{"id":14519,"date":"2009-09-02T06:49:26","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T04:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=14519"},"modified":"2014-01-05T17:24:19","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T15:24:19","slug":"mccain-admits-bush-administration-violated-international-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/09\/02\/mccain-admits-bush-administration-violated-international-law\/","title":{"rendered":"McCain Admits Bush Administration Violated International Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0DAPHNE EVIATAR<\/span> 8\/31\/09 10:12 AM<\/p>\n

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d Sunday that \u2014 like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president\u2019s cabinet \u2014 he thinks President Obama was right when he said \u201cwe ought to go forward, not back.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then he went on to say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that \u201cI think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture that we ratified under President Reagan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, once you acknowledge that the CIA, at the direction of senior cabinet officials, violated international humanitarian law that requires the United States to prosecute the perpetrators, the only way to justify not investigating is to say that the executive branch of government is above the law \u2014 or, put more pragmatically, that it\u2019s politically too messy to investigate senior leaders in the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

Republicans didn\u2019t hesitate to investigate when it involved Democratic President Bill Clinton, however, or to bring charges against him for lying about a personal matter. And Congress didn\u2019t turn its backs on the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, which led to 14 senior officials charged with crimes, and 11 convictions. And of course the Watergate affair led to the indictment and conviction of senior Nixon administration officials, and impeachment charges against the president. Congressional investigations of sitting and past administrations are far from unprecedented.<\/p>\n

So how does McCain explain why we ought to forget the whole torture problem \u2014 which led to the deaths of a still-unknown number of detainees in custody, some of whom the CIA still can\u2019t account for \u2014 even as he acknowledges that it violated international treaties that legally obligate us to prosecute?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think these interrogations helped al-Qaeda recruit,\u201d McCain said yesterday, adding: \u201cthe damage that it did to America\u2019s reputation in the world we\u2019re still on the way to repairing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even setting aside the legal requirements, as a practical matter, a public acknowledgment and investigation would seem to be the only way to repair that damages.<\/p>\n

As McCain put it: \u201cThis is an ideological struggle as well as a physical one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: \u00a0http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/57121\/mccain-admits-bush-administration-violated-international-law<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0DAPHNE EVIATAR 8\/31\/09 10:12 AM Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d Sunday that \u2014 like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president\u2019s cabinet \u2014 he thinks President Obama was right when he said \u201cwe ought to go forward, not back.\u201d But then he went on to say, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":782328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}