Monday, February 16, 2009

Every Breath You Take

It is excellent to have an increasing number of voices calling for investigation of the scurrilous actions of the bush cabal and prosecution if the results suggest it is appropriate. Of course a dutiful (ok, possibly partisan, but fair, nonetheless) student of this stuff "knows" it involved lawbreaking - they have more or less admitted to it, apparently putting a lot of stock in Yoo and Bybee "opinions" as cover.

I'm going with Greenwald for lead-off here. His apt title is "Do We Still Pretend That We Abide By Treaties":

On Friday in Salon, Joe Conason argued that there should be no criminal investigations of any kind for Bush officials "who authorized torture or other outrages in the 'war on terror'." Instead, Conason suggests that there be a presidential commission created that is "purely investigative," and Obama should "promis[e] a complete pardon to anyone who testifies fully, honestly and publicly." So, under this proposal, not only would we adopt an absolute bar against prosecuting war criminals and other Bush administration felons, we would go in the other direction and pardon them from any criminal liability of any kind.

I've already written volumes about why immunizing political officials from the consequences for their lawbreaking is both destructive and unjust -- principally: the obvious incentives which such immunity creates (and, for decades, has been creating) for high-level executive branch officials to break the law and, even worse, the grotesque two-tiered system of justice we've implemented in this country (i.e., the creation of an incomparably harsh prison state for ordinary Americans who commit even low-level offenses as contrasted with what Conason calls, approvingly, "the institutional reluctance in Washington to punish political offenders"). Rather than repeat those arguments, I want to focus on an issue that pro-immunity advocates such as Conason simply never address.

The U.S. really has bound itself to a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994. When there are credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture, that Convention really does compel all signatories -- in language as clear as can be devised -- to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Art. 7(1)). And the treaty explicitly bars the standard excuses that America's political class is currently offering for refusing to investigate and prosecute: "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" and "an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture" (Art. 2 (2-3)). By definition, then, the far less compelling excuses cited by Conason (a criminal probe would undermine bipartisanship and distract us from more important matters) are plainly barred as grounds for evading the Convention's obligations.

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Glenn has more there, well-reasoned and wholly credible as always and nuanced as you would expect. You vigorous, curious, need-to-know activist LTTE sorts who are such a critical resource in the campaign to restore our country and the principles of the founders will of course check that out.

The inimitable Jane at Firedoglake also weighs in:

This morning I stopped by Digby's place and found her post on the disturbing account of torture at Guantanamo that Scott Horton has been covering in Harpers:


The medical personnel involvement is sick and after all the stuff about force feeding and using prisoners' psychological profiles for interrogation purposes, I guess I'm not as surprised as Horton is. But the fact that the white house consciously and knowingly used anal rape to control, interrogate and punish prisoners and went to some length to protect those who were doing it from scrutiny, still has the power to stun me.

Are we really just going to let this stuff go? Really?

No, we can't, and I can't imagine anyone on either the left or the right who believes that America stands for something would think we should. And yet that is explicitly what Joe Conason is arguing for this morning when he says "Pardon the Bush Miscreants." He casts the quest for accountability in purely partisan terms when he speaks about Pat Leahy's pursuit of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, saying that "he is certain to encounter ferocious resistance from most Republicans (and they will surely be joined by a faction of conservative Democrats, such as Connecticut's independent senator, Joseph Lieberman)":


Considering the institutional reluctance in Washington to punish political offenders (especially when they happen to be Republicans), the president's bipartisan approach to governing, and the very real sense that America faces more urgent issues in the economic emergency, there would seem to be little hance of real action.

These are not "political offenses," these are crimes. And despite the propensity of those who committed them to wrap themselves in the flag and claim they did it for America, there is no way to justify anal rape as an expression of anything other than extreme sadism.

Moreover, we've been down the "more urgent issues to attend to" road before, with a stunning lack of success. We were told in 2006 that we had to chuck the part of the Constitution that said we had the obligation to impeach a President who acted with reckless disregard for the law because we had more important things to deal with, like getting out of Iraq. I actually believed that one at the time, but it didn't take long to realize that I was wrong, and nobody had any intention of mounting a serious attempt to extricate ourselves from Iraq. The carnage continued to be unpopular and it made a heck of a campaign issue in 2008, which is all our political leaders seemed concerned about.

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Again, you need a little more cake to dilute that frosting I provided. Do check out the link.


Of course the "other shoe" to subject quote, directed at any government officals who might have or might consider taking the law into their own hands, is


I'll Be Watching You