I find it frustrating that no one is ever held accountable for huge crimes but people get nailed to the wall for petty drug crimes and the like. I think anyone who ordered the torture of anyone for any reason should be prosecuted. Under certain circumstances, perhaps a pardon might be appropriate, but what isn’t acceptable is just refusing to hold people to account for their actions. If I kidnapped my neighbor and subjected him to rectal feeding in my basement, I should expect to spend the rest of my life in prison, and rightfully so. But there is really no hope for justice in this case. At best, we’ll see this:
The chances of a U.S. court re-opening civil or criminal charges against U.S. officials involved with the CIA program are slim. The agency and the Justice Department have conducted their own investigations into the CIA’s program and only low-level military officials and one CIA contractor has been prosecuted.
But European courts may be a different story. Some human-rights groups are now seeking to petition European courts to renew efforts to prosecute Bush administration officials under the principle of universal jurisdiction. That principle was established in 1998, when a Spanish court indicted Augosto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, for his role in the murder and torture of many of his political opposition. When Pinochet was traveling through the U.K. in 1998, he was arrested by order of the Spanish court. (U.K. officials released him back to Chile two years later.)
“After reviewing this report, we will give consideration to reopening petitions or filing new petitions in European courts under the principles of universal jurisdiction,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group that has represented Guantanamo detainees including Majid Khan and Abu Zubaydah, two detainees who went through the CIA’s black-site prisons.
It would at least be something if Bush administration officials were afraid to travel abroad lest they get treated like Augusto Pinochet.
Let it be so.
Saw on Maddow’s show last night that the ACLU thinks many should be explicitly pardoned by the Obama administration. Since the reality is that nobody will ever stand trial for anything, Obama should pardon by name many high-level Bush administration officials for any and all crimes relating to torture abuses committed from 2001 to 2008. At least the bastards will be named and known. Even to this day, whenever the Iran Contra scandal is brought up, you will see a picture of Caspar Weinberger just below the headline “Pardoned.” I like the idea. At least name the shitheels publicly.
Um. Why specifically limit it to “high-level Bush administration officials”? Why the 2008 cutoff date?
Where are Captain Medina and F. Lee Bailey when we need them?
I’ve never seen any curiosity about the world outside Texas by Bush. Cheney either.
Punishment is one thing. Doing it so it is a deterrent for future actors is what is most important.
If the President and the Attorney General don’t feel comfortable doing what is necessary even in a lame duck administration, it mean that the concern is not partisan political but personal safety. And effectively on September 11, 2001, there was a coup that cannot be rolled back.
That realization is not going to incline many voters to continue to vote, and that’s a problem.
Joan Walsh in Salon ties torture and police impunity as a crisis of legitimacy from the federal to the local level. We’ve never been in a position before where all of our governmental institutions have either been sabotaged or siezed by corruption. There was always a TR or wayward members of both parties who could muster ways to stop corruption from getting final chokehold on the society. That happy condition seems to be no longer true.
Until WWII and thereafter, this country never had as many permanent and large institutions that are also as vital to our well-being. At various times one of more of them did crumble in the past. Several of the 19th century Supreme Courts were dreadful and often weren’t so wise at various times in the 20th century. There were several banking/stock market crashes before the New Dealers put all the right pieces together.
Two institutional elements that allowed us to carry on after a collapse of one or more institutions. First there was no standing army. So, military graft and corruption were mostly limited to times of war which, unfortunately, Congress was too fond of declaring, but not as eagerly as Presidents have been since WWII. (The Pentagon was supposed to have been decommissioned at the end of WWII.) A sense of honor and ethics was also embedded in the US military culture. That was significantly eroded during the Vietnam War and decimated in the years after and replaced with god and a cult of warriors with big weapons.
Second, a high percentage of federal officeholders respected learning and took their responsibility to serve the public seriously. Not all. But many, regardless if they were born wealthy or poor. Those in the pockets of industrialists or wealthy landowners or sought public office to line their own pockets were generally a minority of officeholders. We praise Lincoln today, but overlook the Radical Republicans that pointed/pushed him in the right direction. Had he been able to live out his second term, much of what we still grapple might have been better corrected.
We also forget Lincoln’s career as a railroad lawyer.
The trend began in the Wilson administration and was institutionalized in the 1947 National Security Act.
What corroded the Congress was when more money was being contributed to candidates than to party structures. That process became worrying enough in the Reagan administration that we had the first slow-walking of campaign finance laws, which of course put in the loopholes that let the trend expand. So McCain-Feingold tried to rein them in again and must have done well enough because the good ole boys used the Supreme Court to blow the door open.
But right now we have an economic elite intent of feathering their own nests and stripmining the companies that they are purportedly running on behalf of the shareholders. We have a Supreme Court, the majority of which are patently in the tank for one party. We have capture of Congress by big money and an entire caucus effectively on a sit-down strike. And we have an administration that acts afraid of the economic powers and as if it has gun to its back in reining in the national security, law enforcement, and intelligence community agencies, which are running runaway programs of increasing violation of the Constitution. And a bunch of billionaires buying up state legislatures and moving toward municipal and county governments.
It is a more total collapse than I have ever witnessed.
Not everybody forgets that Lincoln was a lawyer for railroads. But given the national transportation infrastructure and lack of federal taxation at the time, those weren’t the worst deals this country ever made.
Of course it’s the worst collapse that any of us born after 1920 have ever witnessed. US institutions, including corporations, were fundamentally changed by the New Dealers. So much of that was set in concrete on bedrock that it wasn’t prone to collapse without quickly and then not without a great deal of chiseling away. And both parties have been chiseling since 1969 — not that the prior four administrations and Congresses during that time didn’t some chiseling as well, but they weren’t hitting the substructure.
Someone please make it so. That would put an end to Condi Rice ever representing this county again.
Well, I am going to pray every night that they do travel and that they get arrested and tried at The Hague every night for the rest of my life.
If they did get arrested I have no doubt the US would move mountains to free them whether Obama or Clinton or whoever is president. Leaving side how the GOP would explode, the citizenry is not really capable or facing the reality and react to make sure they don’t have to. A majority support torture after all.
It would at least be something if Bush administration officials were afraid to travel abroad lest they get treated like Augusto Pinochet.
Well, that’s one wish you have that’s already been granted. To my knowledge, none of the scumbags in question, Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, et al have set foot out of the USA since 2008. In fact, Bush cancelled trips to both Canada and Switzerland for this very reason.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing that POS David Addington booking any vacation trips to Spain any time soon. They are afraid to travel, with good reason. There is some consolation in the fact that they have condemned themselves to be USA-bound the rest of their lives.
There is no such things as universal jurisdiction, and ought not to be. Let it go.