Prosecute War Criminals

I know this is going to piss off some of my friends but here goes anyway.  I wish President Obama would just get on with it.  “Governing,” wrote commentator Mike Whitney recently, “is more than just gliding from one teleprompter to the next pointing at rainbows and promising Utopia.  There has to be action, accountability, and justice.”  

I’m sick to death of Obama protecting W and Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo and Doug Feith.  These guys are war criminals and Obama needs to recognize that fact and get on with the business of living up to his oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution.  Title 18 of the U.S. Code, our national laws, “our red-white-and blue tough-on-crime book of books has a little section called 2441 that prescribes prison or death to any American who commits or conspires to commit a war crime, including torture or cruel or inhuman treatment.”  Title 18 “also contains section 2340, which - - like 2441 - - defines torture with clarity and sanity, and prescribes prison or death for those who engage in it, and prison for those who conspire to commit it.”  Feith and Cheney have been thumbing their noses at Obama since January 20^th.  Cheney has given several interviews admitting to authorizing and ordering others to commit torture.  Feith, in a Wall Street Journal column earlier this month, argues “that Spain as no right to put Americans on trial for torture, at least not second-tier officials who provided pseudo-legal justifications for torture and advocated its use, actions that Feith believes should be immune from prosecution, unlike ordering torture or engaging in it.”  

Prosecuting these scum-bags is not a choice or an option.  The attorney General and the President are legally required to prosecute anyone who “engaged in, ordered, or otherwise facilitated torture.”  Bush and Cheney and Feith have all admitted to authorizing torture.  Fortunately, Spain may force the hand of our Justice Department.  Officials here are not doing what they are legally required to do, what the law says they must do, but a courageous judge in Spain is now investigating Yoo, Feith, Gonzalez and three other second-tier conspirators.  This is the same judge who put out a warrant for Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean mass-murderer.  

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is engaged in co-mmissions almost worse than their omissions.  Obama is engaged in putting forward extremist Cheney/Addington/Yoo arguments “in order to shield Bush lawbreaking from disclosure and judicial review.”  Candidate Obama “unambiguously vowed to his supporters that he would work to ensure ‘full accountability’ for ‘past offenses’ in surveillance lawbreaking.”  Now that he is president, Obama has another tune to sing.  He has, as Glenn Greenwald wrote at salon.com, “become the prime impediment to precisely that accountability, repeatedly engaging in extraordinary legal maneuvers to ensure that ‘past offenses’ both in the surveillance and torture/rendition realm - - remain secret and forever immunized form judicial review.”  As Greenwald pointed out, “Obama has repeatedly done the exact opposite of what he vowed he would do:  rather than ‘seek full accountability for past offenses,’ he has been working feverishly to block such accountability, by embracing the same radical Bush/Cheney views and rhetoric regarding presidential secrecy power that caused so much controversy and anger for the last several years.”

Like the criminals who looted the economy, the criminals who looted our constitution, shredded the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and shattered our national consensus against torture, the criminals who fashioned en-ending war are walking around scot-free.  I want to see a cop on every corner of lower Manhattan and across Washington D.C.  I want regulators snooping through emails and “digging through trash cans to uncover any scrap of evidence that will build a case for investor fraud” and violations of our torture treaties and laws.  I want to see “the Pinkertons . . . swarming the investment houses right now,” swarming over the Bush and Cheney compounds “thumbing through . . . paperwork, overturning filing cabinets and tasering bloated banksters” and smarmy Bush administration slimebags.”