- Theodore Sorensen, Nation’s Business (1963)

Barak Obama’s historic election victory, to some acquainted with the basics of the Christian faith, seemed the closest thing in real life to what had been foretold in the Holy Book. What’s more, his stance on a crucial issue during his first hundred days in the Oval Office supported, if only vaguely and after a fashion, their already fuzzy concept of the Messiah’s Second Coming: after all, wasn’t Obama also forgiveness personified, his mind-set an open and unequivocal disavowal of the all-too-human thirst for revenge?

Obama, as President, persisted with his plainly pacifist posture on his predecessor’s utterly criminal conduct even after being privy to horrific evidence of the Bush Administration’s flagrant violation of the American Constitution and the accepted norms of international law. It was a deliberate resort to abhorrent torture techniques on ‘enemies’, real or imagined, for seven of its eight-year tenure.

Some others, though themselves aware of the biblical prophesy, saw the 44th Prez’s continued and inexplicable waffling over the torture revelations as irrefutable proof of the political reality that is the central principle of America’s unique version of two-party Democracy - the unaccountability of the ruling elite.

Chris Floyd, writing in CounterPunch magazine, put it this way: "They [both Republicans and Democrats] want to retain the freedom of action to do ‘whatever it takes’ (that tough-guy phrase so beloved by ‘savvy’ insiders and their sycophants in the press) to maintain themselves and their cronies and their class in a position of dominance, wealth and privilege. The law is not for them; the law is for the suckers, the rabble, the losers - for you and me, in other words."

Describing as "bizarre and bogus" Obama’s claim that the urgent priorities of his policy agenda would not survive the luxury of wasting time and energy on a full inquiry into the ‘full-spectrum sadism’ that the Bush Administration routinely practiced on detainees in Guantanamo and dozens of other secrets US prisons worldwide, Floyd noted it would be no different had a previous US government claimed, "Oh, we can’t investigate these murders by Al Capone and his mob, because the mayor and city council have a lot on their plates right now, with this Depression and all. This is a time for looking forward, not retribution."

Ample, credible evidence of violations of federal law have been produced by a plethora of reputable sources - including the United States Senate and even the Pentagon, he said. It was the function of the Justice Department to investigate possible violations of federal law, and, if warranted, prosecute them. "Not a single government official now involved in dealing with the wars, with foreign policy, with the economy and the bailout, with health care, with employment and housing, with the environment, with the budget, with immigration - in short, with any single activity of governing whatsoever - would have their ‘time and energy’ taken up by a straightforward criminal investigation undertaken by the Justice Department."

Obama’s constant mouthing of the catechism of uplift and forgiveness is indeed a vital cover-up exercise necessary to deflect public focus away from the reality that the Democratic leaders of Congress were themselves thoroughly complicit in the Bush torture program, about which they were often briefed by the Administration itself. A genuine investigation of the Republican torture years would reveal the shocking extent of Democratic complicity. [Torture-lover Dick Cheney is enjoying himself thoroughly by doing the unthinkable, something he’s never done before – telling the truth!]

For after Obama decided to selectively release a few ‘torture memos’, Cheney charged into TV talk-shows demanding that the Obama administration release all the relevant memos because, he claimed via his patented snarls, they would prove the unbelievably high success-rate achieved through torture. [Dick’s recipe: if at first you don’t succeed, no, don’t just try and try again – up the ante and try again!]

Proof of upping the ante was provided by Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and President of the National Lawyers Guild. When she testified before Congress last year, Republican Trent Franks maintained that detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zabaydah had been ‘waterboarded’ for only one minute each. She knew that was a lie, but couldn’t prove it. Now Obama’s release of torture memos reveal Mohammed got the ‘treatment’ 183 times, and Zabaydah 83 times!

Asks Majorie: "Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? High Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to say there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers - to justify President Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003." [What’s more, FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in The New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.]

Author Arianna Huffington noted that the media seemed incapable of shaking its addiction to looking at every issue - even one that pivoted on questions of morality, not politics - through the archaic prism of Right vs. Left. "Since when is the need to adhere to the laws that govern us a left-wing ‘point of view’? Is Thou Shalt Not Kill a ‘point of view’? When the police arrest a rapist, is it because rape is inherently, inarguably wrong - or because that’s the cops’ ‘point of view’? Isn’t torture one of those things where there really is no legitimate ‘other’ side?"

It was vital that pressure be kept on the President, on Congress, and on the Justice Department, she said. "Not left-wing pressure. Not blogospheric pressure. Moral pressure. The pressure born of America’s values. Pressure to do the right thing. The moral thing. The legal thing. Pressure to keep the acts of the Bush White House from being implicitly condoned. And to keep the abuse of presidential power - and the use of torture - from becoming American precedent."

In his last weekly roundup Diary for April, Alexander Cockburn, co-Editor of CounterPunch magazine noted that Obama’s continuing aversion to any serious calling to account of the sponsors of torture had been evident in his almost daily shifts in position. "At the start of this last week he indicated that yes, those okaying the tortures might be legally answerable, that a ‘Truth Commission’ might be the way forward. By Thursday he was backing into that, saying that a commission would ‘open the door to a protracted, backward-looking discussion’ because of the intense partisan atmosphere built around the issue."

As a former constitutional law lecturer, Obama should have a firmer grasp of the point of executive accountability, wrote John Nicols in The Nation. "It is not merely to ‘lay blame’, as he suggests; it is to set boundaries on presidential behaviour and to clarify where wrongdoing will be challenged. Presidents, even those who profess honourable intentions, do not get to write their own rules."

Thirty-five years ago, California Congressman Don Edwards warned against ‘executive aggrandizement’ and the subversive notion "that any public official, the President or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent power to set the Constitution aside whenever he thinks the public interest or ‘national security’ warrants it. That is the essential postulate of tyranny."

Obama, by his all-forgiving attitude to the Bush-Cheney-Rove gang’s madness, thinks he’s helping perpetuate the two-party system.