I’m for it

Dear Friends:

Earlier this week, President Obama expressed openness to the possibility of Congress creating an independent, non-partisan Commission of Inquiry to examine the use of torture in our interrogation policies and practices since Sept. 11, 2001. You can read about President Obama’s comments in the Washington Post by clicking here.

President Obama doesn’t need to wait for Congress. He can create a Commission of Inquiry himself. With the release of the International Committee of the Red Cross report identifying U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memos detailing the various acts of torture, and the Senate Armed Services Committee Report confirming the approval of the torture techniques by some of our highest officials, we need a Commission of Inquiry to put the full story together so as a nation we can know what the United States did and agree to never let it happen again. The most direct way to establish such a Commission is for President Obama to appoint a Commission himself.

Please click here to email President Obama and tell him that while you appreciate what he’s done to stop torture, he needs to appoint a Commission of Inquiry to help ensure that torture never happens again.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Linda Gustitus, Board President
Rev. Richard Killmer, Executive Director

I reiterate: anybody, Dem or GOP, who helped authorize and implement this needs to be tried and punished.

Yet strangely, Obama seems reluctant here, just as he seems suddenly reluctant to give up all that cool unilateral power Bush handed him after shredding the Constitution. Who could *possibly* have foreseen *that*? Gee, I sure hope he doesn’t misuse the massive unaccountable power that Bush accrued for him and the Rubber Hose Right has been defending tooth and nail for six years. Gosh! That would be *ironic* if some Leftist Caesar used it against ideological enemies instead of foreigner! Golly, what a totally unexpected development–as surprising as, say, abortion leading to euthanasia or wide acceptance of contraception leading to polymorphous perversity.