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TechnoratiEstablishment Washington Unifies Against Prosecutions
The Washington Post's David Ignatius today does what he does best: serve as the spokesman for the Washington establishment's most conventional wisdom in a way that really illuminates what it is:
To underscore the message, Obama indicated that he would oppose retrospective investigations of wrongdoing by the CIA and other agencies, arguing: "When it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed [to] looking at what we got wrong in the past." This is the kind of realism that will disappoint liberal score-settlers, but it makes clear that Obama has a grim appreciation of the dangers America still faces from al-Qaeda and its allies.
The word "liberal" has undergone a remarkable transformation over the last eight years. All that has been necessary to qualify is a belief in such radical, exotic and fringe-leftist concepts as search warrants before the Government can eavesdrop on our communications; due process before the state can encage people for life; adherence to decades-old Geneva Conventions restrictions which post-World-War-II America led the way in implementing; and the need for an actual, imminent threat from another country before we bomb, invade, occupy and destroy it.
Now added to the pantheon of "liberal" dogma is the shrill, ideological belief that high government officials must abide by our laws and should be treated like any other citizen when they break them. To believe that now makes you not just a "liberal," but worse: a "liberal score-settler." Apparently, one can attain the glorious status of being a moderate, a centrist, a high-minded independent only if one believes that high political officials (and our most powerful industries, such as the telecoms) should be able to break numerous laws (i.e.: commit felonies), openly admit that they've done so, and then be immunized from all consequences. That's how our ideological spectrum is now defined.
* * * * *
The more important development highlighted by Ignatius' name-calling is how important it has obviously become to establishment media and political figures to vigorously argue against investigations and prosecutions for Bush crimes and even to rehabilitate Bush officials as well-intentioned leaders who, at worst, went a little overboard in protecting us. Digby raised this question the other day: given that there is virtual unanimity among our political and media elites that we do not and should not hold American political officials accountable when they break the law and (especially) when they commit war crimes -- indeed, outside of civil liberties groups and a few political advocates here and there, it's virtually impossible to find anyone advocating that Bush officials should be criminally investigated -- why has it become such a priority for establishment figures to defend Bush officials and urge that there be no prosecutions? As Digby put it:
I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't more to all this than is obvious. I don't honestly think anyone wants to deal with the torture regime, and it doesn't seem to me that there is a huge public clamor for it. For most people, it's probably enough that the president has promised to end the policy. So, I'm a little bit surprised that it remains so prominent on the radar screen. Something doesn't scan.
I'm not sure I know the answer exactly, but there seems rather clearly to be two primary factors at play:
First, Bush officials didn't commit these crimes by themselves. Virtually the entire Washington establishment supported or at least enabled most of it. It isn't merely that leading Congressional Democrats were, to one degree or another, complicit in these acts and are therefore hamstrung in investigating crimes of which they were aware and did nothing to stop, though that is true. The enabling of all of this extends far beyond the leadership of the two parties.
As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, "black site" prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with any significant platform can point to anything they did or said to oppose or stop any of it -- and they know that. Many of them, even when much of this became conclusively proven, were still explicitly praising Bush officials. Most of them supported the underlying enabling policies (Guantanamo and the permanent state of war in Iraq and "on terror"), and then cheered on laws -- the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act -- designed to legalize these activities and retroactively immunize the lawbreakers and war criminals from prosecution.
So when these media and political elites are defending Bush officials, mitigating their crimes, and arguing that they shouldn't be held accountable, they're actually defending themselves. Just as Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller can't possibly demand investigations for crimes in which they were complicit, media stars can't possibly condemn acts which they supported or, at the very best, towards which they turned a blissfully blind eye. They can't indict Bush officials for what they did because to do so would be to indict themselves. Bush officials need to be exonerated, or at least have their crimes forgotten (look to the future and ignore the past, they all chime in unison), so that their own involvement in it will also be cleansed and then forgotten.
Second, and quite relatedly, is that establishment elites have, by definition, a vested interest in glorifying and protecting the Washington establishment. It's perfectly fine to have a President who is inept or even somewhat corrupt. A titillating, tawdry sex scandal is also fun, even desirable, as that keeps entertainment levels high. That's all just part of the political cycle.
