Don't ignore Bush's torture confession, Olbermann pleads David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Monday January 19, 2009





Print This Email This On the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann delivered perhaps his most heartfelt argument yet for prosecuting high administration officials who authorized torture.



As Olbermann explained in a diary at Daily Kos shortly before delivering his Special Comment, "The prosecution of torture might not have to be the first priority; it might not have to be a sweeping event consuming the nation, but we must have a catharsis. Most importantly, the great and tragic events of our history have proven that the failure to achieve such a catharsis, the failure to atone, has its own tragic, long-range consequences."



"We have tortured people, you and I," Olbermann said in beginning his Special Comment. "This is the people's democracy, we are the people, these are our elected officials. That they did not come to us and ask to act thusly in our names is unfortunate, indeed criminal, but it is also almost irrelevant. They work for us, and they have tortured people, and so we have tortured people."



Olbermann went on to cite George Bush's recent acknowledgment that he had approved the interrogation techniques used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as evidence that "Mr. Bush is guilty, he's guilty as sin."



President-elect Obama, however, has suggested that he feels ambivalent about the idea of holding Bush administration officials fully accountable. He recently stated, "I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. ... How do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing?"



As legal expert Jonathan Turley explained to Olbermann last week, Obama's remarks may have been concerned more with the treatment of CIA officers who were assured that what they were ordered to do was legal than with the administration officials who issued the orders. However, Olbermann took Obama's words as signaling his overall approach.



"As commendable as the intention here might seem," Olbermann noted, "this country has never succeeded in moving forward without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past. In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive -- and often to strengthen it. We compromised with slavery in the Declaration of Independence -- and fourscore and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers in a Civil War."



Olbermann went on to cite succeeding compromises that enabled problems to fester, right down to the compromises following Watergate that encouraged the junior members of the Ford administration to "[grow] up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney."



"Someday there will be another Republican president," Olbermann cautiouned Obama, "or even a Democrat just blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush -- or what you did not do -- and he will see precedent. Or, as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time."



"It is up to you, not just to discontinue this, but to prevent it," Olberman concluded. "Mr. President-elect, you have been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again."





A full transcript of Olbermann's Special Comment is available at Crooks and Liars.





This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Jan. 19, 2009.









Download video via RawReplay.com









