(Washington, D.C.- April 17, 2009) President Barack Obama announced today that he has issued a full pardon to Bernard Madoff and ordered his release from prison.
In a statement released by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, President Obama stated that nothing could be gained by sending the 71 year old financier to prison for the rest of his life, since this would not lead to any of his former investors getting their money back.
The statement went on to read:
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
Before I start receiving comments taking the story of Madoff's pardon seriously, let me acknowledge that this is satiric, but like all satire, has a serious point. The quote from Obama is, however, real. It applied not to Madoff, but to Obama's decision to provide amnesty to CIA officers who may have engaged in illegal torture.
The idea that punishing those who break the law is nothing but "retribution" or "laying blame for the past" is of course contradictory to basic principles of the rule of law, and Obama the law professor certainly knows that. Sending a swindler who has already spent the money to prison will not return the funds to the victims, sending a murderer to prison will not bring back the dead, and prosecuting a torturer cannot relieve the detainee of the pain he suffered.
But the criminal justice system does not punish wrongdoers only to return the victims of their crimes to their former state. One purpose of punishment is to deter people considering committing similar crimes in the future by making them fear the consequences.
The message that Obama sends by refusing to even consider prosecuting CIA officers who may have committed war crimes, is that in the future, government officials can commit similar acts with impunity.
It is good that Obama has said that under his administration, America doesn't torture. But that doesn't prevent a future administration from reverting to the Bush/Cheney policies. If officials in such a future administration know that the next President might prosecute them for their misdeeds they might think twice before carrying them out. Otherwise, there's nothing to stop future war crimes.
Obama was almost certainly under tremendous pressure from the CIA to grant immunity to its operatives. There even may have been threats, implicit or explicit, to undermine his administration. Nonetheless, granting amnesty to those who may have committed war crimes under the justification that they "were just following orders" violates basic principals of human rights and the rule of law.
You see the most dangerous element within our government and nation are these Federalist Society usurpers there is much more to this and I know a lot but they are now embedded within our government in our Courts and the Justice Dept. as well...
When you have a group within a group that's a cabal and there is also the subject of their suspect loyalties due to this affiliation...of the Federalist Society....for all too many of them, their first loyalty is all too often to this group of modern day Tories and worse than Tories..
Basically, he's obstructing justice!
Guards at the US internment camps???? True, the camps were wrong, but the US was an openly racist society back then. But at least the guards didn't (afaik) beat or kill our fellow citizens.
Although the internment camps for Japanese citizens were egregiously wrong, the guards did not torture the inhabitants as you suggest. That's why they weren't put on trial. However, we did prosecute and convict Japanese soldiers for waterboarding. It was an international crime then and it still is.
To confuse the pursuit of justice with "retribution" is a very cynical thing and a dangerous, slippery slope. Obama will be sorry he ever used the term and he will hear the word thrown back at him for the rest of his political life.
Or should we rename the Department of Justice, the Department of Retribution and should Supreme Court Justices be known as Supreme Court Retributionists?
Obama's decision, although he doesn't have the authority to decide who gets prosecuted for crimes, is purely political because he doesn't want to roil the right-wing. He's trying to justify it by using double-speak and terms like "retribution."
As if pandering to them hasn't stiffened their spines and increased their contempt?
Now pretend that the job you do is crucial to national security, and lives hang in the balance, and you have no reason to doubt that the people up your chain of command are anything but the best in their field. If they tell you to hold a prisoner's head underwater because he will reveal useful intel, are you going to risk a court-martial, a hefty fine and jail time?
There are a few examples I can think of in which disobedience of a direct order is absolutely called for, and conversely where failure to disobey would merit prosecution of the agent on the ground. I don't think waterboarding -- which does not leave permanent physical injuries -- rises to that level, particularly when the order is backed by the Office of Legal Counsel's OK. It's the OLC's job to determine the legality of interrogation techniques, and they screwed up, not the CIA employees.
Many in this thread unduly malign some very brave people when they call CIA agents "barbarians" and such, especially given that it was the misgivings of some of these very people who brought torture of detainees to light.
Your reasoning is what the Nazis in their Defence at Nuremberg, and it failed.
An effective military or security apparatus relies heavily on command structure and strict adherence to orders from one's superiors. Waterboarding may be torture, personally I'm agnostic on the subject, but it does not jump out at me as an order that I'd expect CIA or military personnel to defy.
I only voted for Obama because he wasn't a rethug.
We have to keep asking for, intending, and seeking the changes we want made, because we cannot rely on Obama to do it all. If you think the CIA is going to let him prosecute them, you don't understand the nature of political power in the US.
That said, if you are "ordered" to torture someone, please refuse, for all of us. Spare us the worldwide embarrassment, and, in your refusal, elevate us all to the ideal America we know we can be.
Let's all decide that, when asked, even by a person of "authority," we will not torture other humans.
So what? What we need is a president with courage. If he's decided he doesn't have the guts to do what's needed...resign, let's see if Biden does.