In a brief announcement earlier today that Monday's episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann would include a Special Comment that would encourage the Obama administration to prosecute the war crimes that we know Bush and Cheney have committed, he referred to Obama's reply to the question of prosecuting the Bush administration's war crimes. In the same breath, our next President stated he appreciates the importance of the rule of law but that he sees tension between justice and the need to "move forward" or "look forward" which would be an admirable attempt at consensus-building -- if the subject had been some sexual peccadilloes among or between consenting adults rather than matters of life and hundreds of thousands of deaths, 4,000 of which so far have been Americans serving in the military.
Keith has correctly said that moving forward, to any future worth the effort of going, requires upholding the law, now. The way he put it in this advertisement brought my attention to an angle I had really not yet considered sufficiently. Not even close. The words were something like "I agree we need to move forward, and that is why we do need to prosecute war crimes."
I cannot know until Monday if this was his intention, but it occurred to me while I considered the implication that "looking back" is not a valid reason to deny justice, that in fact all the arguments against prosecuting Bush and Cheney depend not on looking forward, but on looking back, and on the way that we look back to be exact. It was switching the role of "looking back" in the standard argument that triggered a very rapid realization that I had been overlooking something crucial. It was like an epiphany or an apotheosis, but I'll try to explain as linearly as possible what I've realized about the Bush administration's war crimes.
In the moment that the idea occurred to me that my subconscious revulsion at the past eight years makes me resistant against looking back closely at the nature and source of my own terror and acquiescence, I realized that this tendency in victims in general is their best defense strategy, and only real chance of not spending the rest of their lives in prison. The public record certainly doesn't help them. I looked back at my own memory of the interval in time that they ordered the unjust invasion of Iraq, wrote memos to the military that combatants in the "war on terror" are not protected by international laws governing the conduct of wars, and shoved the "Patriot Act" through Congress "legalizing" surveillance without warrants, thus in effect repealing every standard of proof that such surveillance is, has been, or will be ordered "only on probable cause." [Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment IV]
What I notice about those memories is that I have been terrorized by my own government, in statements now proven false, and I'm still somewhat embarrassed at having been conned. Those sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution have done more to undermine it than any foreign or domestic terrorist ever has, or could. The argument that we should not prosecute them is dependent, at its ugly primal base, on the fear that the Executive Branch systematically instilled in us, through the lies that we know they told: that Iraq poses a credible threat not only of attack but of a "mushroom cloud," that apprehending terrorists requires compromising the Fourth Amendment, and that prosecuting terrorists might depend on, or even be advanced an iota, by torturing suspects who we assume, or pretend to believe have important "operational details" of an imminent attack. In fact, the more imminent the attack, the less opportunity interrogators have to check any confessions against reality, making them more likely to exacerbate a situation or create one, based on non-existent plots invented under duress, just to interrupt the torture. Prosecution is only an open question because when many of us look back, we still see the past as we experienced it, terrorized. We now have the information to know that fear was misinformed, but once an emotion is evoked it can linger long beyond its original stimulus.
George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney are war criminals. Everybody knows this. During the course of their alleged global campaign against terrorists, their rhetoric has included generous use of pejoratives "terrorist," "extremist," "hate" and "tyranny," always directed outward. What has gotten far too little attention in the corporate media is the degree that such terms apply to our own soon-to-be-former President and Vice President. Consider all of the claims they have made that we now know to be absolutely false. Now, finally, the epiphany that prompted this post is that although we the citizens did not know it, they both did know at the time that the things they were telling us were completely false. My inability to empathize with either of them had obscured this significant implication of the self-evident facts in the matter of United States v. George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.
Applying scientific standards, specifically consistency with and the ability to explain observations, now consider their ongoing historical revision tour. The fact that they knew it was false from the very first time they said that Iraqi intelligence had met with al Qaeda member Muhammad Atta in Prague, is the missing link that makes some sense of Bush and Cheney's continuing denial of what has, in everybody else's mind, been utterly disproved. I came to an uncomfortable realization: George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney are not "only" murderous, sociopathic war criminals who absolve themselves of every "mistake" or "disappointment" in the guise of "national security," they are terrorist enemies of the United States, actively and deliberately pursuing curtailment of the liberties guaranteed by the United States, about which they unctuously babble. Their orders that laws against torture do not apply to al Qaeda, given what we now know, they knew at the time. Only we did not. Their orders led directly to torture of unaccused, untried terrorism suspects. A nation with a reputation as a torturer is known by all espionage and military experts to undermine the Executive Branch's obligations to "insure domestic tranquility" and "provide for the common defence." [Constitution of the United States of America, Preamble]
You and I now know that President George Walker Bush and Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney knowingly took actions harmful to the national defense. Both, in addition to their crimes against those they have labeled "terrorist suspects" have also provided material comfort to our real enemies. They are therefore both, unequivocally, traitors.