Last month, President-elect Barack Obama invited the public to submit questions to him via his transition website, change.gov, on a wide-range of topics. He promised to respond to some of the top queries up until his Jan. 20, inauguration. Since then, progressive activists have launched a major grassroots effort to get the public to ask Obama whether he intends to have the Department of Justice appoint a special prosecutor “to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.”

The effort is spearheaded by Bob Fertik of Democrats.com (a website not affiliated with the Democratic party) who said more than 22,000 people have submitted the question about the appointment of a special prosecutor to Obama’s transition website. Obama has not answered the query even though it's the top question submitted on his transition website.

Fertik is also gathering 100,000 signatures for a petition demanding that Attorney General designee Eric Holder appoint a special counsel to “investigate and prosecute” government officials who may have committed war crimes.



The debate as to whether Bush administration officials have broken international and federal torture laws has played out over the past month in a series of interviews with major media in which Vice President Dick Cheney admitted that he “signed off” on requests by CIA interrogators to waterboard three alleged high-level terrorist detainees. Cheney has staunchly defended the decision and maintained that it was not illegal.





Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights said it's simply unacceptable to allow Bush administration officials to go unpunished for their role in implementing torture policies.

“This is not Latin America; this is not South Africa. We are not trying to end a civil war, heal a wounded country and reconcile warring factions. We are a democracy trying to hold accountable officials that led our country down the road to torture. And in a democracy, it is the job of a prosecutor and not the pundits to determine whether crimes were committed," Ratner said in an article published in the magazine The Progressive.

Newspaper Warns Obama Officials

Ratner also said anything less than a full-scale criminal investigation – a substitute like a Truth Commission assigned simply to ascertain the facts – would be unacceptable.

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).