Today's news that a Spanish court is mulling criminal charges against Bush administration lawyers for violating international treaties "by providing the legal framework to justify torture" should remind folks of British lawyer Phillipe Sands' warnings on Fresh Air, that signatories of the treaties banning torture are obligated by law to investigate and prosecute torturers in other countries. And in that interivew, Sands identified LiTW favorite kicking boy, John Yoo, as someone who's in especial danger of prosecution because his opinions supporting torture reek of a lawyer looking to justify an administration policy without regard to law. A big no-no.
John Yoo was named as a person of interest in the Spanish investigation.
It's embarassing, to say the least. Our government's failure to hold former government officials accountible for their reprehnsible and illegal actions is more than just an embarassment, it's dangerous. While the Obama administration appears to have backed off the more egregious policies enacted by the Bush administration, it does so of its own power. In other words, the government has stopped these policies because the president has decided to, not because the people and their representatives demanded that our laws be upheld and those that broke them be held accountible.
In short, the precedent for the unitary executive and its associated powers still exists.
Okay, in all the hubub of the election and Obama's transition and Rick Warren's honored position in the inauguratiobn is forgotten the Bush administration. The reason - let's face it - for the Democratic sweep of Congress and the presidency.
It was bad. In fact, it was just as bad as many of us had feared.
Take Dick Cheney. Last week on the talk show circuit, he defended the belief that the presidency has absolute powers and admitted he authorized the use of torture, in response to which Dahlia Lithwick appropriately quoted John MacKenzie:
MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
The Bush administration: just as bad as we said it was.
You know...how many of these stories were shrugged off by traditional media for so long, and are now openly admitted to by the vice president? And what consequences will there be?
I'm betting none.
Honesly, everybody should be enraged by this - conservatives and DC insiders, too. But conservatives are busy coming up with intellectual justifications for the Bushies' actions and the media is busy coming up with reasons why it's a bad idea to punish any of these *sshats, the real reason being that they identify with the Cheneys of the world more than the dirty hippies...ie, the rest of us.
Merry friggin' Christmas.
Speaking of which, I'll be posting lightly for the next few days, because I'm on vacation!
