Rahm Emmanuel has apparently confirmed what we had hoped never to hear. The Obama administration has no intention of prosecuting anyone--ANYONE--for war crimes.
This is an outrage. Not simply because it denies justice to victims and accountability to perpetrators, but because it gives a green light to future torturers. Those fresh atrocities will be on our hands.
In 2006, the Democratic rallying cry after years of extraordinary rendition, Black Sites, the destruction of habeas corpus, illegal spying and horrific detainee abuse was "subpoena power!" Instead, the legislative Democrats quietly helped pass FISA, and allowed the entire White House staff to thumb their noses at congressional subpoenas. That's okay, we told ourselves. Real change will come when we can retake the White House.
Now we discover that the new day with Obama is nothing of the sort. It's simply the eye of the tempest, a temporary calm in a storm of torture that will hit us exponentially harder the next time the authoritarian right wing appoints, programs, manipulates or coups its way into the White House.
And make no mistake. The next band of executive torturers and kidnappers will not slink forth from the shadows, or work from the "dark side." They will march full force in daylight, and with a brutality we have not yet seen. Because they now know without a doubt that they have absolutely nothing to fear from us. There will be no repercussions for them, no music to face. No risk.
Instead, it's us who now have everything to fear from the return of the neocons.
Corrupt, authoritarian regimes aren't flukes. Their potential is always circulating around and through our fragile democracy. They organize, accrue power unto themselves, form shadow governments, and constantly press upon the fabric of free societies. If these democratic structures have no integrity, no force of law, then the return of a police state is a foregone conclusion.
In the documentary CoverUp: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair, Dr. Peter Dale Scott discusses the folly of allowing the Iran Contra figures to escape meaningful prosecution. "As we learned after Watergate, these characters don't open cafes and libraries when they move out of power. They bide their time, they work from the margins and through proxies, they regroup to come back stronger, with added cunning gleaned from their past mistakes." (That's a paraphrase.)
Keith Olbermann put it eloquently on 4/16:
Every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We "moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War...
We "moved forward" with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War. Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We "moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism. And we "moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We "moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
[We must] prosecut[e] all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
Yesterday, I suggested that Obama's release of the Torture Memos was a signal to us that he does not want the atrocities of the Bush era to vanish down the memory hole. But it is not enough to say "Never Again." It's not enough, even, to pass new laws that in essence say: "Ok, now we're super-duper serious. Torture is totally and completely against the law. If you torture next time, so help us God.."
Because torture was clearly, flatly, indisputably illegal to begin with. It's spelled out in the Constitution. It's spelled out in the Geneva Conventions. Smarmy, flunky White House lawyers will always finagle re-inventions of terms and conditions to excuse themselves and everyone down the chain of command, if they learn from us now that such bullshit works.
We are setting precedent today for the War Crimes of tomorrow. We are boldly inviting the neocons to give us their best Pinochet imitation, the next time they hold the executive scepter. This is already a certainty, unless we make it politically untenable for the DOJ and Congress to forgo prosecution of these architects of torture.
I believe Obama is both a smart and a good man. It's possible that Obama's hands are logistically tied in ways we don't see. But our hands, at least for the moment, are not tied. And neither are the hands of Congress. We must insist on prosecution. Deafeningly. Not just for justice now. For the future of our free society. If we love our country, and we love liberty, if we love our kids, we have no other choice.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. --Thomas Jefferson