Coonsey’s World

War Crimes: Obama Refuses to be Judge and Jury

During President Obama’s third press conference tonight he was once again asked if waterboarding was torture or not?

Obama did not directly say whether he believed the Bush administration “sanctioned torture,” but he came close to endorsing that viewpoint.

“What I’ve said, and what I will repeat, is waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said. “I do believe waterboarding is torture.”

Stopping such practices, he said, “will makes us stronger and will make us safer over the long term.”

Obama said he is “very comfortable” with his decision to ban interrogation techniques like waterboarding, which he called torture.
The president called the practice a recruiting tool for terrorist groups like al Qaeda, citing World War II-era British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who also rejected such “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
“Churchill understood that if you start taking shortcuts, over time that corrodes what’s best in a people,” Obama said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”

Asked about the previous administration, he said, “I think that whatever legal rationale were used, it was a mistake.”

Political pundits are saying that the President is once again refusing to say whether or not war crimes have been committed, that he’s trying to “move on” and hopes the subject will fade away.

I couldn’t disagree more. After hearing his words tonight (I’ve been skeptical in the recent past) I’ve decided what the president is actually doing is leaving the door open to what ever happens — he’s ’staying out of it’, sort of speak.

He’s decided not to give the GOP and other Bush supporters the ability to say that President Barack Obama started a ‘witch hunt‘ from the moment he took office against the Bush administration and the Republican Party to find anything and everything he could to ‘get’ former President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney convicted of war crimes.

As he pointed out once again, he believes waterboarding IS torture.  This in itself is answering the reporter’s question — Bush did indeed, “sanction torture”.

President Obama knows about the Constitution and our rule of laws.  He also knows about the agreement that former President Ronald Reagan signed in 1984 saying that, “Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

Therefore, what the president is doing is, he’s letting the “chips fall where they may”.  He’s stepping aside and letting ‘others’ do the debating of which method of investigating should be done and by whom, to see if war crimes have indeed been committed and if so, how the guilty should be punished.

President Obama is, in his own way, taking the high ground — until further notice.

If some committee, special prosecutor or the attorney general himself finds that crimes have been committed, you can bet your bottom dollar the President will come out swinging; but at this time he doesn’t plan on being the judge and jury as most of use were hoping he would do (including myself).  He’ll let others do that.