This is the kind of civility that I just can’t stomach. Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, author of the Torture Memos which Bushco’s blimpnecks took for their greenlight to water-board, was a guest yesterday on the Daily Show. Short of Jon Stewart orchestrating a citizen’s arrest, or reality television setting Gitmo alumni upon Woo like bears on honey, I don’t want to see the John Yoo walking free.
I could see that Stewart had planned some zingers which Yoo was able to dodge, and afterward Stewart behaved like Hannibal Lecter had just passed through, but on the whole I think hosting criminals like Yoo is ill advised. For one, you have to shake his hand. Then of course the nature of television entertainment –unless you are Mike Wallace who’s just strode into the mark’s office– has you trying to make light of the interview, the whole of which has been choreographed for laughs. Worst of all I believe, are the too-many times a host finds himself asking the audience to give it up for the guest.
When Stewart first announced the night’s guest was to be John Yoo, the audience appropriately enough did not cheer. Of course when it came time for the cretin’s entrance, the applause was obligatory. And so it followed, each subsequent punctuation. How else are the audience members supposed to show their enthusiasm? It’s true, their energy is critical to the stage energy.
Stephen Colbert solves the applaud-the-bad-guy paradox by taking a victory lap himself when the audience applauds the introduction of the guest. But usually Colbert’s show specializes in leftist guests with whom the audience is sympathetic, so the maneuver is more for bringing the studio audience unto Colbert’s role-playing for the Right. Integral to his act is an audience that mimics O’Reilly-Limbaugh ditto-heads. A veritable right wing audience could never be brought to even show civility to a guest they’re told is hostile.
And I guess I long for a little more of that genuine sentiment. It began for me when I saw Sarah Palin treated with effusive cordiality on Saturday Night Live. Again the audience was expected to applaud Palin, if in fact they were really just excited to see her roasted.
John Yoo and ilk, the whole Bush troops, must be prosecuted and jailed. That they walk about at large, free to second guess President Obama’s terrorism strategies are nothing to laugh at. I’ll cop to being humorless on this point.
NOTES:
Excerpt, March 13, 2002 Memorandum
“… neither the GPW (Third Geneva Convention) nor the Torture Convention restrict the President’s legal authority to transfer prisoners captured in the Afghanistan conflict to third countries. Although the GPW places conditions on the transfer of POWs, neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban prisoners are legally entitled to POW status, and hence there are no GPW conditions placed on their transfer. While the Torture Convention arguably might govern transfer of these prisoners, it does not apply extraterritorially.”
Excerpt, August 1, 2002 Memo
“Under international law, therefore, the United States thus is bound only by the text of the Torture Conventions as modified by the first Bush administration’s understanding.”
There it is in closeup. The arms bound at the elbows, the hands pinned, pressure applied to the stomach, a gun held to the poor Cuban’s head, a funnel put into his mouth, and water poured from a bucket marked “U.S. ARMY.”
David Swanson describes for 
President Obama is blocking the release of further detainee abuse photos. Would more images of outrages committed against US detainees inflame sentiment against US troops? No doubt. Would more of such photos add nothing to the national dialog? Well… If you consider that the media is still vacillating on the definition of waterboarding, torturers and the lawyers who sanctioned torture are being exempted from prosecution, and war criminals like Dick Cheney are bragging about their participation, maybe there’s room for more dialog.
It’s kind of sad reading the liberal ‘Peace’crat sites as they scream and shout about why the Democratic Party must prosecute The Republicans for the crimes of implementing torture. That can’t happen though, and there is one BIG reason why not? Can you guess why it won’t and can’t be done?
American ‘medical science’ is something special! Can you imagine Attila the Hun or Napoleon Bonaparte or even Adolph Hitler with these scientific minded docs that The American Empire has? 
For years now, the majority of Americans have allowed their country’s leaders to murder, torture, and lie in their name, with hardly a protest against it. They allowed their Constitution to be defiled by remaining silent as their government held innocents in solitary confinement without charges and tortured them for years, all the while many of them obtusely said that no torture was involved at all as for as they were concerned. 
This weekend the kids and I watched Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant 1940 movie The Great Dictator. The film was released before the United States’ entry into World War II when our country was still at peace with Nazi Germany. Charlie Chaplin was an outspoken critic of Nazism and fascism while most Americans were either ignorant of or complacent about European goings-on. The Great Dictator is ingenious in its inexorable skewering of Hitler and Mussolini, done with complete levity and irreverance, a task made possible by Chaplin’s lack of foresight into the coming Holocaust. He admits he likely wouldn’t have made the film had he known about Hitler’s final solution.
Obama is covering up for George Bush’s Administration use of torture as policy. He wants to have it both ways, first claiming that he is changing policy, then in engaging in the old policies of ‘rendition’ and coverup of torture of POWs held by the US military. But there is yet another coverup underway, and that is how Obama is covering up for George Bush’s illegal support for the illegal actions of Israel in Gaza and elsewhere (remember Lebanon?). He may want to repeat the same under his own Administration? From MSNBC:
Guantanamo is just the tip of the iceberg for taking down the work of the Bush-Cheney Klan that now continues to infiltrate positions of power at all levels throughout the US. Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio has already murdered some of his prisoners, tortured many more of them, and is himself nothing more than a common criminal. He belongs in jail but just not his own one. He needs to be taken out of power first of all, but then thrown in a Federal Prison where he most certainly does belong! 
The Pentagon has been suppressing the press. ‘Mr Davis said a High Court ruling, which pointed to complicity by the UK and US authorities in his torture, was prevented from being published after the US put pressure on the UK.’ 
There is a growing effort to defend the use of torture on POWs by the US military, and it centers around the Pentagon’s and the corporate media’s effort to convince the American people that some Guantanamo inmates have become terrorists post discharge. These POWs were discharged because they were found to be innocent of ‘terrorism’, but now the Pentagon and US media want to paint a picture of US military incompetence, all to bolster a campaign to defend those that tortured these POWs when they were at the US run torture concentration camp called Guantanamo (Gitmo).