Intro. If the journal that follows looks familiar, you are not experiencing
déjà vu . I wrote a journal almost exactly like this one called
Nuremberg USA: Impeach Now So It Will Never Happen Again just about one year ago today. Since Congress did not do its job, our newly elected President has the task of preventing future presidents from carrying forward the policies that Dick Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have enacted to strip this country’s citizens of their Constitutional liberties under guise of protecting us from (phantom) threats abroad or at home. Call it the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism or the Cold War or the Vietnam War, the conflict is always the same----an endless exercise in futility against an enemy which is poorly defined on a battlefield that seems to be far away but which is, in fact, located in our own living rooms. The goal is the consolidation of power in the executive branch and the weakening of the legislative and judicial branches so that the corporations which run this country need only buy one individual, a puppet leader, and tell him how he will make us make more money for them.
I am going to make a prediction right now. The same people who cheered at the thought of dragging W. and Cheney from the White House are going to offer a great big
Hold on there--- when I suggest that the current administration needs to take the first steps towards limiting the unchecked executive powers which previous administrations have seized for themselves.
But that is our guy in the White House, now. It’s our power. We can limit those executive privileges the next time the Republicans win an election. Obama needs all the help he can get. .
That kind of thinking is exactly what the next Republican coup is counting on.
Nuremberg USA, Again “The trail of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the American Dream. The importance of Nixon now is not merely to get rid of him; that’s strictly political consideration…The real question is why we are forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections…The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the Nuremberg trials forced Germany to confront itself…” Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag 1974 The Great Shark Hunt
Would the history of the American West have been different if the Andersonville Trial had been different? What a silly question. The mind of the United States would have to be different for that to happen. Especially in its early days, this country had a slash and burn mentality. You don’t like the place you are or what you have? Cut it down, pack up your belongings and move west to start over again.
Though Swiss born Confederate Major Henry Wirz made a convenient scapegoat for the 13,000 Union soldiers who died at Andersonville Prison from exposure, disease and violence, he was hardly the only one in the Confederate Army making decisions. Someone higher up chose to continue overcrowding the facility built for many fewer, someone chose to under supply it. Union forces chose not to bargain harder for their prisoners’ release. Lots of things were done during time of war for the sake of expediency. War brings out the worst in everyone. And after the war is over, it is easier to pick out one or two “bad apples”, say “He is an abomination! Inhuman! None of us would ever act like that!” The chosen scapegoat is tossed into the sacrificial fire, and we are cleansed of our collective guilt, free to go out and do it again. And again.
http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/civilwar/p/andersonville.htmMeanwhile, on a Civil War battlefield far to the west in Sandcreek, Colorado
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_Massacre Black Kettle, a chief of a group of around 800 mostly Southern Cheyennes, reported to Fort Lyon in an effort to declare peace. After having done so, he and his band, along with some Arapahos under Chief Left Hand, camped out at nearby Sand Creek, less than 40 miles north. The Dog Soldiers, who had been responsible for much of the conflict with whites, were not part of this encampment. Assured by the U.S. Government's promises of peace, Black Kettle sent most of his warriors to hunt, leaving only around 60 men in the village, most of them too old or too young to participate in the hunt. Black Kettle flew an American flag over his lodge since previously he had been assured that this practice would keep him and his people safe from U.S. soldiers' aggression.<11>
Setting out from Fort Lyon, Colonel Chivington and his 800 troops of the First Colorado Cavalry, Third Colorado Cavalry and a company of First New Mexico Volunteers marched to Black Kettle's campsite. On the night of November 28, soldiers and militia drank heavily and celebrated their anticipated victory.<12> On the morning of November 29, 1864, Chivington ordered his troops to attack. One officer, Captain Silas Soule refused to follow Chivington's order and told his men to hold fire. Other soldiers in Chivington's force, however, immediately attacked the village. Disregarding the American flag, and a white flag that was run up shortly after the soldiers commenced firing, Chivington's soldiers massacred the majority of its mostly unarmed inhabitants.
snip
Between 150 and 200 Indians were estimated killed, nearly all elderly men, women and children. In testimony before a Congressional committee investigating the massacre, Chivington reported that as many as 500-600 Indian warriors were killed..
