You go Keith!

From Countdown's special comment april 16th 2009 Addressing president Obama's take on former president Bush's torture memos.
Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:
"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.
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed. You continued:
"Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."
Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering -- with pervasive stench -- from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.
One, President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President's commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never "moved forward with confidence".without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We "moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War.
After that war's ending, we "moved forward" without the social restructuring -- and protection of the rights of minorities -- in the south. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in our southern cities.
We "moved forward" with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We "moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.And we "moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We "moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must "come together on behalf of our common future" you are entirely correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
And he will see precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong -- that this construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It worked. It saved the country.
The end. This must not be. "It is our intention," you said today, "to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution." Mr. President, you are making history's easiest, most often made, most dangerous mistake -- you are accepting the defense that somebody was "just following orders." At the end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. "The struggle of today," Lincoln wrote, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also."
Mr. President, you have now been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again -- by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say "we won't do it again." It is not, however...enough.

I am in complete agreement especially after reading the following:

A set of memos recently released by the Obama administration provide some support for allegations that the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) were tortured to reveal their father’s whereabouts. A detainee’s relative said that they had been tortured with insects in 2007, and the newly released memos approve the use of insects as a part of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
KSM’s two children were arrested in Pakistan on September 11, 2002, during a raid on an al-Qaeda safe house. However, their father slipped the net and was not captured until early the next year, reportedly on March 1, 2003.
Allegations
The first indications the children may have been tortured were reported in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine. When KSM was being held at a secret CIA facility in Thailand, apparently the revamped Vietnam War-era base at Udorn, according to Suskind, a message was passed to interrogators: “do whatever’s necessary.”
The interrogators then told KSM “his children would be hurt if he didn’t cooperate.” However, his response was, “so, fine, they’ll join Allah in a better place.”
More detailed allegations were made at a combatant status review tribunal in Guantanamo in the spring of 2007. According to a statement made by Ali Khan, the father of high value detainee Majid Khan, KSM’s children were “denied food and water by … guards.” In addition, “They were mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.” Accounts of the children’s ages at this time vary, although they are generally said to have been under ten.
Ali Khan said that he was told about the children by his son Mohammed, who was kept in the same detention center and obtained the information from Pakistani guards there. He also claimed that his son Majid was tortured, for example using stress positions, face slaps, hooding and cramped confinement.

Just as those who were just following orders should not be excused, ( but given light sentences if found guilty) it is imperative that those who authorised and gave the orders must be held to account. If we do not seek prosecution, how are we any different from Hitler's Germany? Is it because the number of tortured and killed pale in comparison? Is it fear of the CIA and the military industrial complex's long reaching tentacles? I mean I can understand your apprehension, those two entities involvement with JFK's assassination has never been made clear in my opinion. It can't be the belief that investigations into these crimes will divide the country at a time when we need to come together. Read the papers! We're about as divided as we've ever been. The political fall out from seeking prosecution of war crimes against those in the Bush administration would be a mere drop in the ocean. The Repubs in congress are already in opposition to everything you say and do. The media gives the lion's share of their coverage to the conservative right that distrust of you. You're never going to have a greater approval rating than you do right now. Strike while the iron is hot. Please, please, please . . . for God's sake . . . for the sake of justice . . . for the sake of American pride . . . for the sake of the children . . . for the sake of the parents that want to tell their children that when you break the law, when you commit crimes, when you are complicit in violent immoral acts . . . you will have to face the music. Executive branch sanctioned torture must not go unpunished, not here, not in this country.

Then after that fire Geithner and Summers and hire Paul Krugman and Robert Reich as Secretary of the treasury and your chief economic adviser. Then take over the Federal Reserve and keep Bernake on as the janitor. He needs to clean up this mess.

DaG Out
PS sorry readers for rehashing an old argument