Attorney General Holder—said there were at least a hundred cases involving deaths of detainees or severe and brutal beatings that he had read the files about and was very disturbed by and could not in good conscience allow to go completely shielded. And so, he said that he would do a—he would ask for a preliminary review to see if criminal charges were warranted in those cases. Last year in June, they said they were closing the books on all of those cases except for two, the two that you just described, that were particularly notorious and brutal, where detainees were killed: in the case of the Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib, a military autopsy found that he had been killed, that he died by virtue of homicide and blunt trauma to his head and chest; and in Afghanistan, where somebody basically froze to death after being beaten and chained to a floor without clothes.

And yet, now the Obama administration has announced that even those two cases—clearly murder—will be shielded, as well. So it’s now a complete whitewashing for any and all accountability.....

In the scheme of the policies that are actually harming the people of the United States and shaping the kind of country that we have, overwhelmingly those issues are ones that find full-scale, complete agreement between the parties. So if you’d look at the policies that take the most money, that have the most effect on the citizenry, things like the drug war, the primacy of the national security and the surveillance state to operate with total secrecy, the war on whistleblowers, the posture of endless war that we’re in, the supremacy of Wall Street and our nation’s oligarchs in shaping policy through their lobbyists and funding, you see virtually no difference between the parties.

And for that reason, those issues aren’t even being mentioned. They’re not even being discussed as part of this election, because there’s nothing for the candidates to say about the other critically because they essentially have the same position. So, the idea, for example, that what we’re discussing now in terms of closing the books on these torture cases could ever be part of the campaign is inconceivable if the candidates being heard are only Romney and Obama, because they have exactly the same views on these issues. The only hope for all of these critical issues to be addressed is to allow some of these third-party candidates, such as Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, to be included in the debates, to give them media coverage, so at the very least the Republicans and Democrats are challenged on the positions that they hold in common....