Posted on 04/27/2009 7:18:34 AM PDT by Tolik
The Obama administration apparently is giving a green light for liberal zealots in Congress and in the Justice Department to go after former Bush-administration lawyers.
We are supposed to damn these out-of-office lawyers because, in a time of national crisis, they gave advice that was construed as permitting torture. In three exceptional cases, interrogators waterboarded terrorist detainees — at least one of them responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. I emphasize the adverb “apparently,” because — as has been the case from campaign-finance reform to the imposition of the highest ethical standards in history for Cabinet nominations — with the Obama administration, any ethical proclamation is usually at odds with the unethical reality.
The administration should tread carefully, since it is about to embark on something nefarious that could tear apart the country.
POSTFACTO JUSTICE?
First, remember that the Constitution already permits ongoing audit of the executive branch. Watergate prompted Nixon’s resignation in face of impending impeachment. Iran-Contra almost destroyed the Reagan administration. President Clinton’s sexual antics with a female subordinate, and lying about it subsequently (speaking no truth to those without power), prompted his impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, who was briefed on the options of waterboarding in the dark days following 9/11, had ample opportunity to hold congressional hearings on Bush’s overemphasis on homeland security. Her outrage now rings false, an unseemly ploy to hide her complicity in what she once thought was responsible governance.
Such ongoing audit is not just the purview of congressional committee hearings. Between 2001 and 2008, Congress could easily have forced the appointment of a special ethics prosecutor, or even a torture prosecutor. Indeed, we have the frightening precedent of Mr. Fitzgerald’s convicting Scooter Libby, in which the supposedly covert Ms. Plame was not covert, and the supposed initial leaker was not the targeted Cheneyist, Mr. Libby, but the protected Powellist, Mr. Armitage.
In other words, Americans deal with perceived executive abuses, both effectively and clumsily, as they transpire. Such contemporary audit avoids the sort of postfacto, partisan damnation of former leaders so common in unstable dictatorships.
Prior to President Obama, Americans did not go in for this sort of thing, because we knew where it led.
Politics and conditions change. What a conservative administration does at a time of national crisis to protect the public may subsequently, in the calm of an eighth consecutive year of safety, seem in retrospect illiberal to a new liberal government.
Dwight Eisenhower did not open hearings to pave the way for indictment of federal officials of the Roosevelt administration or California lawyers working for Gov. Earl Warren, who in concert planned and carried out the forced internment of American citizens into camps. Much less did he bring Truman & Co. up on charges of using nuclear weapons to incinerate Japanese civilians.
Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge did not seek indictment of Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department, which did everything from strengthening segregation to jailing war critics and helping foster the odious vigilantes of the American Protective League. No subsequent administration tried to arrest Lincoln’s Cabinet members for signing off on the suspension of habeas corpus after Fort Sumter — unconstitutional decrees that eventually would mean some 15,000 Americans were held without charges for indeterminate length.
President Obama would not a want a putative President Palin to begin hearings on who ordered the targeted executions of two suspected Somali pirates, taken out in the middle of protracted negotiations. He would not wish a President Sanford one day to indict those Obama officials who approved the assassination-by-Predator-missile of suspected terrorists and their families in Pakistan — without habeas corpus, Miranda rights, or avenues of appeal. He would not enjoy a future President Giuliani’s bringing indictments of Obama officials over the NSA’s exceeding its allotted e-mail intercepts, or the CIA’s conducting overseas renditions of suspected terrorists without providing them the benefits of U.S. law.
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE
Second, Americans also do not Trotskyize our public sphere, in the manner of trying to erase memory itself — so familiar from the Soviet Union and the works of George Orwell. The Romans called this practice damnatio memoriae, “damnation of memory,” in which the new emperor, to prove that he had “reset” the government, and that the present ills were all the fault of his odious predecessor (e.g., “Domitian did it”), simply erased the memory of the prior ruler — even chiseling off imperial names from statues and decrees.
Yet Obama officials can hardly begin a foreign-policy address without either trashing the Bush administration or giving it no credit whatsoever for policies that continue today, with the Obama administration’s blessing. From current Democratic proclamations, no one is supposed to remember or even read memos circa 2001–03. We are supposed to forget that Democrats were chest-thumping their national-security bona fides — giving soapbox speeches about going into Iraq, leaking their worries about raw intelligence over WMD threats, and green-lighting coercive interrogation techniques to prevent another 9/11.
