Torture Memos and Obama

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald is really kicking some butt covering the torture memo situation and the related media coverage.

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Below is an excerpt which spares no punches for Time’s Joe Klein, who comes across as a tool. Greenwald’s mention of the impulse to elevate Obama to an all-powerful arbiter of policy is right on:

But we so fetishize the omnipotence of the President as the central and absolute power that we look to him to make all decisions for us (“will you prosecute, Mr. President?”). We barely recognize any longer that there are other political officials with independent authority and responsibilites. And the idea that high political officials should be immunized from the consequences of their lawbreaking — that political considerations should preclude holding them accountable — is so ingrained that many people who advocate it barely bother to mask how overtly corrupt that mentality is. Time’s Joe Klein yesterday (emphasis added):

Actually, I will concede one thing to Greenwald: I’ve been opposed to prosecuting the Bush miscreants–for political reasons, mostly. The President has put an awful lot of important domestic and foreign business on the table and this whole issue of what went on under Bush, and is no longer happening now, is a diversion from getting the important stuff done.

Note how Klein — who angrily mocked the idea that Lewis Libby should ever spend a day in jail for such “ridiculous” reasons (i.e., being convicted of multiple felony counts of obstruction of justice) — considers legal accountability for political elites who committed grotesque war crimes to be a “diversion from getting the important stuff done.” So many Democrats spent so many years attacking Alberto Gonzales for “politicizing” decisions about prosecutions, and now many of those same people are explicitly demanding that the Obama DOJ refrain from prosecuting Bush criminals — to use Klein’s phrase — “for political reasons.” Jane Hamsher illustrates the sheer lawlessness of Klein’s mindset here, and it is quite representative of the strident opposition among our political elites to legal accountability for their fellow Washington insiders.

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I’m becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Greenwald all the time. If you didn’t catch him on Bill Moyers Journal w/ Jay Rosen, together they do a good job of contextualizing mainstream media narratives and their inherent limitations.

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