The John Yoo legal memos were released last week. (John Yoo was the number two man at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department and wrote a series of legal memorandum that promoted skirting the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law to allow torture of terrorist suspects, as well as promoting unchecked powers for the commander in chief during wartime.) If you blinked and missed it, you weren't the only one as the traditional media seemed more interested in Obama's bowling score than U.S. sanctioned torture. Glenn Greenwald at Salon captures my anger at the whole situation.
This issue gets to me more than any of the other dozens of abhorrent actions taken by the Bush administration. Maybe it is just my romantic notions, but torture and its faux-legal justification are fundamentally opposed to what it means to be American. We tried Nazis for just this kind of action. And now our country has done the same thing in our name.
The question, of course, is what do we do about it. I have participated in online petitions and have written letters to my senators but that seems to do nothing. Even with a Democratic Congress, there is too much posturing and too little action. So my question is serious. What do we do about it?
I know the few people who read this blog do not comment much, but I really am interested in a discussion on this issue. How can we stop this from happening now? from happening again? Is it just a matter of wait until the election? Isn't there some way we can take steps now? What do you think?
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