In “Decision Points,” being released by Crown Books Tuesday, Bush writes that he told Barack Obama Nov. 10, in their first meeting after the election, that he wouldn’t let the auto industry collapse.

Later that week, Bush told his advisers of the decision.

“I told Barack Obama that I wouldn’t let the automakers fail,” Bush writes. “I won’t dump this mess on him.”

Bush says that in the end, he decided to rescue the two automakers because of the potential impact on the U.S. economy.

Bush’s advisers were telling him that with the nation’s economy in such a fragile state, allowing the American auto industry to collapse and go into immediately bankruptcy would push the country into a great depression. The short-term financing Bush extended allowed the Obama administration to devise a policy for saving the auto industry from collapse and return them to profitability.

In some of his most candid comments since leaving the White House, former President George W. Bush said Wednesday he has no regrets about authorizing the controversial waterboarding technique to interrogate terrorist suspects and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again.

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the former president said during an appearance at the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, according to the Grand Rapids Press.

There is no question that waterboarding is torture; we have tried and put to death soldiers from other countries for waterboarding our own troops and even convicted and tried and imprisoned American soldiers for doing it as well. And there is no question that torture is illegal in the United States, under both statutory and treaty law.

The UN Convention on Torture, which was pushed through and signed by President Ronald Reagan, could not be more explicit in obligating the United States to prosecute anyone in this country that authorizes or engages in torture. It also could not be more clear that there are no possible circumstances that can be used to justify the use of torture. Article 2 of that convention says:

Article 2.

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

The definition of torture from Article 1 is similarly unambiguous:

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

President Bush just admitted to violating that convention.

In a statement released by Snyder’s campaign late Tuesday afternoon, Snyder said:

“I would caution my fellow Republicans and the Chairman of our party not to confuse appropriate criticism of the President’s policies with an inappropriate criticism of a company that is struggling to get on its feet. We want and need GM and all Michigan businesses to succeed, especially given our current economic conditions. I was pleased to see that GM is beginning to repay the American taxpayers earlier than expected. It is important to remember that the decision to provide GM with taxpayer funds was a decision made by both President Bush and President Obama.”

Snyder is referring to media reports that Steele, who was in Holland Tuesday speaking to the Ottawa County Republicans, attacked GM and Obama over the announcement that GM had lost $1.2 billion in the third quarter of this year.

“Today’s release of General Motors’ financial results is further proof that President Obama’s economic experiments are wrong for America,” Steele said yesterday in a statement.

“Sadly, GM has not only failed to turn a profit since the president poured $50 billion of the taxpayers’ dollars into GM’s bankruptcy restructuring, but it has actually lost $1.2 billion.”

Steele once said GM would become Amtrak under Obama’s financing plans. Ironically, GM when announcing it had had losses, also announced it believed it would repay the $50 billion loan from the U.S. government back by 2011, years ahead of schedule.

While Snyder cautioned Republicans to be careful in their criticisms, he also said he too had issue with the Obama administration’s stimulus program.

“I have my own concerns with how economic stimulus funds are spent and the current administration’s policies, particularly in light of the Recovery.gov report that credits jobs creation in areas of the country that don’t exist. But I would never applaud or capitalize on the shortcomings of an American company for a political benefit.”

Interestingly, Snyder has been silent on the bailout of AIG and others which was created by President George W. Bush, a Republican.

For two decades, the SEC has made more money in fees from the entities it regulates than it receives from Congress through the budget process — about $350 million more in this year alone. With the agency taking heat for its Bush-era enforcement lapses, most notably the failure to stop Bernie Madoff’s infamous fraud, lawmakers and advocates are debating the right amount to spend to ensure stronger financial cops on the beat.

Read more at The Washington Independent, Michigan Messenger’s sister site in the nation’s capital.

George W. Bush at an armed forces event before leaving office in January. (Photo via Flickr)

For his first domestic post-presidential talk, Bush spoke to and took questions from a highly sympathetic audience of about 2,500 people at an event sponsored by the Economic Development Club of Southwest Michigan, a group that has recently hosted former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top Bush political strategist Karl Rove as speakers, according to organizers.

Bush, en route to Toronto for an event with former President Bill Clinton, flew to Michigan on a jet furnished by Whirlpool Corp., which is headquartered here.

“At least you gave me a chance to get out of the house and come to southwest Michigan,” he told the mostly older, white audience from an area in and around Benton Harbor, one of the state’s poorest cities.

During his remarks, Bush did not mention Michigan’s feeble economy or the dominant news story scaring the state: a General Motors bankruptcy, a possibility that now seems all but certain to become reality very soon.

The former president reminisced about his time in the White House and seemed at ease and at times, waxed philosophical talking about his family, telling the audience: “Victory or defeat is nothing without love.”

Torture and tough decisions

Bush spoke without a teleprompter and took questions from the audience and avoided gaffes — for which he is famous — steering clear of any commentary about his successor’s Oval Office performance, which has come under intense fire from Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney.

