(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Maybe President Harry S. Truman should have invited Hideki Tojo to the White House for tea and advice. President Obama thinks that it is just fine to invite former Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, to the Oval Office to consult with her on Russia, disarmament and other issues. This woman should be in a cell in the Hague for the rest of her life along with George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.
It was Condoleeza Rice who was Bush’s National Security advisor at the time, said in 2003 during the run up to the Iraq war that Sadaam Hussein had “the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon,” and
“The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
It was with Rice’s blessing in Situation Room meetings that included Cheney Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft that water boarding and other methods of “enhanced interrogation” were approved and became the norm.
So as Glenn Greenwald points out that instead of prosecuting the “Bush officials who broke the law and instituted a worldwide torture regime”, President Obama has appointed “some of them to occupy the highest positions in my administration and then meet with others in order to drink from the well of their wisdom on a wide range of foreign policy matters.”
No, Glenn, it is not “very childish, shrill and unpragmatic” of you or anyone else to demand that
“the person who presided over the Bush White House’s torture-approval-and-choreographing meetings and who was responsible for the single most fear-mongering claim leading to the Iraq War” be held accountable by this President and the Justice Department which is so hell bent to uphold laws that are discriminatory, unpopular and, most likely, unconstitutional.
But, Ms. Rice gets to have tea in the Oval Office and is consulted by President Obama. All is forgiven.
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when you talked about “the Justice Department that is so hell bent to uphold laws”. I thought: they’re closing Bagram? DOJ is going to let the Courts adjudicate the lawsuit of the Taliban torture victim who we detained and tortured? No more illegal drone strikes on civilians? Prosecutions for war criminals?
None of that? Ohhh…. you meant the laws like DADT, DOMA, and the War on
brown peopleDrugs.