Perhaps when I made the post What Would Finally Convince You That Bush (Obama) is A War Criminal?, it wasn’t clear why I might include Obama in the story.

The article by Congressman Dennis Kucinich,  My Experience Dealing With the Department of Defense Regarding Pfc. Bradley Manning Has Been Kafkaesque, gives some details of what sparked Obama’s inclusion in the original post and this post too.

We now hear that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Mendez, was denied a private meeting with Pfc. Manning in order to determine whether the conditions of Manning’s confinement amount to torture. The very existence of a U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture investigation speaks volumes about the conditions of his treatment.

The continued delays I have experienced amount to a subversion of Pfc. Manning’s legal rights as well as my own rights and obligations as a Member of Congress to conduct oversight. The whole world is now watching.

 

The op-ed piece False pretense for war in Libya? by Alan J. Kuperman says what I have been thinking since the beginning of this misbegotten adventure.

Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The “no mercy’’ warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.’’ Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight “to the bitter end.’’

If bloodbath was unlikely, how did this notion propel US intervention? The actual prospect in Benghazi was the final defeat of the rebels. To avoid this fate, they desperately concocted an impending genocide to rally international support for “humanitarian’’ intervention that would save their rebellion.

On March 15, Reuters quoted a Libyan opposition leader in Geneva claiming that if Khadafy attacked Benghazi, there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.’’ Four days later, US military aircraft started bombing. By the time Obama claimed that intervention had prevented a bloodbath, The New York Times already had reported that “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda’’ against Khadafy and were “making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.’’

It just drives me around the bend every time Obama repeats his dishonest justification for picking sides in a civil war.