A Decent nation Would Have Impeached Bush and Obama

A decent nation does not engage in wars of choice. The United States, as a signatory to the UN Charter, recognizes this. Obama has, however, operated wars on a global scale that target countries, groups and individuals that pose no imminent threat to the United States. In order to provide a figleaf of persiflage for these actions, he has tortured language well beyond any common meaning. Consider this gem from Obama's legal justification for drone strikes:

Certain aspects of this legal framework require additional explication. First, the condition that an operational leader present an "imminent" threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.

Obama's drone strike program is a war crime. Even if the drone program was legal to pursue, how could a decent nation support a program that has a 96% failure rate, meaning that the deaths caused by it are almost entirely inappropriate targets - civilians, women and children? Yet Obama continues to stonewall providing a justification for this program.

Obama has long engaged in spreading propaganda about his drone program:

Obama Finally Talks Drone War, But It's Almost Impossible to Believe Him

On Wednesday, however, CNN's Jessica Yellin managed to get Obama to open up, just a little, about his criteria for approving drone attacks. His comments may have been the president's most extensive so far on robot warfare. They were also total baloney, outside experts say. ...

"What I found most striking was his claim that legitimate targets are a 'threat that is serious and not speculative,' and engaged in 'some operational plot against the United States,' That is simply not true," emails the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko, who has tracked the drone war as closely as any outside analyst. "The claim that the 3,000+ people killed in roughly 375 nonbattlefield targeted killings were all engaged in actual operational plots against the U.S. defies any understanding of the scope of what America has been doing for the past ten years."

It is well to remember that these unnecessary wars are used as the justification for both the need for war powers and secrecy, which in turn is used as a justification for the failure to hold individuals accountable for wrongs done in pursuit of these wars.

A decent nation does not maintain a "kill list" of people to assassinate. Obama has declared himself judge, jury and executioner as he picks and chooses whom to incinerate on Tuesdays:

Obama and approximately a hundred members of his national security team gather for their "Terror Tuesday" meetings in which they hand pick the next so-called national security "threat" to die by way of the American military/CIA drone program. Obama signs off personally on about a third of the drone strikes: all of the ones in Yemen and Somalia, and the risky ones in Pakistan. ... These "Terror Tuesday" sessions run counter to every constitutional and moral principle that has guided America since its inception. It's not only suspected terrorists whose death warrants are being personally signed by the president but innocent civilians geographically situated near a strike zone, as well, whether or not they have any ties to a suspected terrorist. As an anonymous government official on Obama's drone campaign observed, "They count the corpses and they're not really sure who they are." Indeed, Obama's first authorized drone attack in Yemen led to the deaths of 14 women and 21 children, and only one al Qaeda affiliate. ...

Should we fail to recognize and rectify the danger in allowing a single individual to declare himself the exception to the rule of law and assume the role of judge, jury, and executioner, we will have no one else to blame when we plunge once and for all into the abyss that is tyranny.

A decent nation does not torture. That is why it is a crime which has been prosecuted domestically and during war. It is also a violation of the UN Convention Against Torture to which the US is a signatory. While Obama has sought to justify the infliction of torture in the wake of 9/11 as an understandable reaction, Article 2, Section 2 of the Convention states: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Obama, while claiming to have ordered a halt to torture, has continued to torture Guantanamo prisoners and has also tortured Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. His order that interrogations conform to the standards of the Army Field Manual leaves a gaping loophole. The UN says that the Army Field Manual Annex M leaves the door open to torture methods:

Annex M is part of the Army Field Manual. It allows sensory deprivation, it allows sleep deprivation, and it allows solitary confinement. Those three taken together can certainly constitute cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, as well as torture. The Obama administration just flip-flopped around it, saying that we require a minimum of four hours of sleep. Well, four hours' sleep day after day is basically cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment if not more. When combined with others it can be worse. The people on the committee said, why don't you just take Annex M out of that? The administration demured on it, as they have for a number of years.

So we still have in our law an authorization to use cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment if not more. Those are the four key things that came out of this.

Vice Chairman Bond. President Obama has issued an Executive Order applying the field manual. But, as I understand the situation, he has an Executive Order--the authority to issue an Executive Order describing techniques, classified techniques, that could be used by the Agency that would be different from that used by the Army. Is that your understanding?

Admiral Blair. My understanding is we want to revise the Army field manual and make it the manual that goes for both military and intelligence interrogation and to have the guidance so that it's uniform across those agencies, depending, of course. There are many different things in the manual. ... We have large amounts of unclassified doctrine for our troops to use, but we don't put anything in there that our enemies can use against us. And we'll figure it out for this manual, which will be the manual for everyone to use. ...

It will be limited to those who need it, both within the armed forces and within the intelligence service. ... When I said this manual would be available to those need it, there will be some sort of document that's widely available in an unclassified form, but the specific techniques that can provide training value to adversaries, we will handle much more carefully.

A decent nation does not render prisoners to other states where the likelihood that they will be tortured is high:

Shortly after Obama's first inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that "rendition" was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time: "Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States."

The English translation of "cooperate" is "torture." Rendition is simply outsourcing torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the United States.

A decent nation does not indefinitely detain prisoners without charge in a gulag:

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).