Truth, Crimes, Commissions and Hope

God, I do hope that David is right about this. If he isn't, and nothing is done....well....it won't be pretty in the months and years to come.

By David Swanson
April 2, 2009

Editor’s Note: There is some concern that the momentum for a serious inquiry into the Bush administration’s war crimes is waning, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy confided to a group of Vermonters on Monday.

But David Swanson of afterdowningstreet.org argues in this guest essay that there are reasons not to mourn the death of a “truth commission,” especially if it would only get in the way of more serious types of accountability, i.e. prosecutions:

Good news is being taken as bad. Vermont constituents of Sen. Patrick Leahy report that he's finding very little support for his proposed truth and reconciliation commission from Republicans or Democrats in the Senate. Numerous people have taken this as bad news and cause to despair. I disagree.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1. The idea was never reconciliation with Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, torture victims, spying victims, victims of political prosecutions, or anyone other than the commission members themselves. Real reconciliation is years away from even being comprehensible to, much less supported by, the U.S. Senate.

2. There are very useful things that Congress or an outside commission could do, but most of them have nothing to do with punishing or deterring crimes, or reconciling victims and abusers. The only thing that can deter future crimes of the sort that have been committed is criminal prosecution. Any commission begun before a special prosecutor is appointed would risk serving as a substitute for what is most needed, and risk having its requests and subpoenas ignored as Congress's have been for the past two years. But once a prosecutorial investigation is begun, Congress will be able to take up related issues without creating a substitute for prosecution and with better public understanding that there are advantages to complying with subpoenas and other legal obligations.

3. A commission dedicated to truth would have a hard time ignoring ongoing criminal investigations in Spain and Britain, and likely indictments there and elsewhere. The reconciliation would almost inevitably develop into opposition to international law, which is of course exactly the offense we most need to correct and deter, not encourage.

4. A nonpartisan commission would be a bipartisan commission, with half of the members named by each of the two parties into which our government is now more fundamentally divided than it is into three institutional branches. Both parties would favor a commission designed to cover up congressional complicity in crimes. And if there is some hope that a congressional committee might be motivated to restore constitutional powers to Congress, an outside commission would not be as likely to have that interest.

5. A commission unable to compel witnesses could be designed to bribe them with immunity for their crimes. But unless there are prosecutions and the serious threat of prosecutions, that immunity is not a valuable bribe. And the granting of immunity is not justified by the circumstances. Our justice system is not overrun by too many defendants to be processed. It is simply refusing to prosecute a small number of individuals against whom there is extremely powerful evidence and for whom trials could potentially be very, very swift.

6. While we will never have the complete "truth" about anything and should not encourage the false belief that we lack probable cause to prosecute, obtaining more information about crimes and abuses is certainly desirable. But more information is likely to be obtained by a criminal prosecution than anything else.  And more information is likely to quickly be made public by demanding the release of memos, e-mails, minutes, reports from the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, from the CIA, from the Senate Armed Services Committee, etc., than from any hearing or panel or commission. If Congress wants the truth about the treatment of prisoners, it should demand their release and listen to them. If it wants whistleblowers to speak, it should legislate protections for them. If it wants new stories to break, it should bust the media monopolies.

7. The sort of discussion most needed from Congress is not a weak substitute for a criminal investigation, but rather a study of how to restore Constitutional powers to Congress that have been usurped by presidents. A committee or panel or commission could most profitably examine the treaty power, appointment power, pardon power, power of the purse, power of war, and power to legislate, signing statements, secret laws, secret agencies, secret budgets, state secrets claims, executive privilege claims, vice presidential powers, the power of impeachment, the power of subpoena, and the practice of inherent contempt. The most effective way to do this, and probably the only possible way to do it, would be with a House-only select committee. Not only is the Senate hopeless, but a proper list of democratizing reforms would include proposing the elimination of the Senate.

8. A public airing of the crimes and abuses, if it did not interfere with criminal proceedings, if it enforced (or persuaded the Justice Department to enforce) its demands, and if it was covered by the media would certainly be useful. It would be less useful, however, if it repeated the endless public airings of the past two years in hearings that have been largely ignored by the media, or if it refused to call the crimes crimes, or if it reinforced the loss by Congress of the power of subpoena. Again the best and probably the only possible way to make this happen would be with a House select committee, subsequent to the
beginning of a criminal investigation.

9.  Existing committees and subcommittees can also hold closed and open hearings without delay, and with the possible advantage of Democrats holding majorities over the Republicans on every committee, and some are planning to do so. Committees can, if they choose, reissue all of their subpoenas that were refused over the past two years. Enforcing those subpoenas, into which much thought and work was poured, would reveal more than any bipartisan commission would be likely to.

