TO THE EDITOR:
With regard to the paid advertisement from Mr. James Waters in April 7’s Daily Tar Heel (“You are on the wrong side of history, and you should be ashamed to be among the ‘Confederacy of Dunces’ if you did not vote for Obama...”), I hope that Mr. Waters remembers that, during the previous administration, the United States tortured some of its prisoners of war.
When other leaders, nations, get up to this sort of thing, the U.S. insists, rightly, that they should be brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague to answer for war crimes.
Now we have done it. No one is going to be held accountable for this. Those who ordered or authorized it, those who did it, those who assisted them, those who facilitated the process, those who justified it — they’re going to get away scot free.
And this is primarily down to the White House. In the first two months of his administration, President Obama visited the CIA and said the nation had turned its back on the previous regime, that it was time to look forward and not back.
Defeat at the polls is a political consequence of failed policy, not a judicial decision, and is in no way commensurate with the magnitude of the offense that has been committed.
Henceforth, the U.S. can go on denouncing torture and torturers, but no one will be paying any attention now. Folks in the Third World may not have our fancy iPhones or our multimedia; they may not be on the net at all, but they recognize odious hypocrisy when they see it, and they will act accordingly. No, I did not support Obama in 2012, nor anyone else for that matter.