Snip
During these investigations, numerous witnesses came forward with damning testimony, almost all of which was substantiated by other witnesses. At least one of those witnesses, Captain Silas Soule, was murdered in Denver just weeks after offering his testimony. However, despite the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the Wars' recommendation, justice was never served on those responsible for the massacre. A Civil War memorial installed at the Colorado Capitol in 1909 listed the Sand Creek massacre as one of the Union's great victories.
The massacre shows us the darkest side of the American dream. The fact that forty years later, we could call it a "great Union victory" tells us something that should be almost as frightening. We do not learn from our mistakes. If at all possible, we like to forget about them, so that we can go on repeating them.
We did it over and over again on countless battlefields against the indigenous peoples of this land and then in the reservations where they were forced to live. I have to wonder, if the people of the nineteenth century had been the kind of people to sit down and reflect upon how it was that Andersonville Prison came to be----how the generals on both sides reached the conclusion that it was better to let prisoners of war rot to death in violation of all previous standards of warfare than to try to work out a compromise which might jeopardize temporary military gain---if maybe we would have been the kind of people who would have had second thoughts about doing what we did in the American west.
So, what does any of this have to do with Nixon or Nuremberg or indicting all the criminals---the ones who tortured and spied and broke the law in the Justice Department and stole from the military--- within the Bush administration? Once the west was won, we “forgave” the indigenous people. We even began to idealize them. Since there was no more land to steal to get rich quick, robber barons began to get rich off the labor of other human beings. Families like the Rockefellers started a new kind of warfare. When they took the war abroad as capitalist-colonialists, Americans either cheered them on or grumbled about soldiers dying to make rich men richer. When they fought the wars on US soil by dividing and conquering the working class, Americans either cheered them on or grumbled. And “that’s”, to quote Walter Cronkite, “the way it was” for over the last one hundred years. That's the way it is right now. Your son or daughter is dying in Iraq so that the misbegotten progeny of Standard Oil can stake a claim to that country's crude. It was planned that way as long ago as the 1970s, way back when the NeoCons were still Democrats under the wing of Scoop Jackson, the Senator from Boeing.
America is not the only country with a capitalist elite. Nazi Germany rose to power, in part, because of its big business. You need tanks and tires and chemicals to fight a war. The Nazis had Flick, Farben and Krupp among others. I mention these three uber-rich families and their mega-companies, because each family and each company had its own Nuremberg Trial, just like the Judges and Doctors and every other group which facilitated the Nazi’s schemes.
I suspect that this is what Thompson was referring to when he wrote that the Nixon trials would be the U.S. equivalent of our Nuremberg Trials, in which the American Dream would be exposed. The old fashioned American way of dealing with problems like Richard Nixon was to sweep them under the rug. Kick him out of office in disgrace, arrange a pardon so that his actual crimes---and especially the identities of his co-conspirators in high places, such as the business community—could never be revealed. Ensure that the mechanisms that he used to steal power are left in place so that the same methods can be used again, as Noam Chomsky so presciently noted in 1973:
“But the conditions that permitted the rise of McCarthy and Nixon endure. Fortunately for us and for the world, McCarthy was a mere thug and Nixon's mafia overstepped the bounds of acceptable trickery and deceit with such obtuseness and blundering vulgarity that they were called to account by powerful forces that had not been demolished or absorbed. But sooner or later, under the threat of political or economic crisis, some comparable figure may succeed in creating a mass political base, bringing together socioeconomic forces with the power and the finesse to carry out plans such as those that were conceived in the Oval Office. Only perhaps he will choose his domestic enemies more judiciously and prepare the ground more thoroughly.” Noam Chomsky Watergate: A Skeptical View The New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973
The Nuremberg Trials could have stopped at the first phase, in which the Nazis leaders like Goring and Hess were tried.
However, someone wisely decided that it might be a good idea to make sure that the same thing did not happen again. After all, a Goring and a Hitler and a Von Ribbentrop do not an Auschwitz build. Not without a lot of help from people who know exactly what they are doing.
