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Obama leaves door open to Bush officials' prosecution

by integrityforamerica | April 21, 2009 at 12:16 pm

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama on Tuesday left open the possibility of criminal prosecution for Bush administration officials who drew up the legal basis for interrogation techniques that many view as torture.

President Obama says any congressional investigation should be conducted in a bipartisan fashion.

Obama said it will be up to Attorney General Eric Holder to decide whether or not to prosecute the former officials.

"With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more a decision for the attorney general within the parameter of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said during a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah at the White House.

"There's a host of very complicated issues involved there. As a general deal, I think we should be looking forward and not backward.

So far I have supported the majority of Obama Administration policies. This is one policy I can not support. We can not under any circumstances start to prosecute military members officer or enlisted for following direct orders. The problem with this is very clear. If we go after these people who followed orders they where directly given by their superiors then we will have a military full of members who will question orders all the time.

In order to have and maintain control in the military we can not have members who are in fear of carrying out a direct order.

Please do not change course and prosecute members of the governement who followed orders. Prosecute those that issued the order from the top down, if they broke the law.

I am truly undecided as to how much real and legitimate information we recieved from these interrogations.

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Uwe Paschen

at 20:12 on April 21st, 2009

With you reasoning we should not have persecuted the NAZI nor Serbian war criminals or others.

The Pirate that will now stand trial should not stand trial either since he followed orders as well.

We have International Laws and convention in place that all and every soldier and Politician is aware of and should know, if any of those has been broken it is the duty of the soldier to refuse to execute a direct order.

Following the order make the soldier complicit and guilty.

Same for the one giving the orders.

integrityforamerica

at 15:29 on April 22nd, 2009

In the international tribunals the person giving the order is held responsible. We did not bring every german soldier alive to trial because they followed commands that where given to them. If we have a military of people who question orders then we will not have a military at all.