But to acknowledge that our highest political officials are felons (which is what people are, by definition, who break our laws) or war criminals (which is what people are, by definition, who violate the laws of war) is to threaten the system of power which, above all else, they are desperate to maintain, as it is their role within it as royal court spokespeople that provides them with their access, prominence, wealth and self-esteem. Their prime mandate is to protect and defend establishment Washington -- most media figures are integrals parts of that establishment, not outside of it -- and that means, above all else, attacking anyone who would dare suggest that the establishment has been rotten, criminal and evil at its core.
In a typically superb essay -- entitled "Flushing the Cheney Administration Down the Memory Hole" -- Billmon compares the process currently underway to how adept the Soviets were at simply erasing embarrassing and unpleasant episodes from their history:
It shows just how far the system -- specifically, in this case, the Beltway political press -- has wandered from reality.
You can see this in just about all of the transition coverage. Reporters (like the ones responsible for the journalistic abomination above) and columnists and pundits are busy cranking out the usual lame duck legacy stories, as if this were the "normal" end of a "normal" presidency, instead of the concluding chapter of a national tragedy.
There is just a yawning disconnect between the nature of the crimes allegedly committed (and, in many cases, essentially admitted): waging aggressive war, torture, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy -- to the point where it would probably take an army of Patrick Fitzgeralds and a full-time war crimes tribunal a year just to catalogue them all -- and how the story is being treated in the corporate media. . . .
And, as in late Soviet times, the absurdity of the official story line is only reinforced by the other systemic failures that surround it: in our case, financial collapse, plunging asset prices, massive fraud and a corrupt, sclerotic political system that may be incapable of doing even the most simple, obvious things (like printing and spending sufficient quantities of fiat money) to stave off an deeper downward spiral.
This being the case, I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier -- skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.
Which means, in turn, that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Feith and the whole noxious crew are about to get flushed straight down the memory hole: banished fairly quickly from public discussion and corporate media coverage -- in much the way the Iran-Contra scandal (go ahead, Wiki it) was almost immediately forgotten or ignored once it became clear that the fix was in. America apparently had its big experiment with truthtelling and reform in the post-Watergate era, and the experience was so unpleasant that nobody (or nobody who counts) is willing to go there again. That would be like expecting the Baby Boomers to start dropping acid again.
The political/media establishment isn't desperately and unanimously fighting against the idea of investigations and prosecutions because they believe there was nothing done that was so bad. They're fighting so desperately precisely because they know there was, and they know they bear much of the culpability for it. They fear disruptions to their own comforts and prerogatives if any more light is shined on what happened. The consensus mantra that the only thing that matters is to "make sure it never happens again" is simply the standard cry of every criminal desperate for absolution: I promise not to do it again if you don't punish me this time. And the prevailing Orwellian Beltway battle-cry -- look to the future, not the past! -- is what all political power systems instruct their subjects when they want to flush their own crimes down the memory hole.
* * * * *
Two unrelated notes:
(1) To follow up on the Tom Friedman claim from yesterday that Hamas will lose support if Israel kills enough Palestinian civilians, The New York Times today reports that "The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas's support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority." This was the (self-evident) point made so well yesterday by Daniel Larison: if a foreign power drops lots of bombs on a population (to say nothing of stories like this and this), they tend to become more hostile to those doing the bombing and more supportive of their own leaders, especially if those leaders vow retribution against the attackers. As Jonathan Schwarz recalls, Tom Friedman's own demented reaction to the 9/11 attacks illustrates exactly how that dynamic works.
(2) In The Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed "Dustup" feature this week, I'm debating various issues surrounding the last days of the Bush administration with American Spectator Editor W. James Antle II. The first installment (which, truth be told, wasn't all that fascinating) is here; today and tomorrow's sessions will hopefully be more probing.
UPDATE: Throughout the 20th Century, the U.S. has criminally prosecuted people for waterboarding -- both foreigners who did it and then were prosecuted as war criminals, and American law enforcement officers who did it and were prosecuted as ordinary criminals. But now, in America, MSNBC devotes three hours every day to hearing from someone -- Joe Scarborough -- who just the other day spent six minutes on television explicitly defending torture. There is something about this clip that is simultaneously repulsive and yet fascinatingly illustrative about what the country has become:
49 Comments so far
Show Allamericans are confronted with themselves more and more often these days as the murder and sleaze of the republic oozes and oozes all over the place like a freshly lanced boil
you want to investigate bushco - never gonna happen
how about an investigation into the 9/11 - or jfk's brain airing, bobby, martin, the first nation
america has always been a fascist state
madison called the first nations vermin
then there's the whole nigger thing
how about generals patton and macarthur chasing the bonus army down the mall in washington state of dc - i know most americans are way too ignorant to even know what the bonus army was but........