So, the Allies went further, exposing the people in power who could not claim to have been forced or threatened to participate in the Nazi’s atrocities. Doctors who performed inhuman experiments. Judges who sentenced people for bogus crimes like mental retardation. Members of death squads who might argue that they were just carrying out orders. And businessmen who knowingly used slave labor.
Funny thing.
The prosecution of the businessmen and corporations was never as popular with either the Germans or the Americans as the prosecutions of the others. Note how light the sentences of these slave masters were and how quickly they were released from prison and how quickly they regained their place in society. And most businessmen never were tried.
http://books.google.com/books?id=h-QM56pLM-gC&pg=PR18&lpg=PR18&dq=flick+farben+krupp&source=web&ots=FkxO60gJhP&sig=b6Uc6ChS-9zdWSgGQ0PkX5o3IokIt is pretty common knowledge that companies like Farben had dealings with American companies, and that some of our richest, most respected families, like the Rockefellers and Bushes barely got off by the skin of their teeth when the U.S. government investigated them for their participation in assisting the rise of Germany’s war machine. Unfortunately for us,
by the skin of their teeth was enough to keep corporate giants in power, practicing the worst, most unAmerican kind of business. Check out the two American banks accused of being German collaborators in this document.
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_11.htmNote that George W. Bush chose to lavish extremely large sums of bailout money on two banks. One was Hank Paulson’s bank, Goldman Sach’s---we can all understand that. The other lucky bank was Chase Morgan. As you can see from the last link,
both Chase and Morgan were likely collaborators with Germany during WWII. No doubt they got special treatment last fall, because they knew all the dirt about the Bush family collaboration with the Nazis, and because they share the same corporate fascist ideology. Makes you wonder how much of that bailout money will go right back into the campaign coffers of extreme right wing candidates attempting to defeat our newly elected president in 2012. Maybe that is why the banks insist upon paying those big bonuses to their executives. Bank execs may be writing campaign contributions to the GOP at this very moment with bonus money they got from the U.S. taxpayer last fall.
But how are we going to discover the truth in a country which reveres the almighty dollar, and where the CEOs of the companies which deal in money are treated like an elite caste?
We all know what Nixon did wrong. He had an enemies list. He fed Ed Muskie LSD. He cussed in the White House. How much time do the historians and journalists spend talking about the businessmen and corporations that backed Tricky Dick? Nixon did not get to where he was in 1972 simply by creating an enemies list and telling the IRS to audit the people on it. Nor could the Plumbers burglarize every office of every journalist or whistleblower or whistleblower’s psychiatrist. Nixon needed money. Lots of it. Where did he get his cash? What did he do in exchange for it? These are the kinds of secrets that would have come out during comprehensive trials.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pubs/history/history2.html A turning point in campaign finance history took place after the scandalous "Watergate election" of 1972, in which President Nixon's re-election committee received millions of dollars in secret, and often illegal, donations from, among others, Robert Vesco ($200,000 cash delivered in an attaché case), Howard Hughes ($100,000 contribution purportedly via a locked safe deposit box belonging to Nixon's long-time friend, Bebe Rebozo), Clement Stone ($73,000 reported, $2 million unreported) and, according to a 1974 Senate Select Committee, "at least 13 corporations" and their "foreign subsidiaries" (which made over $780,000 in "illegal corporate contributions").
Sound bad? It was actually much worse than that. This next source says that over 300 corporations gave money to Nixon, that only a handful were convicted and that they paid token fines of around $2000. Good luck finding any of their names. Gulf Oil, one of the few mentioned, claims that Nixon held a loaded gun to its head. Yeah, right. At the same time he was exploring South East Asia for oil?
http://books.google.com/books?id=uNM9ybnZxj8C&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=illegal+corporate+contributions+to+nixon&source=web&ots=2ZAYRycVrr&sig=mpiUSsXnIQ67Khz9hqdFES7wyOw#PPA159,M1The Nixon trials had to be shut down fast. Too many important people were being compromised. Ford’s pardon and the American people’s
Tomorrow is Another Day tendency was just the ticket. Then, since Ford was now compromised, it was time to use the presidential election as the final touch on the ritual purification ceremony by which America would officially proclaim
Out with the old, In with the new. Guess who backed Jimmy Carter and his
Change candidacy in 1976? Guess who is widely rumored to be the bag man for George Herbert Walker Bush’s Hostages for Votes deal in 1980? David Rockefeller. If you can convince the American public that they have used the all powerful voting lever to magically get rid of the problem, then you do not need to actually do anything to fix the problem.
