Obama proudly declared yesterday that ours is a “nation of laws” at the same time he announced that CIA torturers would not be prosecuted for their crimes.
Life in Washington is one damn paradox after another.
Kudos to the American Civil Liberties Union for their lawsuit that compelled the disclosure of the torture memos yesterday. But these are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and supporters of disclosing Bush-era crimes will have sufficient clout to force the government to reveal far more information on the torture scandal. Obama becomes complicit for all the crimes he covers up.
I will be curious to see if the revelations of how the Justice Department tortured the law and rationality to set loose the CIA will have any broader impact on how Americans view the federal government. I ain’t holdin’ my breath.
Bill Pearlman 
TomT 
TomB 
WRW 
Jim Bovard 
James Bovard wrote:
“Obama proudly declared yesterday that ours is a “nation of laws” at the same time he announced that CIA torturers would not be prosecuted for their crimes.”
You know, this site quite regularly gets posters who seem to equate any differences one might have with George Bush or Rush Limbaugh as being lovers of Teddy Kennedy or etc. And indeed because on any number of issues I have ventured to criticize Bush I’ve had one or two such posters direct that kind of wrath (or accusations at least) at me, with the most recent even accusing me of looking down at him.
But far from doing so in fact it just makes me exasperated and depressed a bit to see so many good, concerned people, often justifiably mad as hell, who in my opinion have been hoked into this or that unthinking polemical position by the likes of a Limbaugh or Hannity or etc. whose understanding of conservatism doesn’t seem to go beyond the ostentatious wearing of red-white-and-blue lapel pins.
And I do feel depressed a bit because even though I think they have been victims of the spectacularly obvious self-interest of the Limbaughs and Hannity’s to keep everyone in a constant state of hysteria, nevertheless they sense what I think is something obvious too: And that is that there *is* still a kind of gleeful jihad that some folks pursue against what are seen as traditional American values and institutions.
Most of that is on the Left of course, but, I have to say, when Bovard comes out and talks so blandly about “CIA torturers” and so clearly plumps for their prosecutions of the “crimes” he again so blandly just assumes occurred, this really rubs me the wrong way. In essence it smells to me the same way that Frank Church did back in the 1970′s gleefully waving around CIA dart-pistols that were never used and in essence just having a grand old time whacking at the Agency as a stalking horse in lieu of just being honest about his fundamentally McGovernite views about national security.
Bovard writes that he ain’t holding his breath that the revelations of these memos will spur “how Americans view the federal government” and for my part I’m tempted to say that I hope he would. Because I think that rather than succumb to seeing Bovard’s axe ground the American people will indeed recognize some basic truths.
And to me those truths are that while in the end the American people clearly choose not to continue with Mr. Bush’s policies he *was* the duly elected President at the time and the CIA is an executive-branch agency *specifically* set up to be used by Presidents. And there doesn’t seem to be a scintilla of evidence that anyone, least of all the CIA, went rogue and started doing things that they weren’t specifically asked if not ordered to do by the President. Indeed the evidence is that with many things, especially as regards taking off the gloves with captives, the CIA did exactly what the most fastidious would want and went to the federal government’s lawyers and asked what was within the law and what was without and then followed that fastidiously.
And yet … here we have Bovard, clearly drooling at the prospect of hauling some poor GS-13 or 14 CIA folks into the dock, without a thought apparently given to the *utter* lack of evidence that they were doing anything other than faithfully effectuating what our elected President wanted them to do, after their superiors and legal advisors told them it was okay.
I think Americans recognize this, and also recognize that when you aren’t talking about rogues you’re always going to have the pompous come along and try to trumpet their purity or whatever by still demanding that the little guy on the end of the stick get it in the neck even if the big boys really responsible are out happily clearing brush or fishing trout on their ranches.
And I think another truth the American people will recognize is that they don’t want their system to turn into some hyper-ideological joke country like so many communist ones were where, with every change in leader they spent the next several years purging and assailing and prosecuting the ideological deviants of the last administration in some endless internecine warfare like the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks or etc.
So what would Bovard have? If not every man a king then certainly every CIA officer a legal and constitutional scholar, right? All the while they’re living in some shithole of a country, probably far away from their families, nowhere near the Starbucks on Bovard’s street?
This isn’t to deny that there aren’t some serious issues here. Indeed some time ago there was a wonderful back and forth about same on this site spurred on by the always-thoughtful Phil Giraldi, and in the end even I had to agree that there were some sound arguments that maybe some prosecutions of some CIA people might in the end be warranted.
But thoughtfulness isn’t what I at least see in Bovard’s little contribution here. Instead it’s all “torturers” and assumed crimes and criminals and that ‘s a couple of bridges too far for me at least—and I suspect the American people too in their wisdom, regardless of the state of Bovard’s breathing.