a good writer, but does he really need the craig? paul roberts seems long enough to me

Where Principles Go to Die
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

"The evidence is sitting on the table. There is no avoiding the fact
that this was torture."

These are the words of Manfred Nowak, the UN official appointed by
the Commission on Human Rights to examine cases of torture. Nowak has
concluded that President Obama is legally obligated to prosecute
former President George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.

If President Obama's bankster economic team finishes off what remains
of the US economy, Obama, to deflect the public's attention from his
own failures and Americans' growing hardships, might fulfill his
responsibility to prosecute Bush and Rumsfeld. But for now the
interesting question is why did the US military succumb to illegal
orders?

In the December 2008 issue of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn, in
his report on an inglorious chapter in the history of the Harvard Law
School, provides the answer. Two brothers, Jonathan and David Lubell,
both Harvard law students, were politically active against the Korean
War. It was the McCarthy era, and the brothers were subpoenaed. They
refused to cooperate on the grounds that the subpoena was a violation
of the First Amendment.

Harvard Law School immediately began pressuring the students to
cooperate with Congress. The other students ostracized them.
Pressures from the Dean and faculty turned into threats. Although the
Lubells graduated magna cum laude, they were kept off the Harvard Law
Review. Their scholarships were terminated. A majority of the Harvard
Law faculty voted for their expulsion (expulsion required a two-
thirds vote).

Why did Harvard Law School betray two honor students who stood up for
the US Constitution? Cockburn concludes that the Harvard law faculty
sacrificed constitutional principle in order not to jeopardize their
own self-advancement by displeasing the government (and no doubt
donors).

We see such acts of personal cowardice every day. Recently we had the
case of Jewish scholar and Israel critic Norman Finkelstein, whose
tenure was blocked by the cowardly president of DePaul University, a
man afraid to stand up for his own faculty against the Israel Lobby,
which successfully imposed on a Catholic university the principle
that no critic of Israel can gain academic tenure.

The same calculation of self-interest causes American journalists to
serve as shills for Israeli and US government propaganda and the US
Congress to endorse Israeli war crimes that the rest of the world
condemns.

When US military officers saw that torture was a policy coming down
from the top, they knew that doing the right thing would cost them
their careers. They trimmed their sails. One who did not was Major
General Antonio Taguba. Instead of covering up the Abu Ghraib prison
torture scandal, General Taguba wrote an honest report that
terminated his career.

Despite legislation that protects whistleblowers, it is always the
whistleblower, not the wrongdoer, who suffers. When it finally became
public that the Bush regime was committing felonies under US law by
using the NSA to spy on Americans, the Justice (sic) Department went
after the whistleblower. Nothing was done about the felonies.

Yet Bush and the Justice (sic) Department continued to assert
that "we are a nation of law."

The Bush regime was a lawless regime. This makes it difficult for the
Obama regime to be a lawful one. A torture inquiry would lead
naturally into a war crimes inquiry. General Taguba said that the
Bush regime committed war crimes. President Obama was a war criminal
by his third day in office when he ordered illegal cross-border drone
attacks on Pakistan that murdered 20 people, including 3 children.
The bombing and strafing of homes and villages in Afghanistan by US
forces and America's NATO puppets are also war crimes. Obama cannot
enforce the law, because he himself has already violated it.

For decades the US government has taken the position that Israel's
territorial expansion is not constrained by any international law.
The US government is complicit in Israel's war crimes in Lebanon,
Gaza and the West Bank.

The entire world knows that Israel is guilty of war crimes and that
the US government made the crimes possible by providing the weapons
and diplomatic support. What Israel and the US did in Lebanon and
Gaza is no different from crimes for which Nazis were tried at
Nuremberg. Israel understands this, and the Israeli government is
currently preparing its defense, which will be led by Israeli Justice
(sic) Minister Daniel Friedman. UN war crimes official Richard Falk
has compared Israel's massacre of Gazans to the Nazi starvation and
massacre of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Amnesty International and the
Red Cross have demanded Israel be held accountable for war crimes.
Even eight Israeli human rights groups have called for an
investigation into Israel's war crimes.

Obama's order to close Guantanamo Prison means very little.
Essentially, Obama's order is a public relations event. The tribunal
process had already been shut down by US courts and by military
lawyers, who refused to prosecute the fabricated cases. The vast
majority of the prisoners were hapless individuals captured by Afghan
warlords and sold for money to the stupid Americans as "terrorists."
Most of the prisoners, people the Bush regime told us were "the most
dangerous people alive," have already been released.

Obama's order said nothing about closing the CIA's secret prisons or
halting the illegal practice of rendition in which the CIA kidnaps
people and sends them to third world countries, such as Egypt, to be
tortured.

Obama would have to take risks that opportunistic politicians never
take in order for the US to become a nation of law instead of a
nation in which the agendas of special interests override the law.

Truth cannot be spoken in America. It cannot be spoken in
universities. It cannot be spoken in the media. It cannot be spoken
in courts, which is why defendants and defense attorneys have given
up on trials and cop pleas to lesser offenses that never occurred.

Truth is never spoken by government. As Jonathan Turley said
recently, Washington "is where principles go to die."

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com