But the former president spoke indirectly of his administration’s authorization of the use of torture against detainees captured during the War on Terror, avoiding the words “torture” and “abuse.”

“You have to make tough decisions,” Bush said. “They’ve captured a guy who murdered 3,000 citizens … that affected me … They come in and say he may have more information …and we had an anthrax attack … and they say he may have more information. What do you do?“

Bush was firm and defended his record as president: “I will tell you that the information gained saved lives.”

He acknowledged that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq but said that this was not the only rationale he gave for the 2003 invasion.

Fear of an economic freefall

During last fall’s economic unraveling, Bush said he was forced to “abandon principle,” fearing the nation’s economy could slide into something worse than the Great Depression under his watch.

“You are only really as good as the people you listen to,” Bush said, adding that then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told him that if he did not approve the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the nation’s economy would have quickly crumbled.

“I can’t prove to you that the measures we took averted failure,” he said. “The major culprit was a lack of responsible regulation.”

There need to be regulations, he said, particularly in the housing market.

Bush said he tried to take steps to reign in lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but was unable to push reform through Congress.

“Markets obviously sometimes need restraint and oversight,” said the former president.

Predicting his own legacy

Bush appealed to the audience to imagine the stresses he was under during and following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying that he projected calm because he felt it was his duty and he was concerned about the psychology of the nation. But he said that some did not understand the seriousness of the threats faced by the U.S.

He urged people to consider the long view — the United States and Japan were enemies in World War II, he said, but during his administration Japan’s prime minister was a friend and ally, even making a trip to Graceland together.

“Freedom is transformative,” he said. In the future, Bush predicted, people will think back his presidency and say: “Thank God they didn’t lose faith.”

Bush acknowledged that he was in the White House during trying times.

“There is such a thing as the fog of war,” the former president said, mentioned repeatedly that during a crisis it can be difficult to get good information to make the best decisions.

Several questioners thanked Bush for his service and he received passionate applause in response to a question about his legacy, where he said he wanted to be known as “the man who showed up in office and was unwilling to compromise his soul for the sake of popularity.”

Asked about what role religious extremism will play in the future, Bush took the opportunity to state that all mothers want their kids to grow up in peace and that stereotypes are politically convenient, admitting that he didn’t do a good job in changing the political use of stereotypes.

Bush’s visit is sponsored by the Economic Development Club of Southwest Michigan which was founded by Louis Upton, the co-founder of the locally-headquartered Whirlpool Corp. and grandfather of longtime local Republican U.S. Rep. Fred Upton.

The Whirlpool Corp. and Congressman Upton are backers of a controversial economic development project that involves privatizing part of Benton Harbor’s public lakefront.

This project — Harbor Shores, a luxury housing and commercial development centered around a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course atop part of the city’s Lake Michigan dunes — is being closely watched as a precedent that could endanger the legal status of all public land.

FOX News reports that members of the group WarCriminalsWatch.orgis planning to protest Bush’s visit as part of a national day of protest against U.S. torture.

The State Department’s spokesperson Robert Wood issued this statement:

The United States supports the UN Statement on “Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity,” and is pleased to join the other 66 UN member states who have declared their support of this Statement that condemns human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity wherever they occur.
The United States is an outspoken defender of human rights and critic of human rights abuses around the world. As such, we join with the other supporters of this Statement and we will continue to remind countries of the importance of respecting the human rights of all people in all appropriate international fora.

Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT political group based in Washington D.C. applauds the reversal.

In a press release, HRC President Joe Solomonese said:

“This is a welcome step forward as it signals to the world that, after years of a hostile administration, the United States recognizes the humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people at home and abroad. (snip) We applaud the Obama administration for joining the other 66 member nations that have officially recognized that basic human rights include the equality of LGBT people.”

The U.S. joins 60 other countries in signing the statement which calls for an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Most of the supporting nations are western industralized nations.

(photo: takomabibelot via Flickr.com)

On last week’s Declaring Independence, I interviewed Jeff Morley, the national editorial director for the Center for Independent Media, on the subject of what, if anything, President Obama should do in regard to the torture and abuse of detainees that was authorized and carried out by the Bush administration (listen to the full interview here).

Let’s start with these now-indisputable facts: The Bush administration engaged in torture and abuse of detainees, and the orders to do so came from the highest levels of the White House. We know this from innumerable memos that have been released from the intelligence community and the Pentagon, from the evidence contained in bipartisan reports, and from the blunt admission of Dick Cheney that he personally authorized waterboarding. This is no longer in any reasonable dispute.

What remains contentious at this point is what to do about it. There seem to be three schools of thought: A) Do nothing about it because the administration did nothing wrong and was acting in accordance with their sincere belief of what the law required; B) Convene a “truth commission” that would investigate and publish their findings so that the public will know what was done in their name, but without prosecutions; and C) Pursue criminal investigations of high-ranking Bush administration officials, including President Bush, Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Let me start by dismissing the first option entirely. It is simply absurd to believe that those who authorized waterboarding and other acts could have genuinely believed that doing so was not a violation of American law and of our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, both of which were ratified by the United States and are binding law under the Constitution.

