Lawers Guns and Money

Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles, which we put in place during the military tribunals at Nuremberg, which *we* insisted in 1946 carry the force of law, states:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

So what is this crap Obama and Holder are saying that if somebody acted on orders and didn't exceed the guidelines given them in torturing terrorist detainees that they won't be prosecuted. At Nuremberg we didn't settle for that. "I was only following orders" became THE symbolic phrase for Nazi culpability. In fact, we even convicted the lawyers who wrote the legal justification for Nazi war crimes, as well as anybody whom we could prove ordered those war crimes or carried out those orders, whether or not they had been given "legal justification." This was US, by the way, not the United Nations, not the allies, but US. We supplied the judges, the staff, and the prosecutors. We held the tribunals in our zone of control, stating that we had the authority to do so by virtue of the fact that we were the de facto government there, and we did it without any help from the British, French, or Russians (or, of course, the Germans). These were OUR rules, OUR principles, OUR laws.

But not President Obama's laws, and not AG Holder's laws.

The Nurmemberg principles were later adopted by the UN and ratified as an element of international law. I know that we ignore IL all the time, but these were OUR OWN RULES. Shouldn't we be upholding them now? What meaning do our laws have if the president can chose to ignore them whenever it is politically or militarily inconvenient to enforce them? We asked the same question about Bush and were told that the presidents authority in war time is absolute. Mr. Obama promised change. I don't see it.