And that raises an obvious question: Who was held accountable for that still unending disaster? Who was charged with the crime of willfully and intentionally taking the nation to war -- and a failed war at that -- based on manufactured facts? In numerous books, the grim realities of that moment have been laid out clearly. When it comes to any kind of public censure, or trial, or even an official statement of wrongdoing, none was ever forthcoming.
Nor was there any accountability for the policy and practice of torture, "legally" sanctioned then, that took the country back to practices more common in the Middle Ages. (It's worth noting as well that John Yoo, who wrote the memos authorizing such torture then, is now helping the Trump administration find ways to continue evading checks on the presidency.)
More than a decade ago at TomDispatch, I wrote about how the Bush administration supported such acts at the highest levels. As a result, in the early years of the war on terror, in 20 CIA "black sites," located in eight countries, the U.S. government used torture, as a Senate Select Intelligence Committee Report of December 2014 would detail, to elicit information and misinformation from dozens of "high-value detainees."
It should go without saying that torture violates just about every precept of the modern rule of law: the renunciation of adjudication in favor of brutality, the use of dungeon-like chambers and medieval equipment rather than the expertise of intelligence professionals gathering information, and of course the rejection of any conviction that civility and rights are valuable.
Among his first acts on entering the Oval Office, Barack Obama pledged that the United States under his leadership would "not torture." Nonetheless, the lawyers who wrote the memos legally approving those policies were never held accountable, nor were the Bush administration officials who signed off on them (and had such techniques demonstrated to them in the White House); nