What Obama had to say about prosecuting criminal actions by members of a Presidential administration when he was running for President in 2008. From Will Bunch, Obama would ask his AG to "immediately review" potential of crimes in Bush White House Philadelphia Inquirer 04/14/2008.
What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. ... I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. ... Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law - and I think that's roughly how I would look at it.This is one of the things that made Obama an attractive candidate to progressives in 2008 and made a lot of people think he was a progressive himself.
And just like other times when he is campaigning or fundraising, he can be eloquent and on point on major issues of concern to ordinary people, including Big Picture issues like democracy and the rule of law, which he was addressing there. If there had been substantive investigations and prosecutions of the torture crimes and various other serious lawbreaking during the Cheney-Bush Administration, the Bush crime gang could not have gone about their criminal enterprise in the way they have.
But from all appearances, he didn't mean a word of it. He was committed to impunity for lawbreakers of the Cheney-Bush government.
Obama on Investigating Bush Crimes: "Need to Look Forward" TPM 01/11/2009:
- David Johnston and Charlie Savage, Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs New York Times 01/11/2009
- Robert Kuttner, Truth, Reconciliation, and Obama The American Prospect 01/26/2009
- Arianna Huffington, Memo to Obama: Moving Forward Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Also Look Back Huffpost 02/13/2009 (updated 05/25/2011)
- Larry Cox, Obama must prosecute Bush-era torture enablers Christian Science Monitor 06/15/2009
- David Cole, Obama’s Torture Problem NYB Daily 11/18/2010
- Glenn Greenwald, Obama's justice department grants final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers Guardian 08/31/2012
- Thomas Frank, Compromising Positions Harper's Sept 2012
- Robert Parry, How ‘Looking Forward’ Tripped Up Obama Consortium News 03/12/2014
- Timothy Lee, Instead of prosecuting torturers, Obama prosecuted the guy who revealed the program Vox 12/09/2014
- Dan Froomkin, Obama Wanted to ‘Look Forward, Not Backward’ on Torture, But He Failed to Look Either Way Medium 03/13/2018
- Lisa Hajjar, Why Gina Haspel, the Queen of Torture, Was Able to Rise to the Top of the CIA The Nation 03/16/2018
- Adam Serwer, Obama's Legacy of Impunity for Torture The Atlantic 03/14/2018
- Murtaza Hussain, Report to U.N. Calls Bullshit on Obama's 'Look Forward, Not Backwards' Approach to Torture The Intercept 10/30/2014
- Rebecca Gordon, Torture’s legacy of impunity Responsible Statecraft 02/22/2020
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