Preserve, protect, and defend

Much has been written about the crimes of the Bush administration, and the emerging Washington consensus, predictably, is to let sleeping criminals lie, and move on. Given how many people who comprise that consensus are complicitly involved in some of the aforementioned crimes, it is little surprise they want the rest of us to forgive, forget, go forward.

Paul Krugman reminds us why we cannot allow that to happen.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

Talk About Torture

The notion that there will be so much love and reconciliation in Washington (as evidenced by the Lieberman vote recently, and other nauseating trends) that nothing will be done to address the criminal activities of the Bush administration makes me ill.

Glenn Greenwald cuts through the bullshit:

All of this underscores a crucial fact: a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

Hence: "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals. "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture." And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says: "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

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All of that is what has created the warped Beltway consensus that Bush officials who broke the law, committed war crimes and other felonies, should be absolutely immunized from the consequences of their crimes. That's because when government officials commit "crimes," they're not actually crimes -- they're mere "policy disputes among people in good faith." Only "incendiary" liberals believe that government officials who break the law should be subject to accusations as shrill and extreme as: "they committed crimes."

A further interesting point is this one, made by Jonathan Turley on the Rachel Maddow show. Turley points out that the Bush administrations murmurs that pardons are unnecessary because the Justice Department torture memos sufficiently cover anyone who then participated in such actions from legal liability in fact calls the Democrats bluff on this issue:

TURLEY: What the administration is doing is they know that the people that want him to pardon our torture program is primarily the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Democratic leadership would love to have a pardon so they could go to their supporters and say, “Look, there’s really nothing we could do.”
Well, the Bush administration is calling their bluff. They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments.

I think this is about accurate. Those in power are predisposed to aid one another when it comes to questions of legality and liability. In this case, it is pathetic that the alleged beacon of democracy is less inclined then a third world country recently out from under the boot of brutal dictatorship to prosecute its own leaders for actions that are clearly, without question, war crimes.