President Obama:
If you are to give us true change, as you promised so often during your campaign, it is imperative that you return the United States to the rule of law. As more and more evidence accumulates showing that the Bush Administration used torture as a matter of policy, that the CIA destroyed evidence of that torture, and that the President, Vice-President and Secretary of Defense, among others, were directly responsible for that policy, your Administration is legally obligated to investigate these actions and prosecute them.
You have talked about not wanting to "look back," but we can't move forward as a respected part of the community of nations if we do not hold criminal behavior to account. If your Department of Justice does not investigate war crimes, starting with the war on Iraq, it is as guilty—according to treaty and US law—as the actual perpetrators.
General Anthony Taguba said "the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."
Anne Applebaum, not a radical left-winger by any definition, had this to say: "Sooner or later, we will also have to hold accountable the American leaders who ordered American citizens to torture prisoners who were captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in violation both of our Constitution and of international conventions we ratified long ago."
Bush 41 U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Reagan FBI Director William Sessions wrote in Monday's Washington Post under this headline: "Moving Forward by Looking Back: Why a Presidential Commission on Torture Is Critical to America's Security"
While Pickering and Sessions do not call for prosecution, they do speak to the necessity of facing what happened, rather than sweeping it under a rug labeled "policy differences."
As a Constitutional scholar, as our president—who took an oath "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States"—you MUST start this process.
The American people want investigations. According to a mid-February USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, "Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants."
Please, Mr. President, tell Attorney General Holder to start this process immediately. Because, until these crimes are dealt with, the United States remains a rogue nation.
Thank you.
