Well, better late than never, I always say. The New York Times editorial board is now on the record calling for a full investigation of many Bush administration and CIA officials for the crime of committing torture.
This is far better than the Richard Cohen’s “Safeway” defense.
Toward the end of 12 years of Republican rule, mainstream journalists also realized their careers were far better served by staying on the good side of the Reagan-Bush crowd.
So, when President George H.W. Bush sabotaged Walsh’s probe by issuing six Iran-Contra pardons on Christmas Eve 1992, prominent journalists praised Bush’s actions. They brushed aside Walsh’s complaint that the move was the final act in a long-running cover-up that protected a secret history of criminal behavior and Bush’s personal role.
“Liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many of his colleagues when he defended Bush’s fatal blow against the Iran-Contra investigation. Cohen especially liked Bush’s pardon of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who had been indicted for obstruction of justice but was popular around Washington.
In a Dec. 30, 1992, column, Cohen said his view was colored by how impressed he was when he would see Weinberger in the Georgetown Safeway store, pushing his own shopping cart.
“Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense – which is the way much of official Washington saw him,” Cohen wrote. “Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me.”
For fighting too hard for the truth, Walsh drew derision as a kind of Captain Ahab obsessively pursuing the White Whale. Writer Marjorie Williams delivered this damning judgment against Walsh in a Washington Post magazine article, which read:
“In the utilitarian political universe of Washington, consistency like Walsh’s is distinctly suspect. It began to seem … rigid of him to care so much. So un-Washington. Hence the gathering critique of his efforts as vindictive, extreme. Ideological. … But the truth is that when Walsh finally goes home, he will leave a perceived loser.”
By the time the Reagan-Bush era ended in January 1993, the era of the “skeptical journalist” was dead, too, at least on issues of national security.
God, those pardons happened 22 years ago.
Where has the time gone?
As I said, better late than never.
Here’s the Establishment NYT‘s Editorial Board:
The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.
But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
We told you the water was warm.
If there were any justice in the world, Bush and Cheney would stand in the Hague and answer for their crimes against humanity, along with most of the inner circle of their administration.
but there isn’t
Along with all their supporters and enablers. Tony Blair and all those in Congress that voted for a war that they knew or should have known was based on lies. That would be one way to clean out all the old neoliberalcon dinosaurs in Congress.
What about Rice and Rumsfeld? I am positive they were in the war room when the decision to torture was made.
We would do well to recall that it wasn’t until Germany’s ass was thoroughly kicked before those responsible found themselves in the dock. If it doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen until our asses are thoroughly kicked, perhaps even nuked. These creatures have played the long game, and if we don’t stop it now the world our grand-children grow up in will be far more ugly than even the most alarmist of us can anticipate.
Distopic doesn’t begin to discribe it.
The one and only.
Wow, so what you r saying is that the gonad market has gone soft since the 50s? Well let’s hope Elizabeth Warren can be the new champion for this long lost sector! I am unabashedly rooting for the invisible hand – to do the right thing – ouch!
Yes, the press is as guilty as the Cheney Administration.
For those of us of a certain vintage, all through 1973 and well into 1974, Watergate was a political football: “Yes, it’s a high crime” on one side, “Political witch hunt” on the other. The investigation, the witnesses, the testimony all dragged on and on. Ordinary citizens seemed to be more upset that their stories were being pre-empted than they were by the unfolding tale of corruption at the highest levels of government.
But the Committee investigating the break-in and its attendant activities plodded on, painstakingly building a case brick by brick until the June 23, 1972 “smoking gun” tape came clattering out of the closet. By that time, it was undeniable that Nixon was up to his eyebrows in the crime and the cover-up, and when the House began drawing up articles of impeachment, Nixon made his long-planned escape while Ford locked the door behind him.
The same thing is going to have to happen to bring to justice* the torturers who have damaged our country so badly. There are a lot of oxen ripe for the goring, but it’s absolutely essential if we’re to retrieve our lost honor.
I predict that if a real investigation is begun and the evidence is amassed, Dick Cheney would “forget” to take his medications and slip away into the sweet oblivion of death rather than face a court of law.
*Not the sort of “justice” we inflict on alleged terrorists, but the real thing – due process, right to representation and defense, examination of witnesses and evidence, the whole works.
In real time, the Watergate investigation did seem to go on and on. Easy to overlook that except for WaPo, an investigation didn’t even begin until the sentencing phase of the Watergate burglars in March of 1973. Congressional hearings opened that May. Yet, it wasn’t until August 1974 that Nixon resigned.
In retrospect, that was lightening fast compared to the investigation of Iran-Contra that was equally criminal. That set the new standard, drag out investigations long enough and the public won’t care if the culprits do the time for the crimes. The GOP then took “impeachment” off the table by their farcical impeachment of Clinton for a personal dalliance.
Have to face it that the “rule of law” for elites has been smashed into a thousand pieces. And, “we the people” are responsible for that because we couldn’t bother with upholding the minimal standards that Watergate revealed must apply to every administration.
This is the money quote in the NYT editorial:
Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.
Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality
.
I am less forgiving than Booman about the “any lingering doubt” figleaf the NYT grasps to justify calling for a criminal investigation with a special prosecutor now. That illegal torture was authorized by the Bush Administration under color of law was screamingly obvious [pun intended] the day Obama took office. His cowardly deflection of the problem, based I think on the fantasy that the congressional Republicans would appreciate the gesture and “work with him,” has left this country with a moral dilemma that may never be solved in the lifetimes of the criminal conspirators so admirably ticked off in the NYT editorial: “former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos.” These men are criminals who should be prosecuted while they live, not just left to the “judgment of history.”
Come January, Obama should feel “liberated” by having lost Congress and appoint a special prosecutor. It would create the right political climate for the 2016 election by reminding the American sheeple what Bush/Cheney did in our name. But, Obama’s cowardice on this issue gives me scant hope he will see the light. And that just adds another element of tragedy to this whole, sordid and utterly depressing failure of the rule of law in our Nation.