how about edsel ford - the psychotic son of the famed anti-semite henry ford who sent his goons and the police to shoot his workers on the steps of the ford plant in detroit state of michigan
truman nuking the japs to see what the bomb could do
obama is a nwo/banking cartel stooge who has given the american public, dumb as it is, the self-delusion that change is possible
change that you can believe in
jeez, i'm getting a gas attack
the united states and their mini-me israeli buddies are insane murderers
simple as that
ahhhh......the gas is passing
cheers, b
If the new Administration does not address this, which I think they will, the World Courts will.
Odd. And all these years, our political leadership has demanded Responsibility! Accountability! (at least, when it comes to the poor.)
Crimes left unexamined and unpunished will, indeed, be repeated. The overwhelming majority of Americans, and the world community, want the Bush administration to be held accountable for it's repeated disregard for both US and international law.
It embarrasses me that our political leadership, at taxpayer expense, spent years pursuing every salacious detail of a meaningless consensual fling, hoping to crucify the sinner, while merely shrugging their shoulders over the wild and murderous disregard for law and morality that we have seen these past eight years.
"...columnists and pundits are busy cranking out the usual lame duck legacy stories, as if this were the "normal" end of a "normal" presidency, instead of the concluding chapter of a national tragedy."
This is exactly what I have been saying for years. They (big media) keep treating Bush and his administration just like any old President we have had, when in fact, he should have been impeached along with Cheney and the whole thing brought down. It is some kind of strange bizzaro world they are creating.
After watching the above morning joe clip I've lost what little glimmer of respect I might of had for Joe Scarborough) .... Again he's proven himself to be just another corporate media Fascist ... Ralph
Nice clip, however its the usual, a middle class liberal airhead trying to argue from a perspective she doesn't really understand, this isn't a debate this a reinforcement of stereotypes.
The young pretty but misguided female who is talking about how she feels torture is wrong (the bleeding heart liberal), arguing against an all American middle aged white male who is staunchly defending his country with the facts (unverified, bush statistics as far as I can make out).
If this had been a real discussion, someone more knowledgeable would have discussed the issue as to why torture is wrong and counter productive, but then they probably wouldn't be as pretty.
Obama and the Democrats to the rescue!
Are you kidding the Congress just threw their full support to bombing the Warsaw Ghetto oops Gaza! Like they did not know what happened in Lebanon .
Oh course I am kidding. I see virtually no major difference between the two corrupt parties of Big Business, Big Oil, Big Corporation, Big War and Big Time Criminals in pin-striped suits.
Not only are the majority of politicians in Congress and the supine, servile mainstream media guilty, but many religious leaders--the ostensible moral arbiters of the community--actively supported outrageous crimes. Their true morality was on display, and it's ugly.
Alex
The House Negro, Mr. Obama, is just giving cover to his bosses who are busy looting the last piles of money from the treasury. When the bank is empty, the boss's will make for the exits, and leave the USA an impotent, broken, ruined country.
You elected the House Negro.
Have a nice day, suckers.
WHY WOULD THEY PROSECUTE WAR CRIMES BY THE OUTGOING ADMINISTRATION SINCE PRACTICALLY THE ENTIRE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS IS CLEARLY ONE GIGANTIC
CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE?. WAR CRIMES, ECONOMIC CRIMES AGAINST PEOPLE AND HUMANITY, MORAL CRIMES HIDING BEHIND "RIGHTEOUSNESS", "CHRISTIANITY" OR JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY, "DEMOCRACY", SECURITY, "CIVILIZATION", ETC?.
THERE IS PROBABLY NO INSTITUTION IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION THAT HAS MASTERED THE ART OF MASQUERADING WITH "NOBLE IDEAS" -- WHILE DOING EVIL AND CRIMINAL AND INHUMANE POLICIES THAN THE US WASHINGTON CONSENSUS AND ITS ATTENDANT "INDUSTRIES" -- whether they are in economics, warmaking, civil injustices, spying, undermining other countries and exploiting them or plain thievery and hypocrisy.
Barack Obama's pick for Attorney General, Eric Holden, said today that water-boarding was 100% torture and should never be practiced under ANY circumstances.
