Apr 2009
A Special Prosecutor for Torture?
Should the Department of Justice or a special prosecutor prosecute the Bush administration officials responsible for the authorization of torture? David Corn explores the problems in a thoughtful article on the Mother Jones web site.
The question is “What do we want?” Do we want to know what really happened, or do we want convictions? We may not be able to get both.
As Corn points out, Patrick Fitzgerald unearthed far more wrongdoing than he was able to disclose, due to the rules and regulations that control the prosecutor’s office. Since he concluded that he did not have enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rove, Chaney and a number of other officials were guilty of crimes, the evidence he had collected could not be disclosed. His hands were tied.
In other words, if the Obama administration prosecutes we may get neither truth nor convictions.
Congressional hearings and even independent commissions have their weaknesses, too. The members of the 9/11 Commission were clearly chosen to favor the government’s version of events and to ignore evidence that conflicted with the that version.
Congressional hearings can turn into three-ring circuses when the stakes are high and one party feels threatened. When members of both parties are compromised, the truth will never emerge.
As I mentioned the other day, Obama’s decision to release the secret memos authorizing torture was most likely designed to test the level of outrage among the public, and thus enable him to gauge the support that he would receive were he to prosecute.
Prosecuting the previous administration carries serious political risks, not the least of which is that the Supreme Court could declare the president immune from prosecution for acts taken in his capacity as commander-in-chief on matters of national security. If you think this is far-fetched, consider that in 2000 the court , on specious legal grounds, stopped the vote recount in Florida and thus determined the outcome of the presidential election in favor of George Bush. The justices appointed since then, having been ideologically vetted before being nominated by Bush and confirmed by a Republican Senate, have not demonstrated that they would have any more scruples about stretching the Constitution to protect Bush and Cheney from prosecution.
It’s a tough question. The only workable solution may be truth and reconciliation commissions modeled partially after South Africa. Persons who are willing to appear before a commission and confess their crimes get a break, ranging from amnesty in the least serious cases, to a reduced sentence in the more heinous ones.
There are serious moral and legal problems inherent with truth commissions, however. As a general proposition, persons who have abused the public trust should not be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions, especially when their misdeeds have resulted in the death and suffering of so many innocent persons. To persuade guilty parties to submit to the commissions, the government must be willing to back up such commissions by prosecuting those who either refuse to appear, perjure themselves, or hold back from telling the entire truth.
Individuals without remorse would have to face the full force of the criminal law. This would probably involve, at the very least, putting Dick Cheney on trial, as he is unlikely to ever admit wrongdoing.
The question is “What do we want?” Do we want to know what really happened, or do we want convictions? We may not be able to get both.
As Corn points out, Patrick Fitzgerald unearthed far more wrongdoing than he was able to disclose, due to the rules and regulations that control the prosecutor’s office. Since he concluded that he did not have enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rove, Chaney and a number of other officials were guilty of crimes, the evidence he had collected could not be disclosed. His hands were tied.
In other words, if the Obama administration prosecutes we may get neither truth nor convictions.
Congressional hearings and even independent commissions have their weaknesses, too. The members of the 9/11 Commission were clearly chosen to favor the government’s version of events and to ignore evidence that conflicted with the that version.
Congressional hearings can turn into three-ring circuses when the stakes are high and one party feels threatened. When members of both parties are compromised, the truth will never emerge.
As I mentioned the other day, Obama’s decision to release the secret memos authorizing torture was most likely designed to test the level of outrage among the public, and thus enable him to gauge the support that he would receive were he to prosecute.
Prosecuting the previous administration carries serious political risks, not the least of which is that the Supreme Court could declare the president immune from prosecution for acts taken in his capacity as commander-in-chief on matters of national security. If you think this is far-fetched, consider that in 2000 the court , on specious legal grounds, stopped the vote recount in Florida and thus determined the outcome of the presidential election in favor of George Bush. The justices appointed since then, having been ideologically vetted before being nominated by Bush and confirmed by a Republican Senate, have not demonstrated that they would have any more scruples about stretching the Constitution to protect Bush and Cheney from prosecution.
It’s a tough question. The only workable solution may be truth and reconciliation commissions modeled partially after South Africa. Persons who are willing to appear before a commission and confess their crimes get a break, ranging from amnesty in the least serious cases, to a reduced sentence in the more heinous ones.
There are serious moral and legal problems inherent with truth commissions, however. As a general proposition, persons who have abused the public trust should not be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions, especially when their misdeeds have resulted in the death and suffering of so many innocent persons. To persuade guilty parties to submit to the commissions, the government must be willing to back up such commissions by prosecuting those who either refuse to appear, perjure themselves, or hold back from telling the entire truth.
Individuals without remorse would have to face the full force of the criminal law. This would probably involve, at the very least, putting Dick Cheney on trial, as he is unlikely to ever admit wrongdoing.
Comments
Poor Obama!
Poor Obama! He made the egregious mistake of releasing secret memos written by legal prostitutes in the Bush administration justifying torture, and now, as a result, pressure is building for legislative, possibly criminal, investigations of said whores and the higher officials who ordered the memos.
Obama could have saved himself all this trouble with the judicious use of a shredder and some Cheneyesque stonewalling.
Now it’s too late. He may eventually be forced, kicking and screaming, to authorize criminal investigations, and, heaven forbid, even prosecutions.
He should have known that this would happen.
Obama could have saved himself all this trouble with the judicious use of a shredder and some Cheneyesque stonewalling.
