It occured to me that Obama's visit to the CIA may have actually yielded more nuanced opinions about what he should do about responding to the torture program than we have seen from Hayden and Cheney.  I wondered if this turn of events might have had more to do with feedback at CIA than anything.

We were reminded during the campaign last year that his great uncle helped liberate NAzi death camps:

Ohrdruf was liberated on April 4, 1945, by the 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division.[4], U.S. Third Army. It was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army.[5] The 89th Infantry division included 20-year-old Charlie Payne of Augusta, Kansas. Payne's s great-nephew is U.S. President Barack Obama and Payne's military service has been highlighted by President Obama as well as Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts during his speech at 2008 Democratic Convention.[6]

This, we were told (explicitly or implicitly) meant that Obama had learned that evil and wrongdoing must be rooted out, exposed to the light and thereby destroyed.

We need also look back at how Eisenhower reacted to the capture of Ohrdruf, the first death camp to be captured by the US.  

The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:

. . .the most interesting--although horrible--sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'

Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. That same day, Marshall received permission from the Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson, and President Harry S. Truman for these delegations to visit the liberated camps.

And, in future years, as Holocaust denial became a cottage industry, the wisdom of Ike's exposure of all these atrocities to the world and his orders to record everything and make it public have served to be the single most powerful counterweight to the nonsense spread by those who denied it happened, denied it was as bad as it was said to be, or tried some other flavor of moral equivalence or hedging.

Most of the soldiers who were there would, when they were alive, tell stories supporting and reinforcing the abominations they had personally witnessed.  If, of course, they were not so disturbed by them that they could not bring themselves to talk about them at all.

So, now, we are to look forward, not backward, to be constructive and not retributive.  As I noted yesterday here, and the other day here, what Obama has done is not only to make sure "...the discussion about torture will continue into the foreseeable future and it will remain both respectable and within the bounds of reason for people to argue that torture is, in fact, effective" (all we have to do is look at Deadeye yesterday demanding release of the "memos which show it was effective"), but also to give legitimacy to the species of Holocaust denial encapsulated in Bush's mantra of "the United States does not torture."

Indeed, Obama got cheers from the assembled multitudes - in his Inaugural Address and, more directly, in his pseudo-State of the Union speech to the Joint Session - by intoning that same mantra.  Yet he is facilitating the very same kind of Holocaust denial that to this day poisons any attempt to further raise humanity out of the swamp which led, 70 years ago, to death camps, 35 years ago to Pol Pot and The Killing Fields, and within the last decade and a half not only to the genocides of the Balkans, the Congo and Rwanda but to torture as policy in that country which, allegedly, represented the highest of civilization and to which the world looked and still looks.

The only difference being - six and seven decades ago the world looked to America in hope and admiration.  Now, they still look on in horror.

It is, after all, not that different.  In the 40s, people could not understand how the countries which had given the world Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Goethe, Schiller, the heights of science, engineering and learning and so much more, had similarly brought forth some of the most brutal, calculated mass murders in history.  Today, the scales that grew nurtured by "change" and "hope" are starting to fall from the eyes of the world, which had actually bought into the language of the campaign, in the hope that the atrocities Bush, Cheney and their henchmen gave us would not only end, but be scraped off, purged from the body politic, and burned in the fire of justice in the hope that they would never return.

I don't see how Obama can, in one breath state that he has put an end to a policy of torture because we are a nation that believes in the rule of law, and in the next breath state that he is setting aside that law for those who generated the policy, advised on the policy and carried out the policy, all on the basis of some kind of mishmash of good intentions, reliance on the legal advice and "because I said so."

He was pretty vocal about the need for accountability when he was running for president; he thought investigations were the way to go.  He wanted consequences after years of no consequences.  He wanted transparency where there had been none.

Poof!

All gone.

What's changed?  For me, what's changed is now that I have been given a glimpse at the evil men do, I don't understand why we are just supposed to walk away from it and pretend it never happened.  I don't get why he believes that waving the presidential wand of reflection means there is less chance of something like this - or worse - happening again.

I mean, do any of you want to forgive and forget Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, want to hold hands with Dick Cheney and harmonize on Kumbayah?  Have any trust or any faith that there are not now people dreaming up ways to do the awful things they seem to so enjoy doing - and who are doing the happy dance because they now have more reason to think they will get away with it?

I sure don't.  And I don't think I'm alone in believing that.  Could they just stop treating us like we don't need to know, or have a right to know?  Or wouldn't understand?

The US isn't going to listen to the UN. In any event, the US and the Obama administration already know a huge amount about this situation, whether it has been formally investigated or not. Jeez, this isn't a newly discovered topic/situation. A huge of amount of information is laid out in various memos.

The one guy merely said that it was important to know what occurred, not to assess any blame. Many people support finding out more about what occurred, but that is very different than criminal investigations.

One wonders what sort of mental makeup the interrogator should have to  sit quietly and comfortably   in his chair  (possibly with  a Cuban cigar dangling from  his mouth - most of  these interrogations were conducted in GITMO  where Cuban cigars would be easy to come by, weren't they?),  supervise the prisoner being water-boarded 183 times and  enjoy watching him undergo death throes 183 times.  What is the difference between the acts of these interrogators and  those of the notorious Nazi concentration camp guards who are being hounded  from their deathbeds to be  brought to justice  even after six decades, day in day out?

Do the ends always justify the means?