Great News Common Dreams?
Today is a good day to die
camus13
There is one way we can all be "score settlers" it's easy.
Stop buying their newspapers......we all know that the newpaper business is going down the tubes.
Let's hurry it along.
So then we can settle the score with them all........
Gollygee and Siouxrose: I like your slant on these things.
I made the mistake of spending six minutes listening to Scarborough defend water boarding as a productive interrogation technique not constituting torture in the U Tube clip from an MSNBC shoutfest linked in at the end of Glenn's article. I avoid that rude, table thumping cablevision substitute for civil discourse like the plague, but I guess ever so often I need a dose to remind me why I've basically sworn it off.
Along with Glenn's points (Democratic leaders' awkward complicity in the Bush/Cheney neo-cons' horrendous decision making, and a sense of shame on the part of some figures in journalism that because they enabled the whole process they still feel obligated to defend the Bushies or else they themselves will look bad in the public eye if top officials get criminally prosecuted), I am struck by the unison mantra recently being broadcast louder and louder as though chanted by a Greek chorus: since all the dark deeds that were done has kept America safe from a second major terrorist attack, we morally dare not call crime by its own name now.
At least a half dozen times in the Scarborough rant we hear reference to how it was waterboarding that got Khalid Sheik Mohammed to confess and incriminate others, thereby proving that torture (or whatever euphemism you use as substitute) works, torture produces reliable intelligence, and torture has helped to keep America safe on Little George's watch. Scarborough and other CIA torture apologists go so far as to say close to 70% of the valuable information used by our intelligence officials to thwart follow-up terrorist plots since 911 flows directly from the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, referred to in the 911 Commission's Report as KSM, is crazy as an outhouse rat and has been clinically nuts for a long but indefinite period of time. If 70% of the Bush regime's reliable intelligence in the global war against terror (and the centerpiece of the government's whole 911 al Qaeda attack narrative) hinges squarely upon the babblings of a single loon - before, during and/or after waterboarding - would you even buy a used car from KSM, much less buy into waging endless global war?
Perhaps what's really in play is well founded fear on the part of the mainstream media enablers of the global war on terror that Barack Obama might just be inclined to go back and reexamine the Bush 911 narrative itself. Remember, significant classified documentation - particularly about foreign intelligence services' inputs in the weeks immediately preceding the WTC attack - has been systematically withheld from both Congress and the 911 Commission. If the outgoing criminal junta and its propagandists are so fixated upon putting 70% of their eggs into that single fruitcake's basket, then maybe what Barack Obama ought to do is take up that invitation, and cut right to the heart of the matter.
Declassify the withheld 911 intelligence materials. Declassify the follow up terrorist plots that were supposedly thwarted. That sounds like a good bipartisan approach to me.
Bill from Saginaw
I got to minute three of Joe's harangue and could not take any more.....Who is that idiot anyway?
The purpose of the CIA's torture was not to produce information, most of the prisoners have "zero" information to offer....The purpose of the torture was to strip the old personality away, and create a new personality willing to accept blame for something they may have known nothing about. (The McGill University Studies in Canada and the CIA Mkultra Drug Experiments). Kahlid Sheik Mohammed would not know who he is and what he did after years of torture, he could only know what the torturers wanted him to know and wanted him to remember remember. (Why do you think they got rid of the video tapes?)
There is no doubt that Word Trade Center #7 went down with explosives. There is no doubt that the FBI confiscated and withheld videos of the Pentagon Attack. There is no doubt that there was no Independent Investigation of the murder of almost 3,000 human beings.
The 9/11 Commission was nothing but a political whitewash.(Philip Shenon, "The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission")
Sioux Rose
BILL: Can you imagine the sit-down discussions that come up with the one slogan (like advertising executives finding their power-jingle) that will sound great, that ultimately is like a rhetorical question (no one can really answer it either way) and then PUMP it through all their pre-existing channels? It's been said that there is a grain of truth in every stereotype, and in parallel, the right wing is pretty good at finding something that has an ELEMENT of truth but never is the whole truth, nor will it challenge the status quo and its powerbrokers.
