Thank God for the US Constitution which sets a 2 term limit for the office of President because I really think there are enough people so anesthetized to violations of the law that they would elect Bush to a third term in order to satisfy the blood lust currently going on in the social psyche. Thank God too for Bush’s moments of candor, where he admits to waterboarding and claims he would do it again, which should seal his fate and make him a convicted war criminal. What’s sad about a grown man with the experiences he has had making false assertions about how this one violation of international law, rather of law that we the American government instituted during the Reagan administration, could save lives is that he is lying.
Throughout the heated debate about waterboarding it was pointed out again and again that (a) it’s illegal and the Congress of the United States codified it and (b) there was never any actionable intelligence that resulted from the practice against anyone! Yet there are still people who dismiss the former, we wrapped the term ‘waterboarding’ into a more pleasant sounding euphemism, ‘enhanced interrogation’ to get out of admitting to an illegal act, and erroneously tout the latter about all the lives saved when we finally tortured the information from harden criminals. Why are they purposefully lying? Even more importantly, and this leaves a very dark stain on the Obama administration, why hasn’t Bush been prosecuted for violating that law which explicitly states
The State Party in the territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
These authorities shall take their decision in the same manner as in the case of any ordinary offence of a serious nature under the law of that State. In the cases referred to in article 5, paragraph 2, the standards of evidence required for prosecution and conviction shall in no way be less stringent than those which apply in the eases referred to in article 5, paragraph 1.
Therefore we are obliged to prosecute members of the former administration for their illegal acts of torture and the fact that is not even on the table, or up for discussion, means America continues to go down the road of not respecting its own law or laws it enters into with other nations. In other words we have become lawless, and GWBush feels quite comfortable propagating his false bravado even though it is illegal because no longer feel it binding to follow the rule of law. There is no distinction between us and the enemy we claim to fight.
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