The United States this week correctly extradited John Demjanjuk to Germany for his alleged involvement in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Many war criminals over the years have said they were only "following orders" of Hitler and other Nazi leaders and should not be prosecuted.
Today, there's talk of not prosecuting the two Department of Justice attorneys who reportedly also claim they were "just following orders" from the Bush Administration. It doesn't matter that the Demjanjuk case involved mass murder and that the DOJ case involved waterboarding and possibly other forms of torture. In short, people need to be held accountable for their actions. The two DOJ attorneys had the freedom of choice so cherished in our democracy: to follow orders that were morally and legally wrong or refuse those orders and resign their positions.
Sadly, like their Attorney General and others in the former Administration, they chose to follow an angry mob instead of standing up for the rule of law and for international human rights.
(If I shoot someone to death and later claim that I was "following orders" of another person, does that mean I should not be prosecuted to the full extent of the law?)
America simply can't hold the moral high ground in the world on human rights if the authors of the "torture" memos go unpunished. And our voices of reason and compassion will no longer carry weight when we protest genocide and other obvious human rights violations around the world if we do not seek justice on the "torture" memos case.
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