Sunday, February 22, 2009

Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee: The Temptation to Abuse Powers in a Crisis Is Bipartisan


Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy told the New York Times:

The temptation to abuse powers in a crisis is bipartisan and the [proposed truth] commission’s review should include the role of Democrats in Congress in approving the Bush policies.

As I have previously written, Nancy Pelosi was secretly briefed on torture many, many years ago, and yet did nothing to stop those unlawful programs. Indeed, she egged the torturers on. Pelosi was also secretly tipped off about warrantless spying on Americans. And Pelosi hid from the 9/11 Commission and the American people the fact that the interrogations of 9/11 suspects were videotaped, and that the alleged "confessions" of those held at Gitmo were wholly unreliable. She could have stopped the whole farce cold -- but chose to go along with it.

Leading democrats Harman, Rockefeller and others in Congress were also war criminals, accessories after the fact, and co-conspirators.

So Leahy is correct that the temptations to abuse powers in a crisis - real or imagined - is bipartisan.

at

1 comment:

  1. Charles DFebruary 23, 2009 at 5:13 PM

    War crimes are not only bipartisan, they are criminal. If we want to stop this behavior in the future, we need to prosecute. Truth and reconciliation is fine if there is little or no chance the crime could be repeated (apartheid, for example), but that is not the case here.

    ReplyDelete

→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).

→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).

→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:

-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over

-- Comments that explicitly call for violence

→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.