Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left to Prosecute Bush
by David Swanson
Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the
U.S. government. She was a member of Congress and of the House
Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against
President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973
required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case
basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to
lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth
Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky
scandals. She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes
and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group,
bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice. And she was an
outspoken advocate for
impeaching George W. Bush.Holtzman's new book, coauthored with
Cynthia Cooper, is called "Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney
Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution -- and What
We Can Do About It." Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and
mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that
Bush would pardon himself and his underlings. The debate was over
exactly how he would do it. And then he didn't do it at all.Holtzman
ends her book by pointing out that legal accountability can come after
many years, as in the case of various Nazis, or of Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, or of the murderers of civil rights activists
including Medgar Evers.In between, for the bulk of the book, Holtzman,
a former district attorney, lays out the prospects for a prosecution
of Bush and others on charges of lying to Congress about the grounds
for war, wiretapping Americans, and conspiring to torture. This is an
excellent sampling of the many horrors on the list of Bush's abuses,
and clearly the three areas in which Holtzman believes a prosecution
would stand the best chance of success. Her analysis of the war lies
parallels and builds on that of Elizabeth de la Vega, another former
prosecutor who has written on the topic. Holtzman adds an analysis of
the steps Bush took to protect himself from prosecution in this and
each other area. She also examines his possible legal defenses,
finding some of them strong and others easily overcome.In each area
Holtzman finds charges that would stick, if our laws were enforced.
She also finds charges that would have stuck, had the statute of
limitations not elapsed, and others for which a couple of years yet
remain. Holtzman believes charges for conspiring to defraud the
government with war lies could be brought until January 20, 2014. She
also believes that charges for violation of FISA could be brought
until
that same date, pointing out that changes made to the law have not
provided immunity for prior violations of what the law used to be, and
that immunity has been granted from civil suits but not from criminal
prosecution. Charges of torture, Holtzman concludes, could be brought
at any time in the future.Holtzman argues for lengthening the statutes
of limitations for grave abuses of power, for creating a special
prosecutor, restoring the War Crimes Act, reclaiming protection
against unchecked surveillance, recovering missing records, pursuing
civil cases, impeaching torture lawyer turned judge Jay Bybee, and
looking abroad for hope and change. She sees some chance of the
International Criminal Court pursuing charges of torture.This book is
an ideal guide for a prosecutor with nerve and decency, although we
haven't found one in this country in the past several years. Other
than Kurt Daims who is running for the office of Town Grand Juror in
Brattleboro, Vermont, which voted to direct its police to indict Bush
and Cheney four years ago, I'm not aware of any prosecutors in the
United States with plans to pursue this kind of justice.Glaringly
absent from Holtzman's book, despite its 2012 publication date, is any
significant mention of the approach that President Obama has taken.
There's not one word about "looking forward, not backward," not even
so much as one tangential reference to Obama's public instructions to
Attorney General Eric Holder, no analysis of the intense effort that
the Justice Department, State Department, and White House have pursued
to protect Bush and Cheney from accountability, no mention of the ways
in which Obama has continued a similar pattern of criminality -- a
state of affairs which, of course, might explain his reluctance to
allow the enforcement of laws against his predecessor.I don't think
it's an unfair criticism to object that a book has left out a large
but
intimately related topic, one that apears to have been carefully
avoided. Partisan prosecution of crimes and non-crimes by Republicans
under President Clinton has been aggravated by Republican
defensiveness and Democratic spinelessness under Bush. But it is the
Democratic switch to defending all presidential wrongdoing since 2008
that has put the largest nails into the coffin of legitimate rule by
law in this country. Bush's crimes have been legitimized. Obama has
claimed the power to torture as he deems necessary, the power to
imprison and rendition as he sees fit, the power to murder any human
being including U.S. citizens and children as he and he alone declares
necessary, and powers of state secrecy that Nixon and Cheney never
dreamed of. While Bush lied the Congress into a war that a reasonably
intelligent 8 year old could have seen through, Obama has made the
launching of wars a matter for the president alone. And that's just
fine with
Democrats. Surely Holtzman is aware that this partisanship is a
cancer, that it has ruined the power of impeachment and done away with
truly independent special prosecutors, and that the purpose of
accountability is to halt the ongoing acceptance of crime.I have to
quibble as well with Holtzman's lowballing of the Iraq war death count
by two orders of magnitude. I know everybody does it, but I still
find it grotesque.And yet I have to strongly recommend that this book
be read and presented to every prosecutor in this country, including
the seemingly shameless Eric Holder. We've got 23 months.
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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