Attorney General Eric Holder is reported to consider appointing a prosecutor to look into the “enhanced interrogation techniques” carried out during the President Bush’s administration. Though I think that the practices then were wrong and illegal, I do not think that opening a case against the previous administration would do much good.

Let me first state that I am very much against torture. It is illegal in the laws of United States and in international law. I define torture as the per the international agreement written in 1984 states. I think that water-boarding, liquid diets and sleep deprivation are forms of torture and should not have been carried out at all.

I completely do not buy the argument that these techniques should be used to prevent a ticking time bomb scenario. If there is such a scenario, you would not waste time to water-board the inmate. You would shoot that inmates’ big toes off, step on the inmate’s foot and demand answers. That can only happen if you know that the prisoner has intelligence of a bomb that is about to go off somewhere. That would be understandable and nobody can fault America for that.

But in the case of President Bush’s administration, they tortured to get intelligence.. That was very sloppy work. The very fact that this pointed the direction to Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction and mushroom clouds highlights the failure of these “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

However, it would be a huge mistake for the President Obama’s administration to go after the President Bush’s administration for this. This would open a can of worms that nobody can swallow. It can set a trend that the future administration would start investigating and purging people from the previous administration.

The conservatives could have done it in 2000. They could have gone after President Bill Clinton for lying about the Monica Lewinski affair or they could have gone after the pardon of Marc Rich. But they chose not to. They chose to stand back and let things in the past be in the past.

At best, the President or the Attorney General in this case should give Vice President Cheney and company a pardon should the verdict be guilty. It would be a sad day in America should one administration go about jailing the members from previous ones. That would mean the utter and total collapse of democracy in America, when a person put in by the people is deemed to have been a criminal during his or her term. That is the reason that President Nixon never went to jail, even though he virtually confessed to his crimes.

I think that the decision to carry on with enhanced interrogation techniques was a wrong decision for democracy in America, but I think that going after past leaders in such manner is worse. I really hope that Eric Holder backs off this investigation.

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