For obvious reasons, the most blindly loyal Bush followers of the last eight years are desperate to claim
that nobody cares any longer about what happened during the Bush
administration, that everyone other than the most fringe, vindictive
Bush-haters is eager to put it all behind us, forget about it all and,
instead, look to the harmonious, sunny future. That's natural. Those
who cheer on shameful and despicable acts always want to encourage
everyone to forget what they did, and those who commit crimes naturally
seek to dismiss demands for investigations and punishment as nothing
more than distractions and vendettas pushed by those who want to wallow
in the past.
Surprisingly, though, demands that Bush officials be
held accountable for their war crimes are becoming more common in
mainstream political discourse, not less so. The mountain of
conclusive evidence that has recently emerged directly linking top Bush
officials to the worst abuses -- combined with Dick Cheney's brazen,
defiant acknowledgment of his role in these crimes (which perfectly
tracked Bush's equally defiant 2005 acknowledgment
of his illegal eavesdropping programs and his brazen vow to continue
them) -- is forcing even the reluctant among us to embrace the
necessity of such accountability.
It's almost as though
everyone's nose is now being rubbed in all of this: now that the
culpability of our highest government officials is no longer hidden,
but is increasingly all out in the open, who can still defend the
notion that they should remain immune from consequences for their
patent lawbreaking? As Law Professor Jonathan Turley said several weeks ago on The Rachel Maddow Show: "It's the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime." And this week, Turley pointed out to Keith Olbermann that
"ultimately it will depend on citizens, and whether they will remain
silent in the face of a crime that has been committed in plain view. .
. . It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing."
That
recognition, finally, seems to be spreading -- beyond the handful of
blogs, civil liberties organizations and activists who have long been
trumpeting the need for this accountability. The New York Times Editorial Page today has a lengthy, scathing decree
demanding prosecutions: "It would be irresponsible for the nation and
a new administration to ignore what has happened . . . . A prosecutor
should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials
at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse." Today, Politico -- of all places -- is hosting a forum
which asks: "Should the DOJ consider prosecuting Bush administration
officials for detainee abuse as the NYT and others have urged?" Even Chris Matthews and Chris Hitchens yesterday entertained (albeit incoherently and apologetically) the proposition that top Bush officials committed war crimes.
Perhaps
most notably of all -- and illustrating the importance of finally
having someone like Rachel Maddow occupy such a prominent place in an
establishment media venue -- Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, one of the
Senate's most restrained, influential and Serious members, was prodded
by Maddow last night into going about as far as someone like him could
be expected to go, acknowledging the necessity of appointing a
Prosecutor to investigate top Bush officials for the war crimes they
committed and to determine if prosecutions are warranted:
To
be sure, the political class still desperately wants to avoid
meaningful investigations and prosecutions, in no small part because
every key component of it -- including the leaders in both parties --
are implicated by so much of it. But as more undeniable evidence
emerges of just how warped and criminal and heinous the conduct of our
top political leaders has been -- and the more Dick Cheney and comrades
resort to openly admitting what they did and proudly defending it,
rather than obfuscating it behind euphemisms and secrecy claims -- the
more difficult it will be to justify doing nothing meaningful. That is
why, even as the desire to forget about the Bush era intensifies with
the Promise of Obama ever-more-closely on the horizon, the recognition
continues to grow of the need for real accountability.
The
weapons used to prevent such accountability are quite familiar and will
still be potent. Those who demand accountability will be derided as
past-obsessed partisans who want to impede all the
Glorious, Transcendent Gifts about to be bestowed on us by our new
leaders. The manipulative claim will be endlessly advanced that our
problems are too grand and pressing to permit the luxury of living
under the rule of law. When all else fails in the stonewalling
arsenal, impotent "fact-finding" commissions will be proposed to
placate the demand for accountability but which will, in fact, be
designed and empowered to achieve only one goal: to render actual
prosecutions impossible.
But with these new, unprecedentedly
stark revelations, this facade will be increasingly difficult to
maintain. It is already the case, as the Times Editorial today notes, that "all but President Bush's most unquestioning supporters [i.e., this]
recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse,
torture and death in prisons run by the American military and
intelligence services." That leaves only two choices: (1) treat these
crimes as the serious war crimes they are by having a Prosecutor
investigate and, if warranted, prosecute them, or (2) openly
acknowledge -- to ourselves and the world -- that we believe that our
leaders are literally entitled to commit war crimes at will, and that
we -- but not the rest of the world -- should be exempt from the
consequences. The clearer it becomes that those are the only two
choices, the more difficult it will be to choose option (2), and either
way, there is great benefit just from having that level of clarity and
candor about what we are really doing.