We know that all that public treasure diverted into the military industrial complex is not being spent on schools, a national health care program, national infrastructure, medical research, the arts, clean technology, aid for failing states around the world, climate change, and on and on.
Washington politicians know this story backwards and forwards. They know the long bitter history of this story. They are practiced experts at assuming postures that suggest they are struggling to change the situation while effectively sustaining it and enriching themselves while in office. And they are not the only ones who know it. Leaders around the world are beginning to find ways to reject American economic coercion and predatory foreign policy.
If we don’t prosecute these criminals, we embrace the pathology of deceit while we support criminal behavior on the part of elected officials, and we legitimize the looting of our country and every other country on earth. Moreover, we condone these endlessly destructive wars of empire which enrich America’s parasitic corporate aristocracy and we willingly participate in the destruction of our own country and any other country standing in the way of corporate American greed asserting itself through military force.
If we don’t deal with this there is nothing stopping an American president from repeating these crimes.
As Harpers' Scott Horton wrote, "We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship."
Well, we realize it now.
If we fail to find the courage to prosecute crimes we know have been committed, we deepen the darkness from which the current Obama Administration and all Americans of good will are struggling so valiantly to emerge.
We have a choice, in all its consequences, and it’s ours to make and ours to face.
Bush Administration officials are running scared. They know the jig is up and they are scrambling to hide their tracks. In a glibly cynical maneuver titled "Memorandum for the Files," signed by Steven G. Bradbury, a lawyer who served as the acting head of the legal counsel's office for the Bush Administration's last three years without being confirmed by the Senate, we can see one rat’s desperate leap from the ship. “Bradbury dated his memo five days before Obama's inauguration and said its purpose was to ‘confirm that certain propositions’ asserted previously by the office were no longer supported. He said key national security officials had already been advised of the change of heart but did not say when.’”Bradbury is now releasing memos stating that his retractions were not “intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question” violated any “applicable standards of professional responsibility.” See Washington Post.
This is the most serious issue facing America today: rampant criminality on the part of conservative Republican extremists and their determination to avoid being held accountable.
Consider the words of legal expert Michael Ratner: “we have learned [that] the memos of George W. Bush's legal counsel, John Yoo, lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.
What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)
The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.
That was the America that was planned by George W. Bush and the Republican Party. The next time you hear John Boehner, or John McCain, or any of the other empty suits that represent the Republican Party, attack the Obama administration, just remember how close we came in this country to realizing the dream of Prescott Bush -- a fascist America.” See Naomi Wolf, Treason and John Buchanan YouTube.
And now, in another legal action, Baltasar Garzón, examining magistrate of the Juzgado Central de Instrucción opens procedures to prosecute the Bush Administration- asserting that six former high-level Bush Administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
If you speak Spanish, the document filed in Spain, and now online, can be read at the following link: Público. The subjects of the action are University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now with Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.
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