ANTI-WAR DEMOCRATS WANT NEW DEFENSE SECRETARY

Jen Dimascio has an article on Politico today about anti-war Democrats urging Obama to dump Robert Gates as Defense Secretary. I agree.

Gates has been too gung-ho over beefing up the size of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. This is a dead-end position for the United States. The U.S. will never win in Afghanistan on the basis of military force. It might prevail in helping that poor country build up its infrastructure, build sewer lines, string electric power lines, but it will never defeat Afghani insurgents and the Taliban militarily. Consider that the Afghanis have defeated every foreign invading force going back to Alexander the Great.

I admit Gates is a DefSec far superior to Donald Rumsfeld and the other neo-con hawks in the Bush/Cheney administration. For example, Gates reputedly has been one of the officials who have argued against striking Iran.

But Gates is still a believer in military might and the War in Iraq. Writes Dimascio:

"Arms control advocates and anti-war activists are ratcheting up pressure on President-elect Barack Obama to dump Defense Secretary Robert Gates and replace him with a more strident anti-war voice. . . ."

"Gates exacerbated the opposition to his retention with a recent speech at the Carnegie Foundation in which he staked out a position that made it hard for arms control advocates to back the notion of keeping him around.

"Congress last year pulled funding from studies to create a Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which would reduce and replace aging nuclear warheads in the nation’s arsenal. During the speech, Gates said the cut was misguided."

THOSE WHO ORDERED TORTURE MUST BE HELD TO ACCOUNT

How did it come about with over 10,000 lawyers in the Department of Defense that the DOD authorized "harsh" interrogation techniques (read "torture") of those captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere?

The only explanation is that the decision to use waterboarding, sexual humiliation and stress positions came from the top - from Bush himself and from Cheney and from Rice and from Rumsfeld.

The argument that they did these things because they wanted to protect the nation will not stand up. To engage in techniques used in the Inquisition to root out heretics is to group oneself with all those vile and mean people throughout history who think that torture produces the "truth." Just like the churchmen in Spain who thought they were doing God's work by condemning suspects to the rack or inflicting the "water test."

Furthermore, most of the inmates at Guantanamo turn out to be sheepherders or subsistence farmers, yet these were subject to the cruelest of interrogations.

The people who did this must be held to legal account. The smell of torture will not pass quickly. The United States must not allow the malefactors to leave office unscathed and uncharged.