The Day That Barack Obama Lied To Me

[Guest Tom Scully]

Meet the new "boss", same as the old "boss"!

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/At_least_not_quite_as_many_people_died_when_Obama_lied.html

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The day that Barack Obama lied to me

By Will Bunch

Spain is home to the running of the bulls, of course, but in 2009 it was also home to the running of the bull----, courtesy of our president, Barack Obama. And this time, it's personal. Presidents lie all the time, unfortunately, but in this case candidate Barack Obama lied to my face in April 2008, when he came to 400 North Broad Street here in Philadelphia and I had a chance to ask him directly how he would handle allegations of torture and related crimes by the Bush administration.

Here's part of how he responded:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge that because we don't have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve.

On Jan. 20, 2009, Obama became the 44th president of the United States, and in the 22 months since then there's no reason to believe there's what he promised -- any serious Justice Department review of torture or any other likely war crimes that were ordered up and carried out during Bush's presidency. So what he said up on the 12th floor of the building where I now sit was, in essence, a lie. But tonight, thanks to some on-the-ball reporting from David Corn at Mother Jones,

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-obama-quashed-torture-investigation

we learn that it's even worse than that, that the Obama administration actively protected Bush's minions from any accountability, anywhere in the world:

In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. An April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution....

Is it any wonder that almost the entire Washington political and establishment "journalist" class, alternate between falsely stating that the "secrets" disclosed by wikileaks distribution amount to "move along now, nothing new to see here..." to calls for the prosecution and even the execution of wikileaks front person Assange, and to outright lies about the resulting deaths to those cooperating with US government interests whose names are displayed in the details of confidential U.S. government documents released by wikileaks, despite the fact that even the pentagon and DOD secretary Robert Gates have admitted that they can document no harm to anyone as a consequence of prior wikileaks distributions? The same class of pols and stenographers who display no concern over the deaths of innocents and other destructive consequences of what they aided, abetted, cheered on, and displayed total indifference towards, since September, 2001?

14 minute Video:

Jay Rosen on Wikileaks: "The watchdog press died; we have this instead."

Edited December 2, 2010 by Tom Scully