I find it TOO convenient that 911 went off when the Project for a New American Century had its sights set on the Middle East and its oil, Israel being a strategic player on that board "game." If the intelligence knew of a pending attack and let it happen to fulfill the greater ambitions of this immoral administration, that's about as culpable as having taken part in planning the act from the get go. Nor would I rule out help from the geniuses inside Israel's secret service. Criminals of war now joined at the hip, each has sought to lend cover to the other's trespass, and yet the Court of Karma/universal system of Justice is yet to lend its vote and sentence.
DaveBronstein,:"You try to slap the label "Republican" on the criminality of the last 8 years, but this is manifestly false."
Gosh, you've mistaken me for a Democrat. Now that hurt — even worse than the "naive."
What I said was that I predicted when the full extent of the crimes is known not even the Repuglicans will defend those responsible for what's been done.
"There is zero chance there will be prosecutions."
Again, until we know the crimes and see the evidence, I can't give the odds on prosecutions, can I?
Things seem to be falling apart faster than most of us are able to comprehend. At this stage I wouldn't give zero possibility to a guillotine being set up in the Mall of America.
But let's wait and see. Down the road one of us is going to eat crow.
"At this stage I wouldn't give zero possibility to a guillotine being set up in the Mall of America."
That'll be the one and only time I'll visit the Mall of America, and I don't live too far from it. All necessary beheadings, from Bush, Cheney and gang all the way down to the war-enabling and lie-spinning pundits, would take months. Admission could be charged, at an affordable fee, that would go into a fund to help jumpstart a single-payer healthcare system.
I’m going to suggest another, more insidious reason for the Media’s need to look forward rather than backwards: The media is attempting to position itself to force Obama to toe the pro-corporate line of the last thirty years. With the economy tanking there is going to be a lot of social pressure for the government to bail out Joe Sixpack instead of the big corporations.
A media that was covering congressional investigations or prosecutions of crimes from the Bush era would have less time to devote to promoting the pro-corporate agenda that’s been forced down our throats year after year.
Should Obama step out of line the media needs to be free to “Bill Clinton” him. Since Obama seems to be grounded enough not to nail an intern on the Oval Office carpet whatever the media uses to discredit Obama is probably going to be pretty flimsy and would not stand up to being compared to the eight year crime spree under Bush.
Sioux Rose,
Thanks.
I used to post here fairly regularly — I think I made Common Dreams my homepage around 2002 or 2003 — although for some reason my profile says I've only been a "member" for 14 weeks. (???)So of course I know you.
I've only changed my name once (about 2 years ago because an imposter was using my old one. Had the scumbag occasionally said clever things I probably wouldn't have minded.)
After decades of cronyism and lawlessness in Washington it's nearly impossible to imagine the law functioning as it should — it's certainly beyond the imagination of insiders like Ignatius. Pay-backs and cover-ups are all they know.
Obama, speaking as a lawyer — how can he speak otherwise? — would be stupid to say he was going to "pursue" any legal actions against anybody. If his Justice Department works, and it just looks like it might under Holder, the President doesn't need to get involved at all. The law will take its course.
The Washington crime bosses can't understand this, of course. If they get prosecuted they'll always believe it was brought about by personal vendetta, not by their own actions. That seems to be the mind set of professional criminals.
Thanks again for the welcome. If life weren't such a grind I comment more frequently.
There's no way to comment on this article that can add anything of value. Greenwald has decidedly said it all here. He should be attorney general. But that would require a president who wasn't a sellout to the Washington machine of lies, bullying the world for private profit, theft from its citizens to line the vaults of criminal banksters and Wall St. hucksters, and all the rest of the corrupt caitiffs inhabiting the imperial capital. Nonetheless, Greenwald should be attorney general. That'll happen around the time the Dalai Lama is elected president.
What's the purpose of arguing about anything at all with a man such as David Ignatius?
If he has no respect for moral and legal norms, why would he have any for the logical norms that constrain argumentation and debate, and thus bind those who engage in argumentation and discussion?
For example, the principle of non-contradiction is a norm that binds those who engage earnestly in argumentation and debate. Indeed, from a contradiction, one can deductively derive any statement at all. In other words, contradictions are to be avoided, because from them anything (any statement, or truth claim, that is) follows.
David Ignatius is what one must call a cynical mind, a criminal, if you will, of public speech. He is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest and corrupt man: with such disingenuous people, it is not possible to have a civil, respectful, and productive conversation.
What's frightening is that there are many like him in the media in our time. Since these people do not respect any logical and discursive norms, one may say without exaggeration, that they practice a kind of verbal violence, that they are bullies.
