Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Monday, "We now have President Bush speaking quite candidly that he was in the loop, we have Dick Cheney who almost bragged about it. The question for Barack Obama is whether he wants to own part of this by looking the other way."
"If waterboarding is torture -- and Barack Obama has said that it is torture," Turley emphasized, "and torture is a war crime, then the president has committed a war crime if he did order waterboarding. You have to do some heavy lifting to avoid the simplicity of that logic."
"There's no real question that crimes were committed here by {Obama's] predecessor," concluded Turley, "and he can either begin his administration as a man of principle, and allow the law to take us wherever it may lead, or he will inherit the same type of moral relativism that really corrupted the previous administration. I'm going to say a silent prayer for principle."
|
Call this an afterword to my
morning post. Turley takes it farther than I did, but that doesn't mean I disagree. Refusing to prosecute a crime or to look the other way is practically to be a partner in crime. If Obama doesn't at least investigate war crimes, he'll be derelict in his duty as POTUS. It'd be worse than Ford pardoning Nixon; it'd be more like Ford pretending Nixon never existed.
