regular army training. that these methods are the moral equivalent of all hitherto tyrannies
that for all intents & purpose their is no qualitative difference between stryker force in iraq to the einsatzgruppen in ukraine – their ends are the same to aneantir the enemy not only politically & strategically but also racially
i do not expect an obama or a clinto to change that

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 31 2007 22:28 utc | 2

Europe is now the poodle that Blair created. Israel is the aircraft carrier to deliver kilotons of nuclear weapons to stamp-out this uppity muslims once and for all. Russia and China (they have interests, but the have sane goverment) and the USA have a huge viagra filled cock that wants to still fulfill the charade that GWB and DC want to perpetuate.
A nuclear winter in Iraq /Iran is just passing time on a civilisation that long outdates USA, my problem is that China/Russia will let GWB do it, to hasten end of USA empire.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Oct 31 2007 22:42 utc | 3

yes – the new emperors in china possess something the u s empire has never held within its grasp – intelligence & moderation

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 31 2007 23:50 utc | 4

Scholar links Bush’s US and Hirohito’s Japan

A top US scholar of wartime Japan said Wednesday that the Bush administration’s “war on terror” bore close parallels to Japan’s past militarism through a defiance of international law.
Herbert Bix, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his landmark biography of wartime emperor Hirohito, said he believed US aerial bombings and alleged use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq constituted war crimes.
“The current American rampage in Iraq and elsewhere, not to mention the Bush administration’s threats of war against Iran, so clearly replicates Imperial Japan during the period when its leaders willfully disregarded international law and pursued the diplomacy of force,” Bix said during a visit to Tokyo.
Japan defied the Nine-Party Treaty guaranteeing China’s sovereignty, signed in 1922 in Washington, when imperial troops invaded Manchuria in 1931.
Bix compared Japan’s action to current US efforts to scuttle the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court, which President George W. Bush argues could unfairly target Americans.
He also said that senior US leaders — not just rank-and-file soldiers — should have been held to account for the killings of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
“US war criminality is justice institutionalised, as Japan’s once was,” Bix said.
“In today’s America, torture is not only standard battlefield practice in the so-called war on terror. Torture is celebrated in American popular culture as evidenced by the popularity of ’24,’ a TV programme in which the hero confronts a ticking bomb scenario… designed to justify torture.”
But Bix, a professor at Binghamton University in New York state, said he remained optimistic for change as most Americans were opposed to “the Washington consensus.”
Bix is best known for writing “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,” in which he described the emperor as a shrewd architect of the war.
The book remains highly controversial in Japan, where most historians have portrayed Hirohito, who was never prosecuted and stayed on the throne until his death in 1989, as a figurehead detached from war planning.

Posted by: annie | Nov 1 2007 4:49 utc | 5

I agree with the post and your sentiments on the issue; but I would ask an even simpler question.
When will the American public see that controlling other humans around the world through force or other coercion is both immoral and illegal? Our use of torture is easy to see and easy to condemn; but I think economic warfare though sanctions and other means that punish millions of innocents over decades is even more inhuman.
When will the American empire be stopped?

Posted by: bucky | Nov 1 2007 9:09 utc | 6

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