Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday Feb. 17, 2009 11:55 EST
Lawrence Walsh and America's law-free zone
(updated below)
David Rivkin and Lee Casey are right-wing lawyers and former Reagan DOJ officials who, over the last eight years, have been extremely prolific in jointly defending Bush/Cheney theories of executive power. Today, they have one of their standard Op-Eds, this time in The Washington Post, demanding that there be no investigations or prosecutions of Bush officials. Most of the arguments they advance are the standard platitudes now composing Beltway conventional wisdom on this matter. But there is one aspect of their advocacy that is somewhat remarkable and worth noting.
<snip>
The implication of their argument -- which is now the conventional Beltway view -- is too obvious to require much elaboration. If our political leaders can't be held accountable for their war crimes and other serious felonies in foreign countries or international tribunals, and must never be held accountable in the U.S. either (because to do so is to "pour acid into our democratic machinery"), then it means that American political officials (in contrast to most other leaders) are completely and explicitly exempt from, placed above, the rule of law. That conclusion is compelled from their premises.
At least to me, it's just endlessly perplexing how anyone -- let alone our political class in unison -- could actually endorse such absolute lawlessness for political leaders. Didn't our opinion-making elites learn in the eighth grade that the alternative to a "nation of laws" was a "nation of men" -- i.e., the definition of tyranny? Those are the only two choices. It's just so basic.
Apparently, though, this is all fine with our political establishment, since none of this is new. Here's what Iran-contra prosecutor (and life-long Republican official) Lawrence Walsh said in 1992 after George H.W. Bush pardoned Casper Weinberger days before his trial was set to begin:
"President Bush's pardon of Caspar Weinberger and other Iran-contra defendants undermines the principle that no man is above the law. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office -- deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence...."
<snip>
Does anyone deny that we are exactly the country that Walsh described: one where "powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office -- deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence"? And what rational person could think that's a desirable state of affairs that ought not only be preserved -- but fortified still further-- as we move now to immunize Bush 43 officials for their far more serious and disgraceful crimes? As the Rivkin/Casey oeuvre demonstrates, we've created a zone of lawlessness around our highest political leaders and either refuse to acknowledge that we've done that or, worse, have decided that we don't really mind.
<more>
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/17/lawlessness/index.html
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