Sioux Rose
ABENDLAND: The media is the trumpet to the corporations that are profiting from an agenda that has been rendered lawless by Bush & his supporters of BOTH parties. Your assessment of the credentials needed to post therein are right on. They are craven individuals more concerned with immediate personal gain than the state of the nation or the victims of delusionally based bombast in too many regions extending outside our borders.
Technically, Obama is a "liberal" but not to those who really count. See, Obama is "liberal" to the pro-terrorist CIA and Wall $treet but he ain't liberal to us working class folks. If you're rich and even rightwing religious, he'll be "liberal" to you. Otherwise, you're SOL.
DING DING DING ! If you want a real liberal, folks like Ralph Nader, Cynthia Mckinney, and even libertarians such as Barr and Paul are what you're looking for. I knew the Democrats are for the most part useless which is why I happily voted Nader even as the state was heavily Republican. And I'd still have voted Ralph even if I were living in a swing state.
Yes, Verez, excellent point: what counts as a liberal is definitely relative to class.
To paraphrase Joplin-Kristofferson:
Scorning "liberal score settlers" is just another word for "these men are above the law."
How many hundreds (thousands?) make a nice comfy living by simply purveying the accepted "wisdom"?
Without accountability there is no law, Period!
Sioux Rose
In this excellent analysis Greenwald indirectly supports all the reasons why war is understood as the supreme crime against humanity, and that from which are spawned all other criminal offenses. Thus by DECLARING himself a war president, Bush then used that device to dismantle all the checks and balances patiently set into our government's structure, and then went after civil liberties to blunt the swords of any that might oppose him.
It truly is sickening the degree to which Washington's personnel act like courtiers to a king and as Greenwald pointed out, don't act in any way that will upset the comforts born of their applecarts.
"The Tragedy of the 20th Century is that nothing any longer is perceived as such/tragedy." (I credit this quote to G. B Shaw but I believe someone once pointed out it was not Shaw's quote... but it is apt, nonetheless.)
From the perspective of the long "count" of time, we are at the end of the Age of Pisces (bordering into, i.e. arriving at the "cusp" of Aquarius), and Pisces, ruled by Neptune, the "god" of deception is living up to its reputation. I remember when the cool Black performers would appear on late night TV and use the expression, "That's bad!" To mean it's good, and perhaps that was some kind of cue to the extent to which all things good have become inverted, and a great many things departed from the names used to define them. War = peace, right to life = cause for war, security = fighting, freedom = killing someone else, law = rules for when it's convenient to apply them, etc. We're caught in the high tidal surge of an era of vast global transition... therefore, it's not a bad policy to practice what Old Will recommended, " To thine own self be true..."
high government officials must abide by our laws and should be treated like any other citizen when they break them.
NO! Elected officials are always held to a HIGHER STANDARD than other citizens, otherwise they will always be just common crooks in high places!
At this stage of the game talking about not pursuing legal measures is just Republican whistling in the dark.
It is quite possible that with a new administration taking charge of the filing cabinets lots of new evidence, some of it perhaps more horrifying than anything known so far, will come to light. If the crimes are bad enough and the evidence strong enough, charges will be brought and there will be convictions.
Greenwald always makes good points, but as a lawyer I hope he would agree that a working legal system has a life of it's own and functions regardless of speculation about "public opinion."
If authorities know of a crime and don't pursue it, that in itself can be a crime, can't it?
I doubt if anyone at this stage, Repuglican or otherwise, would be much interested in taking the rap for keeping any of the Bush junta out of jail.
Let's wait and see what happens before we get too worked up about what David Ignoramus of the WP says.
"...At this stage of the game talking about not pursuing legal measures is just Republican whistling in the dark...
It is quite possible that with a new administration taking charge ... lots of new evidence...will come to light. If the crimes are bad enough and the evidence strong enough, charges will be brought and there will be convictions.
...Let's wait and see what happens before we get too worked up about what David Ignoramus of the WP says..."
--------
- You call Ignatius "David Ignoramus," but actually, your viewpoint is nearly the same as his. He's defending the whole Establishment, while you're defending the Democratic half of that Establishment.
You try to slap the label "Republican" on the criminality of the last 8 years -- but this is manifestly false. There was no Democratic resistance whatsoever to any of Bush's initiatives, and on most issues, the Dems actively collaborated: the Iraq invasion, the occupation refundings, the unconditional support for Israel's crimes, the bailout, the refusal to impeach, FISA, PATRIOT Act, torture, the Bailout, etc etc.
