Obama and the Secret Memos: Or How Obama Radicalized Me

One needn’t look too far or too hard to find hypocrisy. Often it is as easy as looking in a mirror yet hypocrisy, when employed in the defense of torture, degrades us all as human beings. For Bush and Cheney it wasn’t torture if you weren’t actually pulling out toenails and teeth with pliers or using thumb presses or slicing away body parts. This type of justification is what leads us down the darker alleys of inhumanity. Obama’s hypocrisy is to shut down the more glaring torture eyesores while allowing the practice to in essence continue by letting non-Americans do the torturing for us.

Link

Barack Obama today released four top secret memos that allowed the CIA under the Bush administration to torture al-Qaida and other suspects held at Guantánamo and secret detention centres round the world.

But, in an accompanying statement, Obama ruled out prosecutions against those who had been involved. It is a "time for reflection, not retribution," he said. .

So even though the Obama administration has ruled that indeed torture took place we should all look the other way and contemplate our belly buttons. This stance is to be expected especially when one is still using torture. So on one hand Obama condemns torture yet he will not prosecute the people responsible for committing torture, Bush and Cheney. Obama pretty much lets both off the hook.

Obama, in a statement from the White House, said: "In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carrying out their duties relying in good faith upon the legal advice from the department of justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

It sounds very much like Obama is saying that since Bush and Cheney had the okay from the justice department they really aren’t guilty of any wrongdoing. The problem with all this fine hair splitting by Obama is that almost everyone believes that torture is wrong, knows torture is wrong, but instead we should all play-pretend that we all were just born yesterday and really didn’t know it was wrong. This is one of a multitude of things that bother me regarding Obama -- that I feel like he is talking down to people, also that we are expected to swallow his numerous lies is insulting. Not only is Obama’s position legally and morally questionable but it is arrogant as well. Basically I find Obama to be arrogant to the point where his judgment is correspondingly affected.

And so life continues on its warped plane of existence and we are told once again that we should look ahead not behind, also that we are reassuring the torturers that the way is clear and all is forgiven. Obama must believe we are all complete idiots. On issue after issue Obama has chosen positions at odds with the chosen one’s image as the peace president, the savvy and smarter Obama. Though if Obama was so savvy one wonders why he needed to ask what the U.S. goal in Afghanistan was after he had already said he intended to escalate the number of troops there. And considering that Obama actively sought out the presidency he should already have had a good idea of just what we are doing in Afghanistan and why since he would be in charge of it. After all, there is no real goal other than the march toward world domination with the war profiteers tagging along for the ride while feeding at the pig trough.

Recently I was talking with a liberal friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in some time. He asked me what I thought of Obama. I said I didn’t care for Obama or his policies. My friend replied that I was the most radical person he knew. The irony is here is Obama continuing with the bulk of Bush policies and I shouldn’t object because, because, because why? Why shouldn’t people object to the blood already dripping from his fingers? I really don’t see how objecting to the death of innocent people, mostly women and children, makes you radical when it ought to make you just plain human. But if objecting to bloodshed makes you a radical then I think this place could use a few more radicals.