10.  A movement is rapidly and impressively building to demand a special prosecutor, to prosecute locally and abroad as well, and to legislate reforms through Congress. The State Secrets Protection Act, a resolution challenging an unconstitutional treaty with Iraq, a bill to restrict the abuse of National Security letters, and other good bills expected just after the April recess mark a trend in the necessary direction.  The possibility of impeaching torture memo author and now federal judge Jay Bybee is even under discussion, and the California Democratic Party will take the matter up in a resolution later this month. By impeaching Bybee, Congress could restore its primary power, the one that gives teeth to the others, and then nobody would be able to type fast enough to record all the truth and reconciliation that would start spilling forth.

David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Leahy Faults GOP Partisanship on Bush

Pardon my French (especially my French Friends) but this really sucks rotten eggs! 

So what the hell are you elected officials going to do, you big cowards? Are you going to leave the criminals to us, the people, to deal with. If you do that, the result won't be pretty.

Leahy, you were a prosecutor before you became a politician and senator. Do you know what the law in most states says about crimes and criminals that proper law enforcement officials refuse to investigate, let alone prosecute? 

You and you congressional pals had better give this some serious thought, because we have. 

We will not protect war criminals and violaters of the constitution. We have let crimes slide before. Every time we do, the next crimes are even worse. That's how we got into this nightmare in the first place. We, the people, cannot afford to allow the Bush/Cheney gang to walk away from their crimes. Oh No, not this time. As Junior himself would say, "you are either with us or against us." 

Which is it, Senator.

By Jason Leopold
April 2, 2009

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the refusal of Republicans to act in a non-partisan way has hobbled his plan for a “truth commission” that would examine alleged Bush administration abuses.

In a Senate floor speech Thursday, the Vermont Democrat acknowledged that his plan could not move forward as he intended unless all sides approached the inquiry into ex-President George W Bush’s expansive claims to executive power with objectivity and fair-mindedness.

Leahy insisted that he had not abandoned his commission idea, but was “not interested in a panel comprised of partisans intent on advancing partisan conclusions. … I regret that Senate Republicans have approached this matter to date as partisans. That was not my intent or focus. Indeed, it will take bipartisan support in order to move this forward.”

On Monday, Leahy confided to a group of Vermonters that his “truth commission” is “not going to happen” because not a single a Republican would support it, according to journalist and author Charlotte Dennett, who attended the meeting. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Leahy Bails on Truth Commission Plan.”]

On Thursday, a senior Leahy staffer did not dispute any of the comments Leahy was reported to have made to the Vermont group. But the staffer told me that Leahy is still serious about trying to attract Republican support for his commission idea.

In the floor statement, Leahy said, “I continue to call on Republicans to recognize that this is not about partisan politics. It is about being honest with ourselves as a country. We need to move forward together.”

But if bipartisan support is what it will take to get a truth commission off the ground, it’s likely not going to happen – and Leahy is well aware of that. Republicans are against the idea of any investigation of Bush’s “war on terror” policies, whether by a truth commission or a special prosecutor.

The Leahy staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that if the truth commission does not come to fruition, that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be oversight into the Bush administration’s policies through “more traditional means,” such as congressional hearings.

The staffer said Leahy has not introduced formal legislation for a truth commission, and it’s unknown if he ever will.

Democratic Blame

Though the Republicans surely have sought to obstruct any comprehensive inquiry into Bush’s policies, many Democrats also have been lukewarm about the idea.

Aides to more than a dozen Democratic leaders in the Senate and the House, whom I have spoken to over the past week, told me lawmakers are simply not interested in an investigation into the Bush administration no matter what form it takes.

Those aides spoke on the condition that I would not disclose their names or the names of the lawmakers they work for so as not to anger the progressive base of the Democratic Party.

In his Thursday floor statement, Leahy noted that new evidence has only deepened concerns that Bush abused his presidential powers.

“In the months and years following 9/11, driven by an inflated view of executive power, the Bush-Cheney administration compromised many of the very laws and protections that are the heart of our democracy,” Leahy said. “Their policies, which condoned torture, extraordinary renditions and the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, have left a stain on America’s reputation in the world.

“In recent weeks, we have also seen a few more opinions previously issued by the [Justice Department’s] Office of Legal Counsel after 9/11 that had been kept secret until now. ... These opinions sought to excuse policies that trample upon the Constitution and our duly enacted legal protections.

