It is amazing and depressing that Dick Cheney can publicly boast of war crimes ahead of his book's launch and there is minimal real outrage about it.

And he can, because Barack Obama along with the help of a complicit corporate media has continued  "the evisceration of the rule of law for political elites," according to Glenn Greenwald.

Originally posted on my personal blog here.

Al Jazeera reports that Human Rights Watch (HRW) has asked President Obama to prosecute his predecessor and many prominent members of the Bush Administration for torture of terror suspects in legal limbo at prisons like Guantanamo Bay.  “Instead of looking at isolated cases, Obama should probe those responsible for setting up the harsh interrogation practices at Guantanamo and the secret rendition programs overseas as America went to war in Afghanistan,” the humanitarian group said in a public statement.

It’s a well-intentioned plan, certainly.  That the American government tortures (even in spite of its own Constitution and legal code) is an established and despicable fact.  The problem is that the torture didn’t stop when Dubya went home to Texas in 2009.  As with so many other issues, Barack Obama has followed in Bush’s footsteps in matter of detainee treatment, secrecy, and rendition.

HRW is correct that we must be consistent in condemning torture when we find at home as well as abroad.  But the organization’s appeal to Obama as a potential ally is…credulous, to put it mildly.

Here he is again, demanding that Biden and Obama take a healthy dose of "thank you George Bush" with regard to Iraq and demanding terrorist acts be treated not as crimes, but an "act of war" by the Obama Justice Department.

Many who favor the use of torture -- er, enhanced interrogation techniques -- on those suspected of terrorism attempt to bolster their arguments by claiming that it's ok because, universal conceptions of human rights be damned, the Constitution only applies to U.S. citizens.

To put it simply, they're very, very wrong.  Glenn Greenwald explains this well in a new piece:

[In a 2009 Supreme Court decision,] none of the 9 Justices -- and, indeed, not even the Bush administration -- argued that the Constitution applies only to American citizens.  That is such an inane, false, discredited proposition that no responsible person would ever make that claim....It is indisputable, well-settled Constitutional law that the Constitution restricts the actions of the Government with respect to both American citizens and foreigners.  It's not even within the realm of mainstream legal debate to deny that.

However, despite the recency of this example, this is hardly a new idea made up by a modern, activist SCOTUS.  Greenwald notes that the exact same opinion was part of SC jurisprudence in the late 1800s.  And even a cursory examination of the text of the Constitution itself -- which clearly distinguishes between "persons" (meaning everyone, regardless of citizenship) and "citizens" -- shows that it was never the intention of the founders to apply the guarantees of the Constition only to those boasting American citizenship.