The United States Supreme Court illegitimately installed George W. Bush as president of the United States after the 2000 elections. Boy George was going to while away his time in office, rewarding friends in politics and the oil and defense industries with rich contracts.
That was why Dick Cheney held those meetings with energy interests behind closed doors. It was as evil a cabal as you could get. They were corrupt and lazy, to boot.
Then, history intervened.
Whatever you believed about the origins and the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the events propelled our nation on a path that altered the course of our history. Every step along the way, when our nation’s leaders had opportunities to chose paths that would strengthen or imperil our nation, they chose wrong.
They chose torture, rather than follow the rule of law. They belittled and denigrated international laws and institutions, rather than harness the goodwill of the community of nations.
The new administration, a legitimately elected president, Barack Obama, bearing a mandate from the people of this country, has begun trying to repair the damage wrought by the last administration. They won’t always make the right decisions. Their steps might be, at times, unsure. But they have one thing George W. Bush never had. Legitimacy.
UPDATE: A special prosecutor should decide the fates of John Yoo, Jay C. Bybee and other memo writers. They should suffer the consequences for violations of international laws that their memos aided and abetted.
All lower level soldiers punished for following orders should have their punishment reduced (because we now know they did not torture on a whim but were, in fact, following orders).
Gen. Geoffrey Miller should be tried for War Crimes.
A Truth & Reconciliation Commission (senior members of the judiciary and the U.S. Congress; governed by strictures of Congressional testimony) should get sworn testimonies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, and Colin Powell. Their testimonies will be immunized if they tell the truth. Liars should be prosecuted for the wholesale violations of international laws (conventions against torture and the Geneva conventions) that occurred.
All will be consigned to history’s judgment.
Zina Saunders‘ illustration for “Guantanamo at Home” in The Nation magazine in which Jeanne Theoharis, with the proposed closing of Guantanamo, takes a hard look at the harsh treatment of terror suspects in prisons on American soil.
Read the article here.
In two columns last week and this week, Village Voice columnist and legendary civil liberties activist Nat Hentoff argues vigorously for bringing American officials responsible for human rights abuses during The Bush Years to be brought up on War Crimes charges. Last week he said:
With regard to serial war crimes, “accountability” would mean putting on trial George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and his longtime associate, David Addington, and a coven of lawyers from the Justice and Defense departments.
He continued:
If you remember, the Constitution begins: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It’s our government. And neither Dick Cheney nor George W. Bush was among our Founders.
While Obama emphasizes that we must look forward and not backward, there is a way to clean out the cesspools of the last eight years.
Next week: the first steps on how to structure realistic, open forums of accountability—even if President Barack Obama chooses not to join us.
In this week’s installment, he continues the argument:
Among President Obama’s advisers (and, seemingly, in the man himself), there is a division as to what, if anything, should be done to the chief rapists of the Constitution since 9/11. On one hand, with so much for the new president to do, he’ll need public support, so why distract the citizenry with old news? Also, for many of us, there’s much more concern about keeping our jobs (or scrambling to find new ones) than finding out who ordered waterboarding or gave the CIA blanket permission to hide away suspects in secret “black-site” prisons.
The answer to this quandary—and I think Barack Obama is capable of understanding this—is provided by Scott Horton, former president of the International League for Human Rights, and a Tom Paine of our time, in a story in Harper’s December issue, called “Justice After Bush”: “If the people wish to retain sovereignty, they must also reclaim responsibility for the actions taken in their name. As of yet, they have not. . . . Pursuing the Bush administration for crimes long known to the public may amount to a kind of hypocrisy, but it is a necessary hypocrisy. The alternative, simply doing nothing, not only ratifies torture (among other crimes), it ratifies the failure of the people to control the actions of their government” (emphasis added).
We need to keep vigilant what the new administration does and take action if our government won’t.
John McCain (incidentally, senator, Jack Balkin at Balkination, has a question) is piling up primary victories. But radio entertainer and reigning Republican party demagogue extraordinaire Rush Limbaugh says that don’t matter.
And Dr. James Dobson (doctor of what? who’s he ever cured of anything?) of “Focus on Family” also says voters don’t matter. He’ll decide who should be the Republican nominee.
You see, McCain to them is a liberal. Why? Because, among other things, he authored a campaign finance reform bill and is pushing immigration reform.
Sunday, September 7, 1997
by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer
Lawyers for alleged police torture victim Abner Louima yesterday criticized city officials for allowing the central suspect in the 70th Precinct scandal to return to police duty.
Officer Justin Volpe, accused of sodomizing Louima with a stick, will return to modified duty this week. That means he has been stripped of his gun and badge, and will work at a desk job.
Under civil service law, cops cannot be suspended without pay for more than 30 days.
“It is shocking, it is unfair, it is morally unacceptable that while Abner Louima continues to languish in his hospital bed, the man who stands indicted for putting him there can be allowed to return to business as usual,” said Vladimir Rodney, a spokesman for the Haitian-American Alliance.
The Rev. Al Sharpton and Carl Thomas, Louima’s lead attorney, said that Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir should have taken steps to prevent the return of the officers, and that they should not hide behind provisions of the police union contract.