BENTON HARBOR/ST. JOSEPH, Michigan – Private citizen George W. Bush
poked his head out from his quiet, exclusive Dallas neighborhood last
night to give his first major speech since leaving office.
Ironically, the place he picked is near one of the nation’s poorest,
most racially divided cities. It also happens to be in one of the
reddest, most conservative congressional districts.
Those of you following the George W.
Bush prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy's
"truth commission" is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and four
other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us.
We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a truth
commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor.
President Barack Obama has come
under some criticism for slowing his promised withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraq and for beefing up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but his
70-day-old administration at least has dumped one part of George W.
Bush's bellicose foreign policy: the phrase "global war on terror."
How did they ever get away with it?
Last week, the Justice Department released a batch of memos drafted
in 2001 and 2002 by lawyers in the Bush administration's Office of
Legal Counsel. Written mainly by John Yoo, then a deputy director
in the office, they laid out the purported legal justifications for
a theory of presidential power amounting to virtual
dictatorship.
It turns out that even the most paranoid among us were right to be
afraid of what George W. Bush's White House and Justice Department were
up to in the days and months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
This week the Justice Department declassified and released two memos
and seven so-called legal opinions that, taken together, informed
President Bush that, as a wartime chief executive, he had unfettered
dictatorial powers.
Last July and September,
I recounted in Salon how, in the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation
Inc. v. Bush, where I am one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, government
attorneys for the Bush administration had gone to extreme and even
bizarre lengths to prevent the federal courts from determining the
legality of President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, deserves
credit for pressing ahead with his modest proposal to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to review the assaults on the Constitution and general lawlessness of the Bush-Cheney administration.
As Leahy said at the opening of Wednesday's Judiciary Committee hearing
on "Getting To The Truth Through A Nonpartisan Commission Of Inquiry":
Earlier this decade when some of us
warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator
than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as
alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.
But it is now increasingly clear that President Bush and his top
advisers viewed the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to implement a
series of right-wing legal theories that secretly granted Bush
unlimited power to act lawlessly and outside the traditional parameters
of the U.S. Constitution.
If history gets this recent era right, future textbooks will have
to show that the US narrowly averted a carefully planned but thorough
and unmistakable conspiracy to subvert the rule of law and the process
of democracy from 2001-2008. For three years, since writing End of America,
I have been arguing that the Bush team sought irretrievably to subvert
our liberty.