This is not a gray area. The United States has tried and convicted soldiers from our own nation and from other nations for waterboarding as a war crime. After World War II, we organized the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, similar to the Nuremberg trials, and we tried and convicted many members of the Japanese military and high-ranking government officers for waterboarding American and allied troops.

More recently, American courts have ruled against Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and issued a judgment of nearly $800 million for what the court bluntly called “human rights violations” for waterboarding dissidents in that country. We have also tried and convicted our own soldiers for doing so during the Spanish-American war, and in 1983 a Texas sheriff was convicted of waterboarding inmates and sent to prison for 10 years. That waterboarding is torture and has always been considered so by the United States cannot be denied.

So what do we do now that our own leaders have admitted to authorizing this vile act? I think the answer is a combination of options B and C above. There needs to be a thorough investigation, one with full subpoena power and the power to grant immunity. But those grants of immunity should be used to get lower-ranking officials to testify about what they were told and by whom without fear of prosecution. This could be done through a bipartisan panel or through a special prosecutor; each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Regardless of what form the investigation takes, I believe that criminal charges should be pursued against any high-ranking official from the administration, including Bush and Cheney themselves, that can be shown to have authorized torture. Nothing less than America’s moral credibility is at stake in this situation.

During his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama said that the world would be more moved by “the power of our example than by examples of our power.” This is the perfect opportunity to put those words into action. We have long claimed to lead the world in demanding respect for universal human rights and for the rule of law, the notion that no man, no matter how powerful, may violate the law with impunity. If we do not see to it that those responsible for these crimes are brought to justice, that leadership will have been forfeited, perhaps forever.

My concern during my conversation on the radio with Jeff Morley was that doing this might be politically damaging to the Democrats, a concern I based on a belief that the American public, as a whole, is not particularly bothered by torture and would not want to see such prosecutions. But that very same day, Glenn Greenwald linked to a recent survey that pretty clearly suggests otherwise.

That survey, done by the Washington Post, found that American by a wide margin (58 percent to 40 percent) rejected the use of torture no matter the circumstance. A smaller majority (53 percent to 42 percent) want the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, more than 60 percent said the detainees held there should be tried in American courts and, most importantly, a small majority (50 percent to 47 percent) said that the Obama administration should pursue investigations of criminal wrongdoing for torture by the Bush administration.

Those results provide President Obama with the political cover he needs to do this. He still needs to be concerned about this issue distracting from the priority of handling the economy, of course, so the way to do this is through a special prosecutor rather than a bipartisan commission operating publicly. That will allow the investigation to proceed with all due process protections before a grand jury without having it turn into a sideshow with public hearings. The prosecutor can then decide whom to charge and with what and issue a full public report of his findings.

If we do not pursue this ourselves, other nations may well do it for us. The same prosecutor in Spain that brought charges against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is already investigating possible charges against Rumsfeld. We cannot afford the humiliation of allowing another nation to prosecute our own leaders when we should be doing it ourselves. President Obama has the opportunity to show the world that America’s support for human rights and the rule of law is more than mere rhetoric; failure to seize that opportunity will be the end of American moral credibility.

Despite arguing that “this President and Vice-President are among the most impeachable officials in our Nation’s history, and the more we learn the truer that becomes,” Conyers says that he has refused to pursue formal impeachment charges against them because they simply did not have the votes to win on the issue and failure to win the vote might set a precedent for avoiding such proceedings against future presidents:

The simple fact is, despite the efforts of impeachment advocates, the support and votes have not been there, and could not reasonably be expected to materialize. It takes 218 votes in the House and 67 votes in the Senate to impeach and remove a president from office. The resolution I offered three years ago to simply investigate whether an impeachment inquiry was warranted garnered only 38 cosponsors in the House, and the Democratic Leader of the Senate labeled it “ridiculous.” Impeachment resolutions against Vice President Cheney and President Bush offered by my friend and colleague Dennis Kucinich only garnered 27 and 11 House cosponsors, respectively…

While some of the difficulty in garnering support for impeachment results from fatigue over the recent and unjustified impeachment of President Clinton, and concern about routinizing what should be an extraordinary constitutional event – whatever the reason, an impeachment vote in the House was certain to fail. What, then, would be the precedent set by a House vote against the impeachment of President Bush or Vice President Cheney for deceiving our nation into war, allowing torture, engaging in warrantless domestic surveillance, and retaliating against those who attempted to reveal the truth about these acts? In my view, a failed impeachment – by an almost certainly lopsided vote – would have grossly lowered the bar for presidential behavior and caused great damage to our Constitution. More immediately, a failure to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney would have been trumpeted by their allies as a vindication for them and for their overreaching policies.

He may well be right about this, but at what point does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Is he not setting such a precedent in a de facto manner by presuming that he is avoiding that very result?