Let this all sink in for a moment: It's 2005. The President of the United States has been running an illegal covert intelligence-gathering operation for years. Two Attorneys General and most senior officials in the Justice Department have been involved in the crime, and key members of Congress have been briefed on it, are fully aware of it, and hence are complicit in serial violations of federal law. The degree of lawlessness is so pervasive among multiple branches of government, and the sense of impunity among the lawbreakers so pervasive, that the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee actually volunteers to lend the weight of her office to possibly derail a lawful investigation of espionage---the betrayal of state secrets to a foreign power---and who is in turn rescued by an Attorney General who views her as a useful tool to provide cover for his own lawbreaking.
In this environment, is it really any wonder the Bradbury memos of 2005 were written, or that the kinds of torture described by them were carried out? Having granted themselves total immunity from any legal repercussions for any kind of behavior---even acts that could jeopardize the security of the Republic---why shouldn’t these people have done what they did? Who was ever going to stop them?
And this is why Obama’s decision---if true---not to instigate any criminal investigations into the possibility of war crimes is a serious, serious mistake. For Obama to simply give the Bush administration policymakers who cultured and spread the corrosive virus of corruption and lawbreaking that infected the entire executive and legislative branches, and which bequeathed us a legacy of wars launched under false pretenses, politicization of government agencies, and wholesale violations of the most basic human rights, is to effectively put his own seal of approval on what was the single unifying theory behind Bush administration governance.Obama may be an ethical man who won’t countenance such behaviors from members of his own administration, and history will be charitable enough to him for this tender mercy. But he won’t be president forever, and someone needs to remind him that his inaction to draw a line in the sand now is tantamount to giving President Palin, or President Boehner, or some other Republican dingbat executive in the year 2018 a green light to do the same exact things, time and again, free from worry that any future administration will ever hold them accountable for their actions. That’s the lesson to be learned from Watergate, from Iran-Contra, and from eight years of the Bush crime syndicate---the way to stop lawbreaking in our executive branch is not with pardons, clemencies, and get-out-of-jail cards issued under the guise of "looking forward"; it’s with grand juries, subpoenas, testimony, jury trials and, if necessary, jail time for the guilty parties. Simply allowing this kind of felonious behavior to escape any semblance of accountability only invites it to reoccur in the future---and if the last 40 years of American history have been any guide, the chances are it probably will.
Update (4/21): Looks as though the White House is keeping its options open after all. Good for them.
---Vitelius
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