Two people are responsible for the torture and illegal seven-year detainment of Muhammad Saad Iqbal. Those two people are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. No one else needs to be held responsible. Bush and Cheney should answer for Mr. Iqbal’s treatment in a court of law. If they want to implicate their accomplices, that’s fine with me.
I cannot for the life of me imagine how any decent law-abiding American would makes excuses for Bush and Cheney in this matter, nor can I imagine why anyone lower than Bush and Cheney should take the fall for it. It’s plain common sense that Iqbal should be able to not only sue the U.S. Government but to press criminal charges against the officials that ordered his mistreatment. Let Bush and Cheney use whatever legal defenses are available to them. A president and vice-president certainly have a lot of legal leeway when it comes to making decisions on national security or in the official duties of their office. Let them make their case before a judge and jury. Let us see if, unlike the editorial board of the Washington Post, a judge and jury think it is legal to abduct a man on a foreign street, send him to Egypt to be tortured, send him to Afghanistan to be tortured, send him to Cuba to be tortured, and then keep him in prison for six additional years without charging him with any crime. Take away seven years of a man’s life, perforate his eardrums, ruin his spinal health, and set him free with a raging infection. Is this how we ‘send a message’ and ‘create deterrence’? Really? Is this legal?
Am I partisan?