[Fwd: OBAMA ’S AMNESTY FOR TORTURERS – ‘THEY WERE JUST OBEYING ORDERS’]

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Subject: OBAMA’S AMNESTY FOR TORTURERS – ‘THEY WERE JUST OBEYING ORDERS’
Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:25:37 -0700 (PDT)
From: rab <rogeralanblackwell at yahoo.co.uk>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: alt.politics.socialism.trotsky

The News Line: Editorial

Saturday, 18 April 2009

OBAMA’S AMNESTY FOR TORTURERS – ‘THEY WERE JUST OBEYING ORDERS’

CENTRAL Intelligence Agency employees who tortured people in the
Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Bay US concentration camps as terrorist
suspects held without charge or trial have been amnestied by the
President, Barak Obama.

The Amnesty was declared after a campaign by the US Civil Liberties
Union forced the release of four memos which featured Bush
administration officials giving their full political and legal support
to the torture measures.

Obama banned the use of methods such as sleep deprivation and
simulated drowning in his first week in office, explaining that these
measures had led to a worldwide revulsion with the US.

The amnesty for CIA operatives has returned to favour the classic
excuse of the Nazi torturers and concentration camp attendants, that
they were only obeying orders and that a refusal would have resulted
in reprisals of one sort or another.

However, at Nuremburg some of those who gave the orders were punished.
In the US today, Obama intends those who gave the orders to get off
scot-free.

There is nothing stopping the President of the United States and the
Supreme Court going after President Bush and Vice President Cheney
except that such an action would completely split the US ruling class
and the various sections of the state apparatus.

So, Obama is taking the easiest option, amnestying the practitioners
and forgetting the architects of the plan – they are to remain
undisturbed in semi-retirement.

In fact the US military and spy chiefs insisted that if there was to
be an admission of torture, there must be an amnesty, since with Abu
Ghraib in mind, there would be thousands of military commanders,
officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers eligible for arrest,
charge and trial as torturers or approvers of torture.

Many officials including the former head of the CIA under former
President Bush, General Michael Hayden, were even opposed to a
recognition that there was torture. He said that such an admission
would undermine intelligence work and that foreign intelligence
agencies would no longer share information with the CIA.

He linked intelligence work and torture together telling the Press
Association: ‘If you want an intelligence service to work for you,
they always work on the edge. That’s just where they work.’

The Obama administration has let it be known that it now regards the
question of torture as closed and that it will oppose prosecutions of
non-CIA staff or Bush administration lawyers and staff.

Indeed the Obama administration has said that it will protect all
those who acted within the limits set by the previous legal opinion,
which was laid out in the just-released four memos.

The legal justification for ‘waterboarding’, or simulated drowning and
the recommendation that a detainee could be placed into a confined box
with insects that he was terrified of is to be treated as a ‘mistake’
in judgement.

What President Obama is doing is the absolute minimum to try and
rescue the reputation of the US which under the regime of George Bush
was absolutely destroyed.

No action is to be taken against the perpetrators or the political
organisers of the torture regime because the US ruling class would not
stand for it and US capitalism would be gravely weakened in the
extremely toxic fall-out.

In fact, the Bagram prison camp, a real black hole, that one inmate of
Guantanamo Bay said made the G Bay camp appear like a holiday home is
to stay open and function as normal and no doubt there are other
prisons that will emerge under non-CIA ownership despite the current
Obama measures.

The simple fact is that it is impossible to separate imperialism from
atrocities and torture. The Iraq war started with the WMD lie, then
one million Iraqis were slaughtered and four million were exiled with
the country handed over to sectarian gangs and Abu Ghraib-style
torturers. This experience proves the point.

The Iraq experience is the reality of imperialism. Nothing will be
well with the world until imperialism is smashed by a socialist
revolution and replaced by socialism.

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/4160

http://www.revolutionarybooks.co.uk/index.htm

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