NY Times Waffles on Prosecutions for Pentagon Torture

Today's editorial by the NY Times on the Torture Report by Carl Levin's Senate Armed Services Committee is great - except when it waffles on prosecuting the torturers-in-chief.

The editorial places blame for torture squarely at the feed of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's lawyer William Haynes.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the interrogators at Guantánamo to use a range of abusive techniques that were already widespread in Afghanistan, enshrining them as official policy. Instead of a painstaking legal review, Mr. Rumsfeld based that authorization on a one-page memo from Mr. Haynes. The Senate panel noted that senior military lawyers considered the memo “ ‘legally insufficient’ and ‘woefully inadequate.’ ”

Bush's torture regime didn't only flagrantly violate U.S. and international law - it also cost American lives:

Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”

So what should be done according to the Times?

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

Yaaaayyyy - except the Times immediately withdrew its own recommendation:

Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step.

Say what?

Obama has not "moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign." On 4/14/08, he told Will Bunch:

if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody [is] above the law -- and I think that's roughly how I would look at it.

"Nobody [is] above the law" means full accountability under the law - which can only mean prosecution.

After Obama chose Biden as his VP, Biden was even clearer about prosecution:

"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued – not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law."

So why doesn't the Times urge Obama and Biden to affirm the principle that "no one is above the law" by forcing the torturers-in-chief to defend their crimes in a court of law?