Presidential Law-breaking: Bother We Must

Regrettably, we need to keep talking about torture, and namely why our country must not and cannot engage in torture. It is one of the more appalling aspects of the shameful Bush administration that so many seemingly thoughtful, even purportedly intelligent and supposedly-educated and even formerly-academic people were brought to endorse a Lord-of-the-Flies mindset. And, of course independent investigation of these actions by the administration are imperative. A pattern of law-breaking cannot be simply rugged over. Otherwise, why bother with laws?

Condoleezza Rice, exhibit A. (Of course the exhibits stretch to Z and beyond) How many assholes have you had your head up over the years? Talk about a stain on Stanford University.

We're talking about War Crimes here. It isn't fuzzy. It's not gray. I suspect most here have a solid grasp of the basics. I have The Band singing "why'd you do it." Indeed! Because all the higher-ups had indicated we needed to be more "effective," and had actually stated that those damned Geneva-rights were irrelevant.

Excerpts on the subject (more Band: We Can Talk About It Now!) include Greenwald at Salon:

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat has a post today -- "Thinking About Torture" -- which, he acknowledges quite remarkably, is the first time he has "written anything substantial, ever, about America's treatment of detainees in the War on Terror." He's abstained until today due to what he calls "a desire to avoid taking on a fraught and desperately importantly (sic) subject without feeling extremely confident about my own views on the subject."

I don't want to purport to summarize what he's written. It's a somewhat meandering and at times even internally inconsistent statement. Douthat himself characterizes it as "rambling" -- befitting someone who appears to think that his own lack of moral certainty and borderline-disorientation on this subject may somehow be a more intellectually respectable posture than those who simplistically express "straightforward outrage." In the midst of what is largely an intellectually honest attempt to describe the causes for his ambiguity, he actually does express some "straightforward outrage" of his own. About the widespread abuse, he writes: "it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral" and "should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on."

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If you've made it this far, I encourage to pursue that link. Actually, each post linked to here has meaty value beyond the brief excerpts you see here. Go wild! Click on some links! Meanwhile, I'm hearing "Long Black Veil," delightfully morbid country-kitsch, covered by many bands. The tune's protagonist takes the fall, in film-noirish fashion, for a crime he didn't commit rather than betray lover in an extra-marital affair. This administration would never take the fall for their actual mis-deeds, never mind do something actually heroic on behalf of someone else.

And, speaking of noir, we have in last week greatly enjoyed Double Indemnity (1944), featuring Fred MacMurray(!? - who would have thought), Barbara Stanwyck (beguiling indeed), and Edward G. Robinson (stunning), and Criss-Cross (1949), less well-known noir, but a classic in its' own way. The latter features Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo.

In the meantime, our "fourth branch" has come out doing his gun-slinger act again (demonstrating anew that this was not how the west was won!):

With his ABC interview Vice President Dick Cheney put a smoking gun on the table. He admitted that he, along with other top administration officials, personally approved the CIA's waterboarding of prisoners. That he said it unapologetically is merely his low-keyed way of declaring open war.

President Bush has been working on his legacy by circulating an upbeat, 2-page talking point memo with a description of his successes in office. Bush likes to white-wash and obfuscate. Cheney prefers a more aggressive approach.

Always blunt, two-fisted, and condescending, the question is, why admit that he approved waterboarding? And why now? Maybe it was egotism, pure and simple, his own version of a legacy campaign where he takes credit for a policy that he asserts made America safe. But to his detractors it is an admission of guilt that is prosecutable, as damning as Jack Kervorkian's 60 Minutes interview that landed him in prison.

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The New York Times is supposedly the pinko-liberal paper non-pareil. Of course, for reasons unclear, this prestigious supposedly liberal-biased newspaper paid J. Miller to do her own criminal work in support of the bush war-crimes, and to be honest, has been a full-on military-industrial-complex supporter, rarely if ever bucking the party-in-power. It might be an accident that they published this quiver of honesty:

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters [editor: i.e., the definition of "sycophant"] recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

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I am a regular reader of Mr. Greenwald, and consequently his followup on the post excerpted above also caught my attention (actually, that was how I came upon NYT editorial). I am also a devoted viewer of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC (who isn't?), whose show-hostessing assignment has to be one of the great media stories of the year:

For obvious reasons, the most blindly loyal Bush followers of the last eight years are desperate to claim that nobody cares any longer about what happened during the Bush administration, that everyone other than the most fringe, vindictive Bush-haters is eager to put it all behind us, forget about it all and, instead, look to the harmonious, sunny future. That's natural. Those who cheer on shameful and despicable acts always want to encourage everyone to forget what they did, and those who commit crimes naturally seek to dismiss demands for investigations and punishment as nothing more than distractions and vendettas pushed by those who want to wallow in the past.

Surprisingly, though, demands that Bush officials be held accountable for their war crimes are becoming more common in mainstream political discourse, not less so. The mountain of conclusive evidence that has recently emerged directly linking top Bush officials to the worst abuses -- combined with Dick Cheney's brazen, defiant acknowledgment of his role in these crimes (which perfectly tracked Bush's equally defiant 2005 acknowledgment of his illegal eavesdropping programs and his brazen vow to continue them) -- is forcing even the reluctant among us to embrace the necessity of such accountability.

It's almost as though everyone's nose is now being rubbed in all of this: now that the culpability of our highest government officials is no longer hidden, but is increasingly all out in the open, who can still defend the notion that they should remain immune from consequences for their patent lawbreaking? As Law Professor Jonathan Turley said several weeks ago on The Rachel Maddow Show: "It's the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime." And this week, Turley pointed out to Keith Olbermann that "ultimately it will depend on citizens, and whether they will remain silent in the face of a crime that has been committed in plain view. . . . It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing."

That recognition, finally, seems to be spreading -- beyond the handful of blogs, civil liberties organizations and activists who have long been trumpeting the need for this accountability. The New York Times Editorial Page today has a lengthy, scathing decree demanding prosecutions: "It would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened . . . . A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse." Today, Politico -- of all places -- is hosting a forum which asks: "Should the DOJ consider prosecuting Bush administration officials for detainee abuse as the NYT and others have urged?" Even Chris Matthews and Chris Hitchens yesterday entertained (albeit incoherently and apologetically) the proposition that top Bush officials committed war crimes.

Perhaps most notably of all -- and illustrating the importance of finally having someone like Rachel Maddow occupy such a prominent place in an establishment media venue -- Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, one of the Senate's most restrained, influential and Serious members, was prodded by Maddow last night into going about as far as someone like him could be expected to go, acknowledging the necessity of appointing a Prosecutor to investigate top Bush officials for the war crimes they committed and to determine if prosecutions are warranted:

To be sure, the political class still desperately wants to avoid meaningful investigations and prosecutions, in no small part because every key component of it -- including the leaders in both parties -- are implicated by so much of it. But as more undeniable evidence emerges of just how warped and criminal and heinous the conduct of our top political leaders has been -- and the more Dick Cheney and comrades resort to openly admitting what they did and proudly defending it, rather than obfuscating it behind euphemisms and secrecy claims -- the more difficult it will be to justify doing nothing meaningful. That is why, even as the desire to forget about the Bush era intensifies with the Promise of Obama ever-more-closely on the horizon, the recognition continues to grow of the need for real accountability.

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I would argue that it is incumbent on all of us who feel the Boston Tea Party and all that ensued was a positive milestone in the history of human governance, to demand law-enforcement, plain and simple. You know the jingle (no bells please): do the crime, do the time.