“These opinions arise from an arrogant rationale that the President can do anything he wants to do, that the President is above the law. The last President to make that claim was Richard Nixon. We saw the results of that policy in Watergate. It was through efforts like the Church Committee that we revised our laws and moved forward. In my view, it is time to do so again.”

Those Justice Department’s legal opinions – many drafted by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo – asserted that President Bush had virtually unlimited powers to wage the “war on terror” and could ignore traditional constitutional rights, including the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and a free press.

“The country will need to have an honest discourse about what happened and what went wrong,” Leahy said. “I continue to feel strongly that a Commission of Inquiry would provide us the best nonpartisan setting in which to undertake that study and national conversation.”

In February, Leahy first proposed the idea of a “truth and reconciliation commission” as a way of probing the Bush administration’s “war on terror” policies, including torture of detainees at military prisons operated by the U.S.

Back then, Leahy, a former prosecutor, told students at Georgetown Law School that although President Barack Obama was unsupportive of the idea of “looking backwards” “many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong. …

“We need to be able to read the page before we turn it.”

Early last month, Leahy held a hearing, entitled “Getting to the Truth Through a Nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry,” where he heard from witnesses who testified about the pros and cons of setting up a special committee to investigate Bush-era abuses. But his idea drew little enthusiasm from his own committee and was treated contemptuously by some Republicans.

Jason Leopold has launched his own Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Internet Doomsday?

Buck up government cyber-security and leave the Internet Alone!!!!

While you're are at it, Pull our corporations out of China and bring the jobs home.

GhostNet: Reconnaissance For Internet Doomsday

Posted on: March 30, 2009, flags: 103

The recent news about GhostNet, the suspected cyber espionage activity of the Chinese government uncovered by The Information Warfare Monitor is alarming news, to say the least. More than a thousand computers have been compromised with apparent ease, many in high-value secure government offices. Researchers revealed that the compromises were so sophisticated, that confidential documents were removed, video cameras and microphones turned on to observe events, and sophisticated key-loggers tracked everything that was typed. According to two of my sources well-placed in government and computer security, this is just the frightening tip of an enormous iceberg.

Many will recall my report on the FBI's concern about counterfeit network router hardware being installed in businesses and government agencies all across the nation. Many were concerned that the counterfeit routers contained code that allowed for a broad range of back-doors into secure computer systems, as well as covert kill-switches that would shut-down after receiving a remote signal. Indeed, several analysts found thousands of additional lines of machine code as compared to a non-counterfeit. Since the counterfeit hardware originated in China, the FBI was very concerned, so much so that they responded to my report.

I've recently spoken to two well-placed computer security experts who firmly believe there is a frightening connection between GhostNet and the counterfeit routers. Their fear is that we are mere months away from a series of significant cyber attacks on key private sector businesses and portions of our infrastructure...

Let The Sun Shine In......

Sullivan: Scared Cheney puts his head in the noose

If my country cannot find its way to prosecute some of the worst official crimes ever committed in our name, I'm not sure I can stay here anymore. I have waited it out, hoping that the next administration would do what HAS to be done. 

According to Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Attorney and professor at Georgetown, it is well-known in D.C. that the new administration fully intends to protect our war criminals. If this is true. I'm done with the country I have always loved.

Andrew Sullivan

Barack Obama’s most underrated talent is his ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. It takes a lot less energy than defeating them directly, and helps maintain Obama’s largely false patina of apolitical niceness.

Obama is about as far from apolitical as you can get; and while he is a decent fellow, he is also a lethal Chicago pol. His greatest achievement in this respect was the total implosion of Bill Clinton around this time last year: Hillary was next. Then came John McCain, merrily strapping on the suicide bomb of Sarah Palin. With the fate of all these formidable figures impossible to miss, one has to wonder what possessed Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, to come lumbering out twice in the first 50 days of the Obama administration to blast the new guy on national television.

Growling and sneering, Cheney accused the new president of actively endangering the lives of Americans by ending the detention and interrogation programmes of the last administration, and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay. It’s hard to overstate how unseemly and unusual this was.

It is fine for a former vice-president to criticise his successor in due course. But there is a decorum that allows for a new president not to be immediately undermined by his predecessor. To be accused of what amounts to treason – a willingness to endanger the lives of Americans – is simply unheard of.

(The Bush administration has topped all other administrations in my lifetime in doing horrible things. So, why is anyone surprised by the behavior of VICE?)


