by John Byrne
with Agence France-Presse
Raw Story
February 10, 2009
from
PrisonPlanet Website
President Barack Obama gave a cool
welcome at his Monday night press conference to Senate Judiciary Chairman
Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) call for a “truth commission” to probe alleged
abuses under
George W. Bush, offering a fresh signal
that the new president may not be interested in investigating President
Bush.
Obama claimed at the first press conference of his presidency that he had
not seen the proposal from Sen. Leahy and would have a look at it:
“But my general orientation is to say let’s
get it right moving forward.”
“My view is also that nobody is above the law. And if there are clear
instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any
ordinary citizen,” Obama said.
Obama’s remarks also come just a few weeks after
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) subpoenaed
former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to testify
about his knowledge in the firing of Bush US Attorneys and the prosecution
of a Democratic Alabama governor. In the subpoena, Conyers invoked Obama and
told Rove “it’s time to talk.”
Leahy, meanwhile, compared his proposed panel to South Africa’s
post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, stressing that he
did not want,
“to humiliate people” or lay the groundwork
for prosecution.
“Rather than vengeance, we need a
fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. Sometimes the best way to
move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we
can make sure it does not happen again,” said Leahy.
The Vermont senator, who unveiled the proposal
in a speech at Georgetown University, said he wanted to chart a middle way
between those who want to prosecute Bush-era figures and those who want to
wipe the slate clean.
“One path to that goal would be a
reconciliation process and truth commission. We could develop and
authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair
minded, and without axes to grind,” said the senator.
“People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and
experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but
to assemble the facts,” said Leahy, a frequent Bush critic.
Obama, who has come under heavy pressure from
his predecessor’s Republican allies to forswear prosecutions of US
intelligence personnel who used controversial interrogation tactics,
declared that,
“generally speaking, I’m more interested in
looking forward than I am in looking backwards.”
“I want to pull everybody together, including, by the way, all the
members of the intelligence community who have done things the right way
and have been working hard to protect America and I think sometimes are
painted with a broad brush without adequate information,” he said.
Taguba Backs Commission to Investigate Bush-Era Abuses
by Matt Finkelstein
Think Progress
February 21, 2009
from
PrisonPlanet Website
Last summer, former Abu Ghraib investigator ret. Army Maj. Gen.
Antonio Taguba said that the Bush
administration had “committed war crimes” and needed to be “held to
account.”
Yesterday, 18 human rights organizations, former
State Department officials, and former law enforcement and military leaders
— including Taguba — signed onto a letter asking the President to create a
non-partisan commission to investigate the Bush administration’s torture
policies.
In a new interview with Salon, he explains why:
I feel we have to come to terms with
policies that have gained such notoriety and have been debated about
whether they were in the best interest of our national security, and
whether those who created these policies were pressured by their senior
leadership. […]
[I support] a structured commission with some form of authority with
clear objectives and a follow-on action plan. I’m not looking for
anything that is prosecutorial in nature, unless a suspected violation
of relevant laws occurred, which should be referred to the Dept of
Justice.