HR2346
I live in Missouri, a red state. During the 2004 campaign, George Bush visited a neighboring community. My son and I stood among 3,000 Bush supporters carrying signs that called for an end to state sanctioned torture. We were heckled and threatened by morons who didn’t even believe it was happening. We lost the election and for the next four years shocking details came out about the extent of state sanctioned torture.
5 years later we have a democratic president who wants to protect Bush from accountability by hiding the evidence of his illegal actions. I went door to door for this guy, made phone calls and helped organize others to do the same. I went to see him speak in Kansas City and when he was asked about accountability for illegal torture he said, “No one is above the law”, and “We will not have two forms of justice” He lied. Seeing this “exception” to the Freedom of Information Act being approved by Obama in HR 2346 is insult to injury in my opinion.
Before the election I believed things were as they are because we had the wrong leadership. Now I believe that they are this way because the leaders know we’ll follow them to hell. This decision matters. If we accept this, we will have to accept more and more because accepting it will grant them permission. If we reject this now and Obama faces a legislative defeat, perhaps he will listen to us. If not, we will have lost again. Lost because we allowed it.
Reference-
1- http://www.washingtonwatch.com…
2- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
Snip- “The Senate, with the backing of the Obama administration, has also added an amendment that would allow the administration to keep secret photographs of U.S. torture and mistreatment of detainees and prisoners, allowing the Department of Defense to exempt such photos from provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who sponsored the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act, said the language specifically addresses a FOIA suit filed by the ACLU for the pictures: the Lieberman amendment will “authorize the Secretary of Defense, after consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to certify to the President that the disclosure of photographs like the ones at issue in the ACLU lawsuit would endanger the lives of our citizens or members of the Armed Forces or civilian employees of the United States government deployed abroad. The certification would last five year and could be renewed by the Secretary of Defense if the threat to American personnel continues.””
CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed
The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.
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By R. Jeffrey Smith- Washington Post
Source-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
This is the American activist’s litmus test. Look at what we have allowed our nation to turn into? Our leaders took us into a war based on lies that was obviously to seize another nation’s natural resources. Our “free press” helped them do it by ignoring the truth and then protected them from accountability when they both got caught. We allowed our president to illegally sanction the torture of captives with no evidence against them. We imprisoned children and there is better evidence than not that they were abused as well. The glazed eyed German’s who followed Hitler into depravity haven’t got a god damn thing on us. And to make this seeming impossible turn of events in America even more bizarre, the AIPAC helped us get here! Now the president we elected to change all this is protecting the criminals in the name of national security. And in doing so he is perpetuating the same morally reprehensible destruction of every guiding principle that allows us to believe we are something to take pride in. We are confronted with the responsibility of doing something about this because every thing built into our constitution to protect our nation from becoming this has already been compromised. We the people are the last house on the block. There will never be a more “in our face” warning that the fate of the United States is in our hands alone.