That leaves the mechanism for another executive coup in place.This is where Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and all the other recycles from the Nixon administration come in. They did not waste any time overthrowing the U.S. Constitution. Forget about burglaries and IRS audits.
From day one it was domestic spying with AT&T screening every single telephone call, fax and email in the whole god damned country. If you had blackmail information on everyone, then even Congress with its power to investigate and write legislation was no problem. Karl Rove took care of the press, which proved to be Richard Nixon’s downfall, by bribing them with FCC favors. In exchange for their assistance in selling the War of Choice with Iraq, they got a June, 2003 decree by Michael Powell of the FCC allowing expanded media mergers. In exchange for attacking Kerry, crucifying Rather and ignoring Ohio 2004 they were promised that the administration would appeal a federal court challenge of Powell’s administrative decree all the way to the Supreme Court. (The promise turned out to be a lie, one of Karl Rove’s big mistakes. Hell hath no fury and all that.) The all important Article II Clause was invoked on 9/11.
Noam Chomsky was correct in 1973 when he said that McCarthy and Nixon were just test runs and that the same forces that tried to stage an executive coup with them would try again.
And now that they have failed once again, with the Republicans out and Obama and the Democrats in, they will do everything in their power to make sure that the mechanism which is in place to let them seize power in a democracy remains in place---because they fully intend to try and try again. Here I should note that Nixon, Reagan-Bush, Bush-Cheney---the three Republican administrations that have each whittled away at our Constitution---came to power through illegal backroom negotiations that amounted in each case to political coups. Kissinger, who was supposed to be negotiating peace in Vietnam for President Johnson, made a secret deal between Nixon and South Vietnam to destroy the peace agreement so that the close election would be thrown in Nixon’s favor. Everyone knows by now about the hostages for votes deal in 1980. And W. was selected by five members of the Supreme Court not elected.
We can tell ourselves
We will never elect another Bush-Cheney , but we will not be allowed to vote against them. When the corporations select them, they will also find a way to install them in office. That is why the office itself must be returned to its original function. The president does not have the power to write legislation through administrative decree. He can not start wars. He can not spy or lie or torture at will---or tell his employees to it for him. He has to obey the law---and there must be accountability if he fails to do so. Otherwise, he becomes Caligula in the service of companies like the ones who have been selling us adjustable rate mortgages and oil at $4 a gallon.
One way to return the office of the president to its original function is to prosecute all of those who committed crimes because they were
just following executive orders . If employees of future administrations know that they will be held liable for criminals acts which they commit, even if President Jeb Bush tells them to commit them, they will think twice. This was the principle of Nuremberg. Had the Allies prosecuted only the Nazi leaders, there would have been nothing to stop the next genocide---or the spread of fascism--- for soldiers could have claimed
I was only following orders. Everyone must be held accountable for their actions. No one is forced to torture another human being. No one can be made to racially profile. You can not be required to discriminate on the basis of religion. These statements are especially true of civilians, who always have the power to quit their job if they are being required to break the law.
If we offer a blanket amnesty for those who followed orders and broke the law and violated the civil liberties of others---and whose careers prospered as a result---when the next puppet dictator is installed, there will be twice as many eager employees ready to torture and wiretap and deny equal opportunity. Bush-Cheney found so many willing helpers, because we failed to punish those who aided Reagan and Nixon in their dirty deeds in Central America and Chile.
We need Nuremberg, USA, the way that a cancer patient sometimes needs chemotherapy. It may not be fun while it is happening. Americans may not like what they are seeing. However, citizens of the United States are not nearly as fragile or as idealistic as some would have us believe. I think more than anything else, they are sick and tired of hearing bullshit from their elected officials. If someone in Washington got up and said “We are now going to start telling the truth.” I think they would applaud. The Watergate hearings were the hottest show on television back in the summer of 1973. Think of how much better they would be this time around if they actually accomplished something lasting.
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