Torture

28. April 2009 by David A. Peterson.

Sometime in the near future…

On January 20th, 2012 the Republican controlled U.S. House and Senate prepares to bring criminal charges against all members of the Obama Administration’s economic team including the President and the Democratic leadership of The Congress.

The charge… Economic terrorism and the economic sabotage of the U.S. economy.

I completely get that  a very small minority of people in our country consider what the Bush Administration did to the detainees was torture and maybe even criminal. After all this small minority is the exact group who thinks the U.S. brought 9/11 on itself. This is the same group that believes if we just worked with these fringe terrorist groups instead of working against them we could all live in peace.

I may get it but I certainly don’t agree with it. I’m going out on a limb here but I would assume that everyone reading this post thinks that this small minority of U.S. citizens is dead wrong, maybe even a little bit crazy - but we all respect their right to have an opinion.

I have written before that President Obama appears to be the “idea man” not really the actual leader of the country. This torture debate is another perfect example. Instead of leading the President is allowing this small minority the ability to rewrite how future administrations treat previous administrations.

We are moving right past the point of rewriting history. The history isn’t being challenged. In this case the terrorist were real. The terrorist really did kill 3,000 Americans on one day. The terrorist were not being challenged and were not kept in check by previous U.S. administrations or by any of our world governmental bodies.

As a result the terrorist were allowed to flourish and allowed to carry out a world wide military campaign. History is not being rewritten - all of this happened in a span of about 10 years. What is being rewritten is the fact that if an administration creates a policy that is not popular by any number of citizens, however small or large that group may be, then lawyers and not historians will be employed to put the issue into its correct context.

Unfortunately “correct context” really depends on who is writing the history.

What you are seeing from President Obama is exactly what leaders of third world countries do. They do not accept that they have been elected as leaders, as the face of entire nations, as the heads of nations that are expected to be in world leadership positions 1,000 years from now.

In essence President Obama is scared to lead, just like President Asif ali Zardari of Pakistan is scared to fight the Taliban, Obama is scared to take on the extreme leftest members of his party.

By not leading he is setting himself up for defeat. Unfortunately he is setting the country back as well. We will become a country that looks at disagreements on policy as disagreements of law. Unfortunately he is legitimizing a new policy of disagreements being be settled by the courts instead of by elections.

President Bush was reelected to keep American safe. His policies were certainly controversial but at that time a little more than 1/2 of the country agreed that it was the correct policy. Given the 2004 circumstances, given that the Iraqi war was not going well he was STILL reelected.

The Bush Administration checked the U.S. laws on the subject of what constituted torture. They examined and then reexamined again to see if they were within the law with respect to the policy. They did not see this as “torture” and just to make sure the inmates would not be harmed they had medical personnel standing by.

During his tenure as President the Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and Senate were aware of the “torture” policies. At the time these Democratic leaders also thought that these measures were within the law.  At that time they decided that America’s citizens as a whole were more important than these few individuals being kept awake for days-on-end.

That same Democratic leadership may be talking a different game today but documentation will eventually bear out and show that they approved of the “torture.” 

Regardless if you believe in the torture policies, if these policies saved lives, if you believe the policies are reprehensible, or if you believe this wasn’t torture at all, the policy was made by and approved by an ELECTED representative government that believed it was acting within the law.

To go back and rewrite history, to now call it criminal… there will be no end to that type of thinking in the future. The United States needs a leader right now before this stuff gets out of hand.

Sometime in the near future…

On January 20th, 2012 the Republican controlled U.S. House and Senate prepares to bring criminal charges against all members of the Obama Administration’s economic team including the President and the Democratic leadership of The Congress.

The charge… Economic terrorism and the economic sabotage of the U.S. economy.

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