Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Former Guantanamo Prosecutor: Prosecute Those Who Authorized Torture
Darrel Vandeveld served as a prosecutor in the Guantanamo military commissions. He resigned due to ethical problems with the tribunal system, and is currently serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve.
Vandeveld co-wrote an op-ed with the president of the ACLU calling for the prosecution of torture:
Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are two indisputable facts...
The process of self-examination and accountability has been, and remains, the only way to move forward and regain our moral and legal grounding...
We have a Department of Justice for a reason, and now it's up to Attorney General Holder, the nation's top law enforcement officer, to do his job and appoint an independent prosecutor to follow the evidence where it may lead...
It is critical that we hold accountable those who authorized, those who legally sanctioned and those who implemented the torture policies of one of the darkest periods in our nation's history. What is at stake is nothing less than our democracy.
Thank you to Colonel Vandeveld for being a patriot and standing up for the United States. You are in very good company, sir.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
→ 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.