You Cannot Pardon a Crime you Authorized

[Phred42]

Hope?
~~~~~~~~

You Cannot Pardon a Crime you Authorized

War Crimes of President Bush and His Subordinates

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11188

by Lawrence Velvel

Statement from the Steering Committee for the Prosecution for War Crimes of President Bush and His Subordinates

Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The closest thing to this in U.S. history thus far has been Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Bush is widely expected to follow that commutation with a pardon. Not only did Libby work for the White House, but he was convicted of obstruction of justice in an investigation that was headed to the president. Evidence introduced in the trial, including a hand-written note by the vice president, implicated Bush, and former Press Secretary Scott McClellan has since testified that Bush authorized the exposure of an undercover agent, that being the crime that was under investigation.

There are widespread concerns that Bush might pardon other subordinates for various crimes that he authorized, potentially including torture, warrantless spying, a variety of war crimes, taking the nation to war on fraudulent evidence, and the abuses of the politicized Justice Department. Voices in the media advising Bush to issue such pardons include: Stuart Taylor Jr. (Newsweek 7/12/08) and Alan Dershowitz (Wall Street Journal 9/12/08), while many additional voices have urged Obama to commit to not prosecuting.

The idea that the pardon power constitutionally includes such pardons ignores a thousand year tradition in which no man can sit in judgment of himself, and the fact that James Madison and George Mason argued that the reason we needed the impeachment power was that a president might some day try to pardon someone for a crime that he himself was involved in. The problem is not preemptive pardons of people not yet tried and convicted. The problem is not blanket pardons of unnamed masses of people. Both of those types of pardons have been issued in the past and have their appropriate place. The problem is the complete elimination of any semblance of the rule of law if Bush pardons his subordinates for crimes he instructed or authorized them to commit.

If Bush attempts this, here are possible responses:

[Stuff213]

1. Actually if you have people who refused to do anything about it. You can.

[Blarch]

4. Yep.

Hence, Nixon, Bush sr. ...and now Jr.

When the Dems do nothing, they set precedent for future violations, and the pubs take full advantage.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. fred, how can you even think that?

Name one time that Bush has played by the rules. I honestly cannot think of one. I think that the only reason he has not been impeached is because he and his cabal have been so bad, so lawless, so obscenely self-dealing and criminal in so many ways, that the sheer numbers of crimes and misdemeanors have shocked the Congress into an almost coma-like state.

[FarCenter]

3. Possibly true, but impossible to prevent

If Bush pardons his subordinates, then they can't be prosecuted first. You would have to first prove that Bush authorized their crimes.

But this takes away the usual method of developing a case, which is to go after the lower levels of a criminal conspiracy and get their cooperation to work your way up the heirarchy. Without being able to work this way, it is pretty hopeless to get to Bush and Cheney.

[atimetocome]

5. Its not a crime till the courts say so. So, why the discussion of

pardons?

[TahitiNut]

6. So, Cheney/Bush will merely commit another "cannot." What else is new?

Torture. Habeas Corpus. Unprovoked invasion ov a sovereign nation based on lies. Rendition. Pillage. Warrantless wiretapping.

The list is virtually endless.

And still "We The People" allow them to go unpunished.

We don't deserve self-governance.

[Stuff213]

7. How the media talks about torture and the rule of law

How the media talks about torture and the rule of law


Yesterday, The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti, in reporting on John Brennan's withdrawal from consideration for a top intelligence post, wrote:

The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.

I quoted that paragraph yesterday to show how the establishment media is acknowledging the role blogs played in this episode, prompting Billmon to materialize in the comment section and make this point:

Glenn should have noted the sly way that asshole Mazzetti slides from "the CIA's secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base" -- because, of course, only those wacko lefties worry about war crimes -- to the completely bogus assertion that said concerns have made it "difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone . . . who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since 9/11" (emphasis mine).

So, according to the New Pravda (sometimes known as the New York Times) to criticize crimes against humanity is to oppose the entire campaign against the people responsible for 9/11. Dick Cheney couldn't have put it better.

Now THAT'S some sleazy journalism we can believe in.

Digby noted the same passage and made a similar point: that to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda." And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence: "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture." As Sullivan notes: "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"

All of this underscores a crucial fact: a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?source=rss