Former president George W Bush himself declined any such criticism. He told a Canadian audience: “I’m not going to spend my time criticising [Obama]. There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.” Last week Condi Rice echoed the same theme. “My view is, we got to do it our way,” she said. “We did our best. We did some things well, some things not so well. Now they get their chance. And I agree with the president; we owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it.”

Cheney’s critique of Obama’s policies was also inaccurate. He claimed the new administration had abandoned the concept of a war on terror and returned to a pre9/11 law enforcement paradigm. But the noticeable thing about the new administration has been its retention of certain aspects of the terror war that are clearly about war and not law enforcement.

It has not abandoned rendition, while placing it under the restrictions followed by the Clinton administration; it has insisted it has the right to detain terror suspects under the laws of war, if the suspects are deemed a direct threat to security; it has increased troop levels in Afghanistan; it has decided to keep the US presence in Iraq as high as possible for the bulk of this year.

Some critics on the right have even accused Obama of simply continuing the Bush-Cheney mindset with mere window-dressing to appease the civil liberties crowd.

So what was Cheney thinking? My guess is that he fears he is in trouble. This fear has been created by Obama, but indirectly. Obama has declined to launch a prosecution of Cheney for war crimes, as many in his party (and outside it) would like. He has set up a review of detention, rendition and interrogation policies. And he has simply declassified many of the infamous torture memos kept under wraps by Bush.

He has the power to do this, and much of the time it is in response to outside requests. But as the memos have emerged, the awful truth of what Cheney actually authorised becomes harder and harder to deny. And Cheney is desperately trying to maintain a grip on the narrative before it grips him by the throat.

The threat, however subtle, is real. Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects.

But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture.”

The narrative that has taken shape since Cheney left office and lost the chance to stonewall inquiries is damning to the former vice-president. It was not an accident, it seems to me, that Cheney went on CNN the morning The New York Times published leaked testimony from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The documents detailed horrifying CIA practices that the Red Cross unequivocally called torture – shoving prisoners in tiny, air-tight coffins, waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions: all the techniques we have now come to know almost by heart. And torture is a war crime. War crimes have no statute of limitations and are among the most serious crimes of which one can be accused.

This is what Cheney is desperate to avoid. It is unclear whether he will actually ever be prosecuted, but the facts of his record will wend their way inexorably into the sunlight. That means he could become a pariah. Even though the CIA actively destroyed the videotapes of torture sessions, it could not destroy the legal and administrative record now available to the new administration.


So Cheney is reduced to asserting that what he did saved countless lives and averted many plots. He is reduced to asserting the same Manichean view of the world that gave us Guantanamo, Bagram and the Iraq war: fighting terrorism is “a tough mean, dirty, nasty business”, he told Polit-ico, an American political website. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

But no one is urging that we turn the other cheek: they are simply saying the West has to obey the laws of war and the rule of law in its battle against jihadist terrorism. By coming out so forcefully and so publicly so soon after he left office, Cheney is intent on asserting that the torture programme he set up was legal, moral and defensible. Like many of Obama’s former foes, he may come to regret making that move in his own defence.

www.andrewsullivan.com

Let The Sun Shine In......

Obama and the American Auto-makers

When it comes to the many judgments cast on U.S. auto executives, there is none harsher than the White House's de facto assessment yesterday that these guys are actually dumber than bankers.
That's cold, but also the essential truth of the matter, assuming that a "Democratic official close to the White House" was dishing the real skinny when he told the Politico: "[The administration has] more confidence in the leadership on the banking side -- that there are people in place who understand what went wrong and the steps necessary to deal with this disaster. They have no sense of confidence that the auto industry has the capacity or plans to structure a workout."

This was merely the first reason among five, according to the online paper, that "the car companies got hit with the stick" and denied another immediate carrot. In brief, populist outrage -- an overworked phenomenon we should all hope is furloughed soon -- over bailouts and bonuses may have provided Obama convenient political cover from the ire of union sympathizers on the left and economic nationalists on the right, but of much weightier concern was that, simply, of a non-ideological fix -- from business as usual to just business, for a change.

"The prevailing mindset inside the White House," wrote the Politico in what I found to be the most helpfully comprehensive report on events of the past 48 hours, "is that both [GM and Chrysler] had a more than fair chance to prove they could present a realistic plan for survival. They didn’t come close."

And here was a shocker, embedded within the second reason provided for the administration's stick-over-carrot approach: "A White House spokesperson confirmed to Politico that the federal government’s loans to GM and Chrysler have no special priority in the bankruptcy process," which means taxpayers could be standing in a very long line for even partial recovery.

