Obama on Torture: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

posted by Ari Melber on 01/12/2009 @ 11:22am

The Obama administration will not focus on prosecuting government officials who practiced illegal torture or war crimes, the president-elect said on Sunday, though he added that prosecutions and independent commission have not been completely ruled out. This was Obama's first major statement on the issue since April; over the past few weeks, Obama's aides have repeatedly ducked questions about what, if anything, the administration will do to enforce laws violated by officials under President Bush. The question topped the list of citizen concerns on Change.gov last week, out of over 70,000 submissions, but Obama aide Robert Gibbs refused to respond, leading ABC's George Stephanopoulos to press the question during an interview on his Sunday show.

"My orientation's going to be to move forward," Obama said. The attorney general has to stay above politics and "uphold the Constitution," Obama added, but his administration will focus on "getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

Read on...

Ignoring war crimes isn't focusing on the future. Nor is it staying above politics. Of course the media hardly questioned Bush about torture for eight years. And the media accepted Bush's lame use of semantics to deny that the U.S. used torture. Looks like widespread criminal behavior is just going to get ignored. On Wall St. and in the Whitehouse. Tom