Bruce Fein served as an associate deputy attorney general from 1981 to 1982 in the Reagan administration. He's no Democrat out for venageance. He's committed to the rule of law, and if you want an eloquent, clearheaded articulation of what's at stake here, and how nauseating it is that the Obama administration is even hesitating on this, watch this show or read the transcript here. Suggest to anyone you know who's on the fence about this to watch this show; it destroys any counterargument about pursuing investigations and prosecutions.
To those who fear such investigations and prosecutions will lead to a politicized media circus like that which surrounded the Clinton impeachment, Fein's idea that Obama should grant pardons to Cheney and Bush might be worth thinking about. It would at least recognize that they broke the law. And then it would be important to move ahead with investigations and prosecutionsa of other key officials who were essential to the design and implementation of this policy. Once again, this isn't about vengeance or even about some rigid application of the absolute justice; it's about making sure it doesn't happen again. I don't care if Bush or Cheney does jail time–Nixon didn't. I just want Bush and Cheney to go down in history as publicly acknowledged criminals who dishonored our country and the constitution the swore to protect. They should be thought of in the future as worse than Nixon, whose crimes didn't even come close in seriousness to those of this current lot.
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UPDATE: Larison on the same subject:
I would add that the recourse to past crimes to evade accountability for new crimes is a good argument in favor of enforcing strict accountability for crimes recently committed. If such crimes are permitted to go unpunished, their apologists will continue to work overtime to shape the debate in later years and decades in favor of the decisions leading up to those crimes, and the more time goes by the apologist will be able to fall back on one unassailable retort: “If this was a crime, why didn’t anyone in the government investigate and prosecute it as such?” Having warned against witch hunts and “criminalizing policy differences” in the beginning to intimidate the responsible institutions into inaction, the apologists will then remind the public that no charges were ever filed and no convictions were secured.
So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted.
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