War Crimes

We are a nation in denial, there's just no other way to see it. We have been in the total grip of a despotic, dictatorial regime for eight years and our vaunted system of checks and balances failed us. Spectacularly. The evidence for this has been abundant and in our faces for some time - arguably since 2000 - but it became even more clear yesterday with the release of the notorious Yoo torture memo. This topic upsets me so, I have great difficulty writing about it, and everything that needs to be said about it has been much better done here, here, here, here, and here, among others - I'll probably be adding to that list as the day goes on. But I just want to add this: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney need to be impeached and convicted. Now. This is not a partisan issue, it is a national issue. These men must not be allowed to retire in peace and glory to live out their days making money on the AEI lecture circuit. God help us please!

UPDATE: This may be the first of many, as I'm sure I'm going to feel compelled to highlight some of the really good writing that's being done on this subject. To wit, Christy Hardin Smith:

Sometimes, as a lawyer, you are asked by a client to give them a results-oriented memorandum justifying a particular course of action they would like to take. Usually it's in a business client context, and you have to find some way to rationalize what you are being asked to do with the letter of the law and, when they don't match up, you and your client have a long talk about liability and exposure and your ethical limitations in what you are willing to write -- or not write.

In this context, though, his "clients" would have to have been Cheney and Addington and their neocon ilk for such a results-oriented argument to be drafted this way. Never mind that his opinion applied itself to the whole of the American public, and we'll all be paying the consequences of its results for generations to come. And never mind that a good lawyer covers all the bases and doesn't just give his clients home runs whether or not they've earned them.

.....

I'll be very interested in Marty's take on the OLC obligations on this, and how far afield this memo takes them. It's bad enough to ignore a controlling precedent altogether as a regular old lawyer, but to do so representing the government on an issue with such broad foreign policy and human rights implications as torture seems to me to be a whole other level of deliberately blind reasoning. Marty's started with some great questions about this mess -- and I'm certain there will be many more to follow.

And this from Vanity Fair:

It would be wrong to consider the prospect of legal jeopardy unlikely. I remember sitting in the House of Lords during the landmark Pinochet case, back in 1999—in which a prosecutor was seeking the extradition to Spain of the former Chilean head of state for torture and other international crimes—and being told by one of his key advisers that they had never expected the torture convention to lead to the former president of Chile’s loss of legal immunity. In my efforts to get to the heart of this story, and its possible consequences, I visited a judge and a prosecutor in a major European city, and guided them through all the materials pertaining to the Guantánamo case. The judge and prosecutor were particularly struck by the immunity from prosecution provided by the Military Commissions Act. “That is very stupid,” said the prosecutor, explaining that it would make it much easier for investigators outside the United States to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed by the justice system in the home country—one of the trip wires enabling foreign courts to intervene. For some of those involved in the Guantánamo decisions, prudence may well dictate a more cautious approach to international travel. And for some the future may hold a tap on the shoulder.

“It’s a matter of time,” the judge observed. “These things take time.” As I gathered my papers, he looked up and said, “And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.”

This guy is back. And that's a good thing.

Ruth at Cab Drollery:

The lack of an outcry is an increasing crime against this country. The oath of office a president takes is to protect and defend the constitution. His job is to enforce the laws. This is no president.

It is past due for the press to proclaim a crime a crime, and when the country is being robbed, beaten and tortured, it is the press's duty to cry out.

Amen to that!