Obama’s Impeachable Offenses Regarding Torture

Barack “We Tortured Some Folks!” Obama took an oath of office when he became president. The people who rule us would have us believe that this oath isn’t merely a meaningless formality, a bit of solemn pageantry to entertain and awe the subjects of the Empire. Alright then, let’s pretend it really is a serious oath, legally binding on the person who “solemnly swears “ to it, “so help [him] God,” (their official deity). [1] The newly-minted president-  chief executive of U.S. imperialism and hired manager of the corporate oligarchy which it serves-  pledges to “preserve, protect and defend the [U.S.] Constitution.” The Constitution itself prescribes this oath. (Article 2, Section 1.)

Under that legal document, the Constitution, treaties the U.S. signs have the status of Constitutional law.

The U.S. is a signatory to an anti-torture convention. This not only bans torture by signatory nations without exceptions, it also obligates the signatory nations to prosecute torturers. Failure to do so subjects the torturers to foreign prosecution. (In theory. Of course the U.S. has enough power to thumb its nose at the rest of the world.)

Thus Obama is violating a treaty, which has the legal status of the U.S. Constitution itself, by refusing to prosecute known torturers. The opposite of “preserving, protecting and defending.”

In fact he has been aiding and abetting the torturers during his entire presidency by shielding them from prosecution and vigorously attempting to suppress information about their crimes. This includes barring Guantanamo Bay prisoners (aka “detainees”) from testifying about their torture in the kangaroo court “military commission” show trials against them and preventing their lawyers from telling anyone about the torture under pain of criminal prosecution. Oh, and trying to squelch and impede in every way investigations by the Congressional committees- while out of the other side of his mouth, Obama likes to tell us that there is vigorous control and oversight of the secret police by three branches of government- Congress (kept in the dark), the judiciary (the rubber-stamp FISA “court,” also deceived,) and Obama himself, an accomplice. (Every Federal secret police agency, starting with the NSA, CIA, and FBI, has had a strong ally in Obama for their seizures of ever-more-repressive powers.)

As early as February 2009, before he was even in office a month, one of the government attorneys under his command made a veiled threat to a Federal judge in a case brought by victims of CIA kidnapping and torture (in this case the victims were handed over to Egypt for torturing). [2]

The president, and indeed all the members of Congress, have a duty to uphold the laws of the U.S. Torture is a Federal crime under U.S. law. Of course, during the Bush regime, the fiction was upheld that their torture wasn't torture. The corporate media (including "liberal" organs such as the New York Times and Washington Post) strictly observed a proscription against calling U.S. torture "torture." Instead the euphemisms "enhanced interrogation techniques" (a government term parroted by the media) and "harsh interrogation techniques" were employed. Particularly daring reporters would slip in "brutal methods" occasionally. But since Obama conceded "we tortured some folks," and with the voluminous evidence on the record, it is long since past time to put this Big Lie to bed.(And yet the media persists. Even reporting the story of the Senate report, while now using the word "torture," they still are mainly using the aforementioned despicable euphemisms!) 

There are other crimes Obama has committed. For example, by refusing to prosecute- indeed refusing to even investigate- the CIA criminals who brazenly incriminated themselves in computer crimes they committed against the Senate Intelligence Committee staffers whose computers they broke into and deleted files from, Obama aided and abetted those crimes and obstructed justice. (Obstructed it completely in fact!) After breaking into the Senate staffers computers (remember, the Senate allegedly “oversees” the CIA- apparently it’s the other way around), CIA boss John “Everyone I Kill Is A Terrorist” Brennan accused the Senate Committee of stealing CIA documents, based on the CIA’s surreptitious searches and seizures from the Committee’s computers! (Like I said, brazen.) Obama has backed the CIA to the hilt the whole time. He helped drag out the writing of the Senate report on CIA torture for five years. And all this year he has impeded the release of the report. (Insanely, the Senate “overseers”  agreed to let the CIA censor the report!)[3]

So Obama has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and has violated his oath of office. Of course his own party supports him. And the Republicans would only impeach him over Obamacare and his  executive order tweaking the repression of undocumented immigrants (“illegal immigrants” in xenophobe lingo). The GOP supports all the evil Obama does. In fact, except for John McCain, a foe of torture, pretty much all the GOP members of Congress are pro-torture, and indeed their members on the Senate Intelligence Committee denounced the committee’s report. (Democrats control the committee, being a majority in the Senate. In January the GOP takes over the Senate and all committees, since they won a smashing victory in the November midterm elections.)

One Big Lie Obama and the Obamaites have been telling is that Obama “banned torture.” Not so, as the U.S. Army Field Manual has a section on torture- excuse me, “interrogation.” And of course U.S. “Special Forces” torture their prisoners and have been torturing- and murdering- their prisoners routinely, at least as far back as the Vietnam War.

Ruthless empires do stuff like that.

1] Those last four words actually aren’t in the Constitutional oath, but like “God” added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950’s, and “In God We Trust” printed on U.S. currency, is an infection of religiosity against the Constitutional separation of church and state.

2] See “State Secrets and Deceit: Obama Embraces CIA Torture,” Global Research, February 13, 2009. Nor has the torture ever been a secret, as years ago victims have been interviewed by genuine journalists. For example, “Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA ‘Black Sites’ Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture,” Democracy Now, December 18, 2007.

3] The report itself, based on examining 6 million CIA documents, is over 6,700 pages. It is still “classified” (a fancy word for secret). What has been released is a heavily-censored 525-page  executive summary of the report. To illustrate the absurdity of the CIA censorship, which the Senate Committee shamefully knuckled under to, the long-publicly-known names of two sadistic psychologists whom the CIA paid a cool $81 million to for designing and overseeing torture (in which some people were murdered- people who were NOT “terrorists”) were replaced with pseudonyms. Notoriously, the American Psychological Association worked hand in glove with the CIA to deem their behavior perfectly in line with medical ethics. Their names are James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. [The Psychologists Who Taught the C.I.A. How to Torture (and Charged $180 Million), Vanity Fair, December 10, 2014.]