By Steve Hynd
So George W. Bush admits personally authorising torture, a crime under international and U.S. law, but most people follow the media shiny and are more interested in what he said about Kanye West calling him a racist. That's so outrageous, yet so predictable, that one can only react with what I once described as "Lying Bastard Fatigue".
Even worse, as Andy Worthington notes, the Obama administration are more than happy to give the former president and un-indicted, self-confessed war criminal plenty of cover for his crime.
In January this year, it was revealed that Holder had appointed � or had allowed � the veteran Justice Department fixer David Margolis to override the conclusions of a four-year internal investigation into the behavior of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, in which the author�s conclusions � that both men had been willfully guilty of �professional misconduct� � were watered down so that they were merely reprimanded for exercising �poor judgment.�
In addition, the administration�s stock response to attempts to investigate torture claims in court � as, for example, in the cases of five men subjected to �extraordinary rendition� and torture, who sought to sue Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that acted as the CIA�s torture travel agent � has been to slam all the doors shut mercilessly, inappropriately invoking the little-known �state secrets� privilege to prevent anyone with a valid complaint from even getting anywhere near a court.
This is unlikely to change in the near future, of course, leaving George W. Bush able to boast openly about his crimes, apparently secure in the knowledge that he is untouchable, although as David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, and a long-standing critic of the Bush administration�s interrogation and detention policies, told the Washington Post on Thursday, �The fact that he did admit it suggests he believes he is politically immune from being held accountable � But politics can change.�
At present, it is difficult to see how, but those compiling evidence will have taken note that, in the very public forum of an internationally available memoir, George W. Bush has failed to rehabilitate his legacy and has, instead, openly confessed to war crimes.
When I wrote back in 2006 that "America is being governed by a bunch of empathy-impaired borderline crazies - I am no longer surprised that they are Lying Bastards for that is the primary symptom of sociopathy," I was naive. Forgive me, I hadn't been observing politics long enough in this country. I didn't realise that the Democratic alternative was just as empathy-impaired a set of Lying Bastards as the Republican one.
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