Accountability...Plain & Simple

David S Broder has written a piece for the Washington Post stating that President Obama should "stick to his guns" and not prosecute those guilty of instituting and instigating torture.

Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Rice. Those guilty ones.

Really? Let them off the hook when they took this country and dragged it through the mud, all the while touting our moral superiority, and saying that they are our protectors from the mighty Axis of Evil? Just say, You shouldn't have done that, George, Dick, Don and Condi, and shake an index finger at them? Really?

I wonder how those men who were tortured all day every day would feel about that? Their friends and families? Their countries? All those men that were accused of something but never charged, never tried, never convicted, but were nonetheless subjugated to waterboarding and humiliation at the hands of the Good Old US of A.

We cannot, in good conscience, walk the world with our head held high while we're treating people as less than human. Would we, as a country, stand for that, for even a nanosecond, if that same torture and degradation were being inflicted on our citizens in some prison camp on the far side of the globe? Of course we wouldn't, so we shouldn't have been doing it ourselves.

Broder makes the argument that it will be the "underlings" at the White House, CIA, and the Justice Department, that will bear the brunt of prosecution for the torture. It won't be Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, as it should be. But then he makes the most amazing statement of all. He says, and I quote, "if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me."

Yeah. That'll happen.

If Bush had been a man of honor, even a man with one iota of honor, we wouldn't have tortured one single person in the first place.

So, I disagree with Broder. I say go after those who instigated and ordered torture, not the ones who simply followed orders from their superiors, but from the so-called superiors themselves. Let's show the world, and our own country, that this kind of administration is not who we are, what we are, nor what we will be, it's is merely the remnants of one of the darkest, dirtiest ages in US history.

You can read David Broder's piece HERE