President Obama, there are certain issues where splitting differences is not only an option but the wisest policy.  In the case of prosecuting CIA torture suspects this is not the case.

Historical analysis reveals that it was the United States under President Harry Truman that made a concerted effort to arm the world statutorily with the legal wherewithal to avoid the tragic Holocaust of World War Two and other horrible ramifications flowing therefrom.

Justice Robert Jackson, a former attorney general under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was selected to lead the U.S. legal team at the Nuremberg Trials, conducted in the same city where Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler held his largest rallies, which were preserved on film by his cinema diarist Leni Riefenstahl.

Assisting Jackson was Telford Taylor, soon to become one of the eminent legal minds of the past century and a longtime professor of law at Columbia University.  

President Obama's statement reported this afternoon by the New York Times that his administration would not be prosecuting CIA operatives responsible for "waterboarding" prisoners is a decision that is both legally and morally reprehensible.

Obama's statement used the term "good faith" respecting the individuals involved in the context of his decision not to prosecute.  To anyone who studied law the term good faith in this context is a contortion of legal terminology.  Its use in this fact situation would be rejected scornfully by any reasonable judge hearing this fractured lexicon.

The term good faith is generally applied in a civil context pertaining to performance of duty in a contractual setting.  In making a determination on services rendered in a contract the issue of good faith is applied in the context of the individual performing under the contract.

How does good faith apply in this context?  It never passed muster and almost assuredly was never used in the cases of Japanese officers who went to the gallows following World War Two for waterboarding.

Vincent Bugliosi has expressed recent exasperation over the issue of torture being mentioned currently with greater frequency over what the former L.A. County prosecutor believes to be the key issue over which George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should face trial -- murder.

Bugliosi's concern, through which he urges action from an American prosecutorial body to bring Bush and Cheney to trial, could be directly addressed through the international tribunal of the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

A reputable source of keeping up to date about the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the initial "shock and awe" attacks on Baghdad ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prior to occupying that city and the nation of Iraq is Just Foreign Policy.  This informative site provides international detailed analysis of significant events throughout the world.

Just Foreign Policy publishes numbers based on the highly respected international medical journal The Lancet.  According to The Lancet's detailed continuing study, supportive evidence of which is supplied by Just Foreign Policy, the current death figure is much higher than that reported by America's mainstream media on those rare occasions when any such information is presented.

Robert Jackson was one of the exemplary figures in American history, not to mention one of the nation's greatest patriots and one of its greatest jurists.  

Here was the last of the great bootstrap lawyers like Clarence Darrow who did not attend law school but picked up their educations working under skilled lawyers and judges and achieved lasting greatness.

When it came time to pick someone to lead the U.S. team in prosecuting Nazi Germany at the Nuremberg Trials the ideal choice was then Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Robert Jackson.  Those were the days when we had judges who were capable of independent thought and were not hacks pushed through the Washington process by the Federalist Society.

A basic principle enunciated by Jackson at the historic Nuremberg tribunal was that individuals were responsible for their acts and could not slide by with a variation of the Flip Wilson "The devil made me do it", which the late great comic meant as a joke and not something to be emulated.