The defense of the Establishment to which Greenwald refers is not a defense of "Republicans." The "Establishment" encompasses virtually all of official Washington (elected officials, MSM hacks, lobbyists, & think-tank flaks) plus the richest one percent of the country. There are plenty of Democrats in that group.
Contrary to your naive statement, there is zero chance that there will be any prosecutions of Bush admin officials under Obama. Sunday's Obama interview with Stephanopoulos made this perfectly clear. But it was obvious long before then, simply from the fact that during the entire presidential campaign, there was no discussion of holding Bush admin officials accountable for crimes, nor was there any statement that any crimes had been committed.
And no, the posture of "Let's wait and see what happens before we get too worked up" is exactly wrong. The time for "waiting & seeing" is long since past. We already know what's going to happen -- and the time to get "worked up" was already years ago.
Excellent post. The naivete of the above post is incredible. It is WAY past time to get "worked up" about America's fascist shift for EIGHT YEARS.
Sioux Rose
GOLLYGEE: Welcome to the forum. I think Greenwald is pointing out the degree to which complicity was systemic. How do you "go after" a whole culture of deception, a body of persons from military to media, with government representatives widely involved, when it involves so many?
I just emailed Ignoramus to let him know that the need for prosecutions is about salvaging the rule of law in this country. Not bringing criminals to justice means that laws are just words on paper (kind of like the Constitution). In that case, why not just start eliminating the traitors in the media and the government, since laws don't apply?
Of course, the absurd reasoning, by Ignoramus as well as by Uncle Tom Obama, underscores the ugly, unconscionable reality that different "laws" apply to different classes of perpetrators of injustice. Smoke a joint, spend your life behind bars. Kill millions of people through an illegal war fabricated on non-existing evidence, and retire to your ranch on a tax-paid pension with full protection from justice.
Time to start burning down castles and making pharaohs disappear.
Kill one man and your a murderer. Kill a million and you may get your face on a bill and a library named after you.
The Glue That Holds Chaos Together
I believe in accountability, and capital punishment for war criminals like Bush and Cheney, but I am hard-pressed to find many liberals who share my believes.
If Germans and Japanese were convicted and executed for war crimes(crimes against peace and crimes against humanity), it is NO LESS A CRIME when committed by Americans. And the SAME measure that was meted out to them should be meted out to the Bush/Cheney cabal.
NUREMBERG II 2009
If the Germans had somehow gained a draw in WWII, for example if they had developed the bomb simultaneously, prompting a peace treaty, and then the German people had discovered the concentration camps, undoubtedly the German equivalent of Ignatius would have been arguing, even if the Nazi Party had lost power and Hitler was powerless or dead, that all Germans and people everywhere "must look forward and not back."
Sioux Rose
KIVALS: Chilling thought!
You have to catch the bastards first.
Liberal is a classification that delineates one of two prevailing political philosophies within the two party system. When liberal is perceived as being a four letter word, the word gets replaced by progressive. The status quo and the establishment manipulate the terminology to better control its constituency. It's time to dump these descriptors and two major parties. They are but flip sides of the same corrupt and counterfeit coin.
Good point. I notice just about anybody in the Democratic Party can be a progressive. Laura Richardson, my representative has a dismal voting record (voted for war funding, FISA etc) and she is in the "progressive" caucus. Same thing for Obama, the so-called , most "liberal" Senator ever. Yeah right.
As far as I am concerned real progressives are few and far between. Dennis Kucinich is a progressive.
Why use the word 'liberal' here? This isn't a matter of ideology - it is a matter of law enforcement and accountability. I have grave reservations aboaut the death penalty in general due to the horrendous state of the criminal justice system in this country, having said that, there is overwhelming evidence against the Bush administration - objective and verifiable evidence. I would support the death penalty in this case - or any other case - where leaders lie their people into war, destroying friend and foe alike in the process.
Pathos uses the word "liberal" to set up a straw man, an irritating but frequent tactic used in the toxic political discourse of our times.
Greenwald does a good job of pointing out that, with respect to the cluster bombing of Gaza or the get out of jail card being given to US war criminals, the vast majority of Americans are still in desperate denial of the societal meltdown going on around them, Obama or no Obama.
"You want the truth ? You can't handle the truth!".