Now it’s too late. He may eventually be forced, kicking and screaming, to authorize criminal investigations, and, heaven forbid, even prosecutions.
He should have known that this would happen.
Candidates Answer Green Survey
Apr 23, 2009 18:36 Filed in: Local
Candidates for municipal offices in Jackson were asked to share with readers their vision and plan fir moving the City of Jackson toward more efficient and sustainable use of natural resources. Here are the results.
Some of the answers are very thoughtful, others perfunctory, and one clearly shows its author to be a Swiftian yahoo. I guess that’s par for the course.
Some of the answers are very thoughtful, others perfunctory, and one clearly shows its author to be a Swiftian yahoo. I guess that’s par for the course.
Sunday Thoughts from Several Weeks Ago
Apr 18, 2009 12:47 Filed in: Politics Subjects Progressivism
Any political policy, belief, or theory contains a vision of what the world should be like. That vision is seldom explicit, often unconscious, and sometimes secret, at least in its purest, most unembellished form.
Political dialogue, it it is to be productive, must address this vision, or else it misses the mark.
The ideal polity arises from the projections of our own shadow material onto both the world and the deity that created it (or the physical processes that made it, depending upon one’s belief). Most people do not know why they are attracted to a conservative, liberal or progressive position, because the attraction has its origin in their unconscious.
A conservative vision is easier to come by than a progressive vision, because it is based upon an appealing past. It draws much of its strength from our tendency to forget unpleasant experiences and remember only the pleasant. We are easily convinced that there existed an ideal era, a veritable Garden of Eden, of which evil people and forces have deprived us, and—if we can only defeat those evil forces—Eden will be restored. In our current era, the evil people and forces are represented as misguided do-gooders, socialists and redistributionists that have poisoned the well of pure capitalism and the free market.
At its heart, the conservative vision is profoundly elitist and anti-democratic. Societies governed by conservative principles are invariably plutocracies or timocracies. The few rule and take what they want; the many obey and try to live on the crumbs left over. The first task of the conservative thinker, then, is to conceal this ugly reality from his followers, a task made easier by the almost universal ignorance of history. If he is a decent person, he will have to explain it away to himself first, a task made somewhat easier by the financial support of the elites themselves.
A progressive vision arises from the idea of a possible future different from the past but better than the present. It must change, however, in the face of empirical evidence, or it will become another conservative vision. The progressive vision, therefore, is wedded to reality, which is continually in flux. The conservatives have Plato and the eternal forms. The progressives have Socrates with his questioning and Heraclitus with his river.
To a progressive, the past is teacher, not master. What worked in the past may or may not work today or in the future. Every significant advance of the human race was, by definition, unprecedented. Faulkner notwithstanding, the past is really past, and a society based upon the contrary assumption is sick. A society that believes in an imaginary past that is not yet past is insane.
The weakness of the progressive vision is that it requires imagination and a willingness to question what society accepts as eternal verities. Some “eternal” verities do persist throughout the ages, but many of them serve only to preserve the power and position of elites. Therefore, public progressivism requires political courage, a rare virtue.
Political dialogue, it it is to be productive, must address this vision, or else it misses the mark.
The ideal polity arises from the projections of our own shadow material onto both the world and the deity that created it (or the physical processes that made it, depending upon one’s belief). Most people do not know why they are attracted to a conservative, liberal or progressive position, because the attraction has its origin in their unconscious.
A conservative vision is easier to come by than a progressive vision, because it is based upon an appealing past. It draws much of its strength from our tendency to forget unpleasant experiences and remember only the pleasant. We are easily convinced that there existed an ideal era, a veritable Garden of Eden, of which evil people and forces have deprived us, and—if we can only defeat those evil forces—Eden will be restored. In our current era, the evil people and forces are represented as misguided do-gooders, socialists and redistributionists that have poisoned the well of pure capitalism and the free market.
At its heart, the conservative vision is profoundly elitist and anti-democratic. Societies governed by conservative principles are invariably plutocracies or timocracies. The few rule and take what they want; the many obey and try to live on the crumbs left over. The first task of the conservative thinker, then, is to conceal this ugly reality from his followers, a task made easier by the almost universal ignorance of history. If he is a decent person, he will have to explain it away to himself first, a task made somewhat easier by the financial support of the elites themselves.
A progressive vision arises from the idea of a possible future different from the past but better than the present. It must change, however, in the face of empirical evidence, or it will become another conservative vision. The progressive vision, therefore, is wedded to reality, which is continually in flux. The conservatives have Plato and the eternal forms. The progressives have Socrates with his questioning and Heraclitus with his river.
To a progressive, the past is teacher, not master. What worked in the past may or may not work today or in the future. Every significant advance of the human race was, by definition, unprecedented. Faulkner notwithstanding, the past is really past, and a society based upon the contrary assumption is sick. A society that believes in an imaginary past that is not yet past is insane.
The weakness of the progressive vision is that it requires imagination and a willingness to question what society accepts as eternal verities. Some “eternal” verities do persist throughout the ages, but many of them serve only to preserve the power and position of elites. Therefore, public progressivism requires political courage, a rare virtue.
Seizing the Bully Pulpit
It is now clear that Obama’s presidency will be a very public presidency. In the two and a half months since his inauguration, he has likely accumulated more media exposure than George Bush did in his first two years of office.
No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.
So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.
For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.
Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.
The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.
Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.
The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.
In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.
John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.
Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.
My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.
While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.
I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.
And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.
No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.
So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.
For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.
Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.
The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.
Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.
The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.
In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.
John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.
Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.
My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.
While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.
I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.
And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.