A Gallup Poll released February 12 revealed that 62 percent of Americans want to investigate or criminally prosecute Bush administration officials who authorized torture in the so-called “war on terror.”  But even though President Obama has said numerous times that “nobody's above the law,” on February 10 he used the Bush administration’s “state secrets” gambit to quash a lawsuit attempting to penalize some of those involved in renditioning torture subjects.

That lawsuit sought damages against a private airline used by the CIA to rendition low-value suspects for torture by dictatorial regimes abroad. One of the five plaintiffs, Benyam Muhammed (a British and Ethiopian citizen), alleged he was renditioned to Morocco where torturers made razor cuts on his penis. The lawsuit alleges that San Jose-based Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should have known that its planes were being used to ferry suspects for torture and is therefore liable for damages.

But because the Obama administration invoked the “state secrets” policy at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the lawsuit’s likelihood of revealing felony torture on the part of Bush officials is now remote.

“This is not change,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero correctly told the Associated Press. “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.”

The Obama policy in San Francisco also drew a rare condemnation of a Democrat from the New York Times editorial page.

The Gallup Poll came just two weeks after it was revealed that the Obama administration’s Justice Department has dispatched several government lawyers to defend Bush-era Justice Department official John Yoo from a lawsuit by torture victim Jose Padilla.

Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center calls giving Justice Department lawyers to alleged international war criminals “an outrage and constitute an embarrassing embrace of international criminal conduct that the international community has demanded must result in absolutely no form of impunity.” Paust says that alleged criminals should bear the costs of their own defense, and notes there is a long historical case for this. At “a 1781 Resolution of the Continental Congress, the Founders expected that 'the author of ... injuries [that are “offenses against the law of nations”] should compensate the damage out of his private fortune.'”

President Obama’s actions are fast diverging from his public rhetoric.

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JimDandy said:

No one is above the law Torture is the least of the crimes that Bush and his cronies are guilty of. They used lies to have the US unnecessarily attack Iraq and in so doing they became responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans (more than died in the 911 attacks). They are also responsible for the deaths of reportedly over 100,000 Iraqis while destroying the infrastructure of the country. These are bad men. To call them criminals is a compliment. There have been times in the history of this planet that evil men have been placed in positions of power and their actions have caused tremendous suffering during their time in power and for years and even decades afterward. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and others in the Bush administration and sphere are this kind of evil. They attract one another and they must be seen for what they are and brought to justice or their kind will rise again in short order.

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February 14, 2009
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MisterMeister said:

	Missing a zero JimDandy ... They are also responsible for the deaths of reportedly over 100,000 Iraqis while destroying the infrastructure of the country. I think you missing a zero since The Lancet Medical Journal has reported that over one million Iraqis have been killed.
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February 16, 2009
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Thomas Eddlem said:

Bush Crimes Prosecution I agree that Bush's largest crime was to attack Iraq without provocation, but the real issue is what crime is most likely to be prosecuted. And the answer is the charge of torture. Congress passed on the Iraq war, and too many Americans agreed with it early on for it to ever be prosecuted. And it's too political any way. I've got an article coming up in the print edition of The New American on just this subject. Subscribe and get the full analysis!

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February 16, 2009 | url
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