Be careful of fostering animus against well-intentioned American officials for the sake of short-term partisan advantage. Sharks smell blood. Now enters one Austrian professor, Manfred Nowak, the “U.N. special rapporteur” for torture who hails from a country that routinely sells Iran everything from sniper rifles to nuclear technology. Professor Nowak informs the world that the Bush officials must be punished. He is eager to please the Obamians, but not so eager to displease the Chinese, Russians, Libyans, Iranians, Saudis, and most of the rest of the world, where torture is as commonplace as its investigation is futile — if not dangerous.
ENDLESS CYCLES OF BLAME
Third, once we start this tit-for-tat cycle of adoration and damnation, there is no end — because it is based not on principle, but abject expediency.
We saw such contortions in the Iraqi War. Once upon a time, many liberal columnists and Democratic congressional leaders praised the pre-war notion of preemption. Public intellectuals wrote letters to then-president Clinton demanding that he preempt and remove Saddam Hussein. Some even castigated a hesitant Bush with charges that he resembled his timid father. One or two went on to demand consideration of nuclear strikes against Iraq should it be associated with the anthrax attacks of 2001.
Then came the insurgency. Not only did such braggadocio cease, but embarrassed liberal hawks suddenly reinvented themselves as long-suffering, anguished, and principled doves. They now felt betrayed by “phony intelligence” as they bought into the cheap rhetoric of “Bush lied, thousands died.”
Yet we all know their conversions into moralists were predicated entirely on the escalation of the insurgency. Only then did their inspired and perfect three-week victory become outsourced as someone else’s fouled-up occupation. And we all know that 20 of the 23 original congressional writs to go the war were as unchanged by the absence of WMD stockpiles as they were forgotten when the conflict became unpopular.
So we know this predictable pattern of flexibility and accommodation. From 2001 to 2003, Bush officials were deemed serious and sober, and reformed the intelligence agencies to stop the incompetence that led to 9/11. By consensus, they took decisive measures to stop new enemies in a new sort of war — in which terrorists out of uniform, blending in with civilians, had devised ways of infiltrating the United States to murder thousands. And that consensus kept us safe.
Then, in the luxury of that very safety, and with the recrudescence of partisanship, from 2004 to 2009, our once-praised guardians were redefined by their Democratic critics as Gestapo-like torturers who created a Stalag in Cuba. And the terrorists, this new story went, were unfortunates bundled away for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the vicinity of bin Laden’s Hindu Kush compounds.
And we know in advance the dénouement of this tragicomedy. Should we lose another 3,000 in a morning, and should the attackers have appeared earlier on wire-taps, been released from Guantanamo, or escaped notice due to new “firewalls,” then once more we will go into the cycle of recrimination.
The only constant is that those who are most loudly screaming for the heads of the Bush officials will be silent should the carnage return — or perhaps they will be the most vocal in allotting blame to the Obama administration, which listened to them. No doubt they will demand postfacto hearings on topics such as “Who let him out of Guantanamo?” as they chant, “Obama slept, we wept!”
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
On Trashing Your Predecessor [Victor Davis Hanson]
From a July 2002 Bush Press Conference, when GWB was asked about the topic of the recklessness and the re-regulation of the 1990s:
Q. Sir, you said in your speech tomorrow you're going to talk about some of the excesses of the 1990's when a lot of money was flying around people were playing a lot of games ... money. You weren't president then. Bill Clinton was president. Do you think in some way he contributed to that? Set a moral tone in any way?
A: No.
Does this also mean that democratic liberal traitors can also be prosecuted and hanged for their treason. Bring it on and let’s start with Obummer!
Victor, don’t expect to see the flaming sword of justice held gallantly aloft in the hand of the next “conservative” president. After Hussein has declared himself “President for Life”—for the greater good, of course—no such person will exist.
Obama and cabal fear no pay-back. He (or another puppet) intends to be Presidente for Life.
Criminalizing Policy Differences —the Galactic Double Standard [Peter Kirsanow]
Bush administration officials who may find themselves in legal jeopardy because they authorized the use of enhanced interrogation methods must be bewildered by the double standard being applied to them — one even more unbalanced than the media's usual double standard for conservatives and liberals.Whatever one's position on the propriety of the enhanced interrogation methods, there's no evidence that the use of the methods resulted in the death of a single American. On the contrary, several credible sources maintain that the methods kept Americans from being killed. Nonetheless, some partisans assert that those who crafted the enhanced interrogation policy should be imprisoned.Contrast that with the position of those same partisans regarding the governmental officials who crafted the famous pre- 9/11 "Wall" — i.e., the Clinton-era policy that separated criminal investigations from intelligence operations, thereby impeding counter-terrorism investigations.Among other things, the Wall prevented counter-terrorism investigators from accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, days before 9/11. At the time one FBI investigator said, "Someday someone will die — and, wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems."The Wall went beyond what was legally necessary and indisputably rendered Americans more vulnerable to terrorist attacks (whether removal of the Wall would've prevented 9/11 can only be a matter of speculation). The Wall was kept in place by government officials who were on notice that terrorists planned to kill Americans. It was kept in place even after terrorists had succeeded — pre 9/11 — in killing Americans. Maintenance of the policy was reckless and inexcusable — some might even argue that it was criminal.Will the partisans who demand the prosecution of those who kept America safe also demand the prosecution of those who endangered America?I'm not holding my breath.
Krauthammer’s Take [NRO Staff]
From last night’s “All-Stars.”
On Nancy Pelosi’s calls for a “truth commission:”
Before you can decide whether to have a prosecutor or a commission, you have to know who the players are. The Democrats want to make this a war on the Bush administration.
But there is one inconvenient fact, and it's stated by none other than Dennis Blair, who's the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, not under Bush. And he said in writing that the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities to the executive and to members of congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.
Now, he's a man who's completely disinterested in this. He does not have a stake in the fight, and that's what he says.
So among these Democrats, of course, among these members of Congress who are saying that we were not told that these techniques were used in the past, past tense.
But what she said in December '07 in a statement in response to a "Washington Post" story which said that she had been in on the hearings and had not objected, had been in on the briefings and not objected, she issued a statement saying that she was briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future.
So the parsing here is positively Clintonian. But even so, it doesn't help her, because if you're in a briefing, and you're a member of Congress, and you're hearing about a technique that you now say you were scandalized and is a war crime and you opposed, what is more important to speak out about? A technique that has been used in the past, in which case the briefing is pointless, or speaking about a technique which is going to be used in the future, in which case your objection is essential, but it never happened either. It never happened, and she never objected.
So I agree with "The Wall Street Journal." If you want to have a commission, start with her. Put her in the dock under oath. Ask what did you know? When did you know it? And if it's a war crime, how could you possibly not have objected?
I hope this establishes a precedent. No man in the history of our country is more deserving of life in prison than the neosocialist traitor in our White House. I hope he’s prosecuted for every violation of our Constitution, for every violation of law that follows from ignoring our Constitution, and for every other high crime and misdemeanor he commits. The best part is that I imagine Obama will enjoy his romantic opportunities in prison. I don’t mind if he’s happy behind bars, so long as he’s no longer a clear and present danger to our country.
Precedent is unimportant to the Democrats. First, they never intend to relinquish power so the precedent will be in their favor. Second, they know that if the conservatives ever do reclaim power they will play fair and do what is best for the country rather than what is best for the Republican Party and their continued political control.
It takes diligence for Good to overcome Evil. Evil has a much easier road to travel and it is persistent.
Edmund Burke said ALL THAT IS NECESSARY FOR EVIL TO PROSPER IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING.
The clearest and easiest prosecution of Obama would be for extortion of the banking system.
Banks reported that they were threatened to take TARP money or the FDIC would start investigations that would impact their stock prices.
This can happen by the next administration, if Obama insists on prosecuting Bush admin officials.
Personally, I think Obama will relent at the last minute and call off any prosecutions, but will create a panel to investigate and castigate Bush. Obama does not want this precedent set on his watch and with his baggage.
Well, ole Ed was pretty smart. :-)
Of course I would prefer not to be a banana republic, but it doesn't seem like that's an option here.
Hanson may be unrealistic when he speaks of a future Republican President. The goal is to make the Republicans as unlikely to win the White House as to win the mayor's office in Chicago or Detroit.
I am looking forward to VDH's take on this, but I fear he has increasingly succumbed to "political correctness." Otherwise it would be a very short article.
Persecuting (usually with extreme prejudice) predecessors is the hallmark of the most primitive, backward and brutal societies on earth sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America Banana Republics come to mind.
Hanson should have mentioned the Athenians who had the Pelopennesian War well in hand but used their vaunted democracy to kill a couple of their own victorious generals and admirals.
The Athenians of course went on to lose the war.
Thanks, Tolik. VDH’s articles are always a treat to read.
The idiocy from the left is mind boggling!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