Oops. But wait, why my sensation of shock? That shouldn't be. After all, it was the criminally inept Bush regime that packaged the loans.

Reason Three: A supremely delicate calculation by Obama. He's "convinced that if AIG or some of the big banks collapsed, the economy could go down with them. That’s not the case with Chrysler, for sure, and probably GM, too." As one anonymous official explained, "There’s a feeling that the failure of these two autos is already priced into the market but that really shaking up the banks could be catastrophically risky."

Which reminded me of something I read years ago, in Bob Woodward, I think it was, on the earliest agonies of the Clinton administration. Trapped between its political aspirations and the demands of Wall Street, the White House in '93 caved to the latter; after a savage internal debate between its neoliberals and more traditional progressives, the administration decided it simply couldn't afford to risk a financial meltdown, so it pulled up on the reins.

As one participant among the progressive camp later observed -- and I'm just paraphrasing from shaky memory here -- If I come back in a second life, I want to come back as the bond market. Because it is that which has presidents by the short ones, and Clinton knew it.

After this immediate crisis, Obama's ultimate challenge lies in busting up such a powerful financial oligarchy -- one now more concentrated than ever, with the absorption or extermination of Lehman, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch. Otherwise we'll be right back where we started. Reagan got its worst manifestations rolling, Clinton facilitated them without later reforms, and God knows Bush II removed all restraints. Yet right now, this moment, is hardly the time to be setting off explosives on an already leaky ship.

Stick-over-carrot Reason Four was arrestingly blunt: "The bottom line for Obama -- and the auto industry -- is many people don’t want American-made cars." To wit, an auto-industry analyst appeared on "PBS Newshour" last night and offered this startling fact: 2005 was a boffo year for auto sales, yet GM somehow managed to lose more than $10 billion in the bonanza's midst.

Still, the utter lack of a domestic auto industry is unthinkable, hence the first-quoted Democratic official said that "for all the negative aspects of structured bankruptcy," the industry "will continue to exist in some form." The politics of Obama's inherited mess in the auto business alone -- which a White House adviser labeled "brutal" -- dictate that.

But the politics of it -- Reason Five -- could also dictate what some on the left would deny at their own risk: that populist outrage can and ordinarily does contribute to unintended, undesirable consequences (undesirable, that is, from the left's point of view).

"[Obama] was caught flat-footed by the AIG bonus uproar," the Politico observed, "but since then ... the White House [has] used a well-choreographed rollout to dominate the news-cycle ... with his tough love approach -- and present Obama as a fair-minded centrist when it comes to bailouts."

A White House adviser warned that "Taxpayers are already in revolt over spending all this [bailout] money."
And this is my express warning, not his: That revolt could easily convert to one over spending money, period -- and that means goodbye universal health care, goodbye educational improvements, goodbye federal investments in renewable energy.

It's clichéish as hell, but hellishly appropriate: Progressives of the populist variety are playing with fire.

AGREED!

For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Let The Sun Shine In......

Former Cheney Aide Suggests That Hersh’s Account Of ‘Executive Assassination Ring’ Is ‘Certainly True’

Last month, The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh revealed in Minnesota that former vice president Cheney presided over an “executive assassination ring.” “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving,” Hersh explained.

Today, CNN interviewed Hersh and former Cheney national security aide John Hannah. Although he expressed regret for revealing the story (calling it a “dumb-dumb”), Hersh stood by his initial statements. “I’m sorry, Wolf, I have a lot of problems with it,” he said about the assassination scheme:

HERSH: I know for sure…the idea that we have a unit that goes around, without reporting to Congress… and has authority from the President to go into the country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack somebody. … You’ve delegated authority to troops in the field to hit people on the basis of whatever intelligence they think is good.

Hannah replied that Hersh’s account of the assassination scheme “is not true.” Yet in the same breath, when asked about a “list” of assassination targets, Hannah echoed Hersh’s statements. Hannah said that “troops in the field” are given “authority” to “capture or kill certain individuals” who are perceived as a threat. “That’s certainly true,” he said:

Q: Is there a list of suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

HANNAH: There’s clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, interagency process…that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to our troops in the field in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

Hannah didn’t directly dispute Hersh’s claim that Congress wasn’t informed about the assassinations. “It is extremely hard for me to believe,” he said.





Speaking about the program to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said, “It’s potentially a war crime, it‘s potentially just outright murder, and it could clearly be in violation of the Ford executive order” — referring to a 1976 Executive Order that said, “No employee of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassination.”

Let The Sun Shine In......