Working out the recent past in the US

In my previous post, I ended by commenting that a real set of prosecutions is needed for criminal acts both in domestic affairs and foreign policy during the current administration. The Democrats shouldn't flinch from such a thing and the Democratic base needs to demand it.

Mark Kleiman in Truth and Reconciliation 12/17/07 at his Reality-Based Community blog suggests:

The new President should ask Congess to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, empowered to subpoena records and witnesses, hold public hearings, and dismiss officials guilty of misconduct in office or appointed by improper means. And the Commission should have power to inquire into Congressional as well as Executive behavior, and to refer Congressional misconduct back to the Houses for appropriate disciplinary action. (That avoids the "speech and debate" problem.)

The key is using the criminal law only as a backstop: the Commission should be able to offer complete immunity from criminal prosecution for anyone who testifies fully and frankly, but impose complete liability for perjury or obstruction on anyone who fails to do so.

We don't really want to see Dick Cheney's ass in prison (well, part of me does, but not the better part of me); we want the wrongdoing of this crowd exposed and the civil servants they have "burrowed in" purged. We want a "lustration," a de-Ba'athification. Appointing T&RC does that. If the Republicans in Congress want to vote against "an end to the politics of personal destruction," they can be my guest. (my emphasis underlined)

I'm fully in sympathy with the notion that there needs to be some formal process involving the national government to promote real reflection and understanding about the Cheney-Bush period.

But what we do not need is some carefully-balanced "bipartisan" commission to has through these issues and have Bob Kerrey and Jim Baker come out at the end and say, "Problems occurred, and some unfortunate things were done. But now we need to look to the future and let the national healing begin." That's pretty much what happened post-Vietnam War and post-Watergate, under the great healer Jerry Ford and his chiefs of staff Rummy and Dick Cheney. All it did was keep the anti-Constiutional current in the Republican party robust and determined to get their chance to take the Nixon administration's authoritarian tendencies even further. The Cheney-Bush administration was the major result.

Yes, let's have Congressional investigations and maybe even "truth commissions" and historians' committees and so on. But Cheney and Bush and their administration have committed serious crimes in a wide variety of ways, from the Iraq War to the apparently unlimited electronic surveillance programs to the disgraceful torture policy. Those crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. If Bush hands out blanket pardons all around before he leaves office, refer the cases to the International Criminal Court where American law can't reach through the pardons. Without that or something very like it, the new Dick Cheneys and Karl Roves and Scooter Libbys and John Boltons will still be considered respectable citizens among their fellow Republicans and will work to bring back the current form of Republican rule in an even more virulent form as soon as they can.

No doubt, the Democrats were not nearly aggressive enough in fighting Cheney and Bush on their worst actions. But this is not a bipartisan problem that somehow affects every American equally. To genuinely avoid this happening again, it's very specifically the Republican Party and our pathetic mainstream press that have to come to a real recognition that preventive war and torture and illegal surveillance and outing CIA agents for cheap political payback and partisan prosecutions and all the rest of shameful behavior of this administration are wrong and it's their responsibility to defend Constitutional freedoms and the rule of law just as much as it is everybody else's.

We've seen in the last decade and a half how an authoritarian can override the checks and balances in the Constitution through a combination of party discipline, contempt for the rule of law and the massive use of fear. The Democrats need to learn how to fight this kind of thing better. The Republicans and the Establishment press need to learn that crime doesn't pay.

We need meaningful prosecutions, not just a nicey-nice commission to issue a toothless report with vague platitudes.

Digby in The Revenge Wing Hullabaloo 12/17/07 endorses Kleiman's truth commission idea. But she also states the problem much more directly:

But the truth is that we [Democrats] are actually just the same old civil libertarian, constitution loving, safety net promoting, tolerant, pluralist liberals we've always been. The problem is that the conservative movement went way too far these last 15 years or so and now the country needs to sort out the terrible mess they've made.

The Reps will scream that this is a "partisan" prosecution. But there are ways to avoid the substance of a partisan prosecution, such as the use of special prosecutors.

But when the actions at issue stem from Republicans overriding the law based on their partisan-political goals, the impact will fall largely on Republican perpetrators. But without that, they'll be back in business running an administration and setting policy, the way so many of the key players in the Iran-Contra scandal were in the current administration. This is serious stuff that goes to the heart of Constitutional government in the United Staes. Neither a formal "bipartisanship" nor the squeamishness of the national press corps about prosecutions against officials whose policies they often admired and abetted should prevent a Democratic administration from proceeding with serious criminal investigations.

I'm still stunned by Glenn Greenwald's recent defense of far-right Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. But Greenwald is SADLY on the mark in The Lawless Surveillance State Salon 12/16/07 when he writes:

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful - precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values. As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that - like so many others we've detained and tortured - he was guilty of nothing.

This doesn't mean there is a complete erosion of freedom equal to all of those societies. Free speech still basically thrives; we elect our leaders; and individuals retain a fair amount of autonomy in their personal choices. But it is simply undeniable that many of the political attributes that were always used to define the oppressive societies against which we were supposedly fighting are now explicitly vested in our own government. By itself, the scope and breadth of domestic spying is just staggering, and much of it is illegal.

No speculation or inferences or rhetorical flourishes are necessary to reach these conclusions. Just go read what has been disclosed about what our government is doing in the dark, with no oversight and in violation of our laws - and the ways in which our political and media class work feverishly to defend and enable it all - and there really is no other conclusion which a rational person can reach. In a country that lived under minimal notions of the rule of law, the very idea of having Congress pass a special law to immunize retroactively an entire industry which illegally spied on us, on our own soil, for years would be inconceivable. Yet even in the face of these latest revelations of just how broad and brazen this lawbreaking is, that is, in the absence of unexpected developments, quite likely what is about to happen. (my emphasis underlined)

Fortunately, Chris Dodd's courageous opposition to the telecom amnesty bill has derailed that effort for the moment.

It will take many more actions like Dodd's to get the Consitutional system functioning correctly again. And a big part of that effort will be rolling back the open-ended sense of fear and permanent war that Cheney and Bush have made the center of their governing style.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, digby, glenn greenwald, mark kleiman