“You authorized a risky operation to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Following your orders, a SEAL team shot him through the eye and the chest. Imagine that your successor is an even more left-wing Democrat than you are. Or imagine that he/she is a libertarian. Either might assert that the operation violated the law in some way. Would you approve of a Justice Department investigation into the actions of the SEALs? Do you think it be okay if, under the next administration, they will be obliged to hire lawyers and worry about their own and the their families’ futures? If not, will you instruct Eric Holder to call off the dogs who are currently investigating the CIA for interrogating the terrorists who led you to Osama bin Laden?”
That would require him to have some kind of consistent set of decent personal and political principles. Of course, the thought of a Democrat more left wing than him succeeding him is kind of frightening.
With the ongoing criminalization of policy difference it will probably become standard operating procedure for outgoing presidents to issue blanket pardons for all his appointees. Then he will resign on the morning of his last day in office and the outgoing Vice President will be sworn in, and pardon him.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea of Joe Biden being President for a whole morning..
Rand, you could far better ask why the current AG isn’t cooperating with the ICC to bring the war criminals of the Cheney Administration to trial. A case can be made that the entire war of choice in Iraq – and the directly related use of torture as a matter of US policy within Iraq – constituted felonies under US code. (The torture scandal certainly qualifies; violation of the Geneva Accords is a felony, and that statute applies to any military or civilian person of trust in Federal service. The law was passed in the 90’s.)
The death of UBL is one incident, with perhaps four total deaths. And a prosecution of these SEALs, under these circumstances, is impossible; no one can sensibly question their judgement under the conditions of that raid.
And I still cannot fathom how you can be so confused about this President. There is ample evidence that you choose to ignore, than he is actually a “Rockefeller” type liberal Republican and has been since his Harvard days. All this fevered writing about his “socialistic” ways is horribly delusional.
no one can sensibly question their judgement under the conditions of that raid.
Or at least not without the helmet cam footage and the text of their orders.
Kevin, you just offered clear proof of alternate universes
philw1776 Says:
May 8th, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Especially the Geneva conventions that don’t apply in the situation under discussion. Of course his whole comment ceased to be serious with the Cheney administration jab. With that in mind, Kevin needs to stop huffing unicorn farts.
ISTM that a great many people (Kevin included) that carry on about Geneva Convention violations have never actually read them – or if they have, not the same ones I did.
Or the Montreaux ones, either.
“A case can be made that the entire war of choice in Iraq”
We better bring up all of the congress critters that voted for the war on war crimes charges. Maybe we should do the same for all of them that voted for the war in Libya.
“– and the directly related use of torture as a matter of US policy within Iraq – constituted felonies under US code.”
If you are referring to Abu Ghrab, that wasn’t US policy. The government had already done an investigation and was preparing to bring courts marshals when the story broke in the media.
At least the current administration has ended the use of black site prisons and renditions, oh wait.
wodun:
the government performed a whitewash of Abu Ghraib, not a serious investigation. They nailed the troopers who acted badly, but not the higher level persons who set up the situation in the first place.
And I don’t like the continuing use of renditions by the current Administration either – or the presence of John Yoo as a professor at my University, which I consider to be a disgrace.
Wow, Mr. Maron, now there is a serious response, “unicorn farts”. Yeah, that’s telling me off, for sure.
Now as for a point of fact: under US Code, a violation of the rights of prisoners under military custody is a felony. Serious intelligence professionals have made it very clear that brutality has no place in a serious interrogation. It generates nonsense and corrupts the interrogators. Yet for the past week, we’ve been treated to more media interviews with the two vilest persons to disgrace the US Government in decades, Cheney and Rumsfeld, still making their claims.
The legal reality is made very clear for our Armed Forces in Appendix D of the Counterinsurgency Manual, which gives direct reference to Army Field Manual FM 2-22.3, which enacts the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 which is legally binding upon all US Forces.
“Unicorn farts”?
Try this direct quote from that same Appendix D, paragraph D-20: “Regardless of the precise legal status of those persons captured, detained or otherwise held in custody by US forces, they must receive humane treatment until properly released. They also must be provided the minimum protections of the Geneva Conventions”
“Unicorn farts”?
Try ascertaining the facts, before you huff your own.
So the President has come out and publicly claimed that OBL must have Pakistani assistance.
Hopefully this will finally put to rest charges that bin Laden had Pakistani assistance.
I’m getting very concerned for the SEAL operators. I don’t see any effort being made to protect those guys. There is a reason that operate in secret, and this administration doesn’t seem to understand that reason.
Nice try wodun. I agree with everything you wrote, but then again, you just pointed out the facts.
Try a little math and some legal counseling. Iraq invasion, 2003, Detainee Act 2005. Like I said, stay off the sack. And hey, they were no worse than your average union president.
Folks seem to forget that Thomas Jefferson ordered a small force of marines to overthrow the leader of the Muslim state of Tripoli in 1805, a mission remembered today in the first line of the Marines Hymn. The regime change was carried out by President Jefferson’s secretary state, James Madison.
As in the current war, the Congress never formally declared war against the Barbary Pirates (today they would be considered terrorists…) but then provide funding for such action as needed while looking the other way.
In the early 1900’s President Theodore Roosevelt approved William Howard Taft’s use of water boarding of Muslim rebels fighting U.S. troops in the Philippines. Again, lack of anything authority in the Constitution doesn’t seem to have bothered them.
The key points is that the U.S. has been fighting threats to its citizens from Muslim terrorists since the nation was founded and earlier administrations, including those of the Founding Fathers didn’t seem to be to worried about the niceties of it in terms of the Constitution. Why do you want to hold the current administration to a different standard?