Do Not Let Them Go Gently

Woah, what a night. How was it for you, Ron Paul supporters?

Ah. Maybe I shoudln’t have asked.

I have to say myself I’ve never been so glad to say I was wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong, double underlined wrong, in illuminated letters wrong. The Republicans didn’t ratfuck the election, martial law was not declared, no-one was assassinated, the American people spoke up louder than this cynic could ever have hoped and finally, the right thing was done.

After 8 years of unbelievable criminality and ineptitude, there’s a breath of hope in the air.

But while we’re all sharing a metaphorical post-coital cigarette and basking in the afterglow, let’s not relax too much; that’s always the moment when you accidentally roll onto the wet patch.

The wet patch in this instance is a proper conundrum and it’s a key question for the incoming Democratic administration – what is to be done about George Bush? Will he, his sidekick Dick Cheney and their many criminal associates be allowed to walk away from their numerous crimes? Will Bushco ever face any kind of justice? If you listen to campaign rhetoric, the answer’s yes:

In an Obama-Biden administration, we will not have an attorney general who blatantly breaks the law,” Biden said at a town-hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, his voice at times drowned out by applause. “We will not have a president who doesn’t understand the Constitution. And I will not be a vice-president who thinks he’s not part of any of the three branches of government.”

Biden ripped the Bush administration for wasting a chance to unite the nation in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“George Bush and his administration are going to be judged harshly by history,” said the Delaware lawmaker. “Not for the mistakes they made, but for the opportunities to unite America and the world they squandered.”

Biden also promised to go through the Bush adminstration’s records with a ‘fine-toothed comb’ for criminality:
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“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation,” he said, “they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution – out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law.”

But that was during the campaign, when rhetoric was high. Obama himself was very careful to be noncommital on the subject of potential prosecutions:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

Experience teaches us different. It’s become customary for incoming presidents to pardon their predecessors’ crimes; presidents can even indemnify against crimes yet to be committed; the person pardoned need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime.

Many pardons have been controversial; critics argue that pardons have been used more often for the sake of political expediency than to correct judicial error. One of the more famous recent pardons was granted by President Gerald Ford to former President Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974, for official misconduct which gave rise to the Watergate scandal. Polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the pardon and Ford’s public-approval ratings tumbled afterward. Other controversial uses of the pardon power include Andrew Johnson’s sweeping pardons of thousands of former Confederate officials and military personnel after the American Civil War, Jimmy Carter’s grant of amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders, George H. W. Bush’s pardons of 75 people, including six Reagan administration officials accused and/or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, Bill Clinton’s pardons of convicted FALN terrorists and 140 people on his last day in office – including billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, and George W. Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison term.

I see the outgoing President Bush has already started on wangling for his own presidential pardon, inviting President-elect and Mrs. Obama to the White House. Although he has, in effect, already pardoned himself, it’s thought to be unconstitutional to do so:

But there’s one person at least who won’t let Bush leave without a reckoning and that’s former mafia prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi:

I may be sounding presumptuous to you right now, [Amy and Juan], but I?m telling you this: I am going after George Bush. I may not succeed, but I?m not going to be satisfied until I see him in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first-degree murder.

[…]

we know?not ?think,? but we know?that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October the 7th, 2002, Cincinnati, Ohio, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. So if we had nothing else at all, this alone shows us that he took this nation to war on a lie, and therefore, all of the killings in Iraq of American soldiers became unlawful killings and therefore murder.

But it gets worse. October 4th, three days after the October 1st classified top-secret report, Bush and his people had the CIA issue an unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report, so that this report could be issued to the American people and to Congress. And this report came to be known as the ?White Paper.? And in this White Paper, the conclusion of US intelligence that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country was completely deleted from the White Paper. Every single one of these all-important words were taken out. And the question that I have is, how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George Bush and his people be? And yet, up to this point, unbelievably?and there?s no other word for it?he?s gotten by with all of this.

Indeed he has. It’s not enough for me, and I doubt it’s enough for everybody else either, that Bush be out of office, out of the White House and out of power: there has to be a reckoning too. Some crimes stink so high that there has to be justice – and if the new president won’t do it, then the people, even in the person of Bugliosi and who knows how many other outraged lawyers, will have to.

Bugliosi again:

This is a very real thing that we?re talking about here. I?ve established jurisdiction on a federal and state level for the prosecution of Bush for two crimes: conspiracy to commit murder and murder. On a federal level, we?re really only talking about the Attorney General in Washington, D.C., operating through his Department of Justice. But on a state level, I?ve established jurisdiction for the attorney general in each of the fifty states, plus the hundreds of district attorneys in counties within those states, to prosecute George Bush for the murder of any soldier or soldiers from their state or county who died fighting his war in Iraq. And with all those prosecutors?

Well quite, if only all that collective pent-up outrage doesn’tget swamped by the big, pink, fuzzy wave of post-election euphoria. However, there are encouraging signs that the sins of George Bush have not been forgotten, that there may well one day be a reckoning, even if I don’t live to see it. The people (and not just the American people) will see that it’s so: and if anyone should respect the power of the people to do what they say, it’s Obama.

UPDATE:

Speaking of never forgiving: what DDay said.