Now, we all know that, when it comes to the hard core terrorists of Al-Qaeda, when it comes to the men who planned 9/11, lots of American don’t care and will never care that they were tortured. This would likely be true even if no intelligence of any value has been obtained from them by torture, as a lot of people with relevant knowledge believe. But to hold innocent people for years on end -- at a facility (Gitmo) where there was regular torture and abuse, moreover? To keep people known to be innocent in jail for a significant chunk of their lives? This, one suspects, will strike lots of people as a horse of a different color entirely. Yet despite this -- or perhaps because of it? -- the mainstream media, as far as I can see, has largely ignored what Wilkerson said. It has ignored it though, in news that it happily carried, and which Wilkerson assailed, Cheney has taken to the airwaves to denounce Obama for planning to close down Guantanamo, has claimed that releasing the innocent from that prison will cause more attacks by releasing jihadists when those who will be released are mainly innocent (of course as Wilkerson says, maybe he too -- or you or I -- would become a jihadist if Cheney and Rumsfeld had done to us what they did to innocent Muslims), and has “unmistakabl[y] stok[ed] . . . the 20 million listeners of Rush Limbaugh, half of whom we could label, judiciously, as half-baked nuts.” (Emphasis in original.) Cheney and his like “are evil people,” says Wilkerson, and to that comment one can only say “Amen.” They are evil. They are traitors to the American Constitution.
Letting people like that go unprosecuted, letting them continue to walk free -- often as wealthy men, no less -- letting them continue to walk free even though they locked up innocent people for years in order to serve their own selfish political purposes, just as Hitler and Stalin did, is just as bad as it would be to let Bernard Madoff walk free, could even be considered worse than it would be to let Madoff walk free. Cheney, Rumsfeld and their ilk are at least as purely evil as he, are perhaps more evil than he.
Given all this we now face a Joseph Welch moment when the Congress, the Executive, including Obama, and the American people will stand revealed as either being on the side of decency, on the side of persons like Joseph Welch, or on the side of indecency, on the side of persons like Joe McCarthy. We must either choose prosecutions to uphold decency, or no prosecutions, which would reward indecency.
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