I just got through watching press secretary Robert Gibbs do his daily White House press briefing. Ninety-percent of the briefing consisted of various beat reporters acting like panicked schoolchildren at the idea that the president believes no one is above the law and that Attorney General Eric Holder will independently determine if laws were broken in the interrogation programs of the Bush administration.
“Buh…buh…buh…didn’t Rahm Emanual say they shouldn’t be prosecuted?”
“Buh…buh…buh…doesn’t that logically extend beyond the OLC lawyers all the way up to the former president?”
“Buh…buh…buh…aren’t you just caving in to the left-wing and MoveOn.org?
To all of which Robert Gibbs reacted with good-natured befuddlement.
“It should come as some big surprise that the President of the United States believes in the rule of law?”
“It’s up to the Justice Department, not the president, to determine if laws were broken.”
“If there’s any confusion, just listen to what the president said.”
And so on. The press corps feels like they’ve been given a classic bait and switch. Obama announces that no one will be prosecuted for torturing people as long as they abided by legal guidance and goes to the CIA to reassure them. Rahm Emanuel says that the policy-creators should not be prosecuted. And then…BLAM…it turns out that Eric Holder is going to apply a simple test of seeing if the law was broken to the policy makers.
Well, HOLY SHIT, we all know the law was broken. The Supreme Court ruled that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applied to these prisoners and that means, plain and simply, that Bush and Cheney authorized war crimes. It’s definitional. It’s not even ambiguous. They said it was impossible to commit war crimes against terror suspects and the Supreme Court said ‘bullshit!” End of story.
All that’s left is to look the other way and pretend it didn’t happen, right? That’s sure as hell what the press corps expected.
This is supposed to be a big flip-flop, but perhaps it was planned this way all along. All I know is that if Eric Holder applies a simple standard of a plain reading of the law, the war crimes go all the way to the top. And Obama just gave him permission to conclude whatever he wants using that standard.
Let’s see how much fight the right has left? How many allies does Dick Cheney still have? And let me assure you that, with allies like these, Cheney is in deep trouble because I could rip that piece of crap apart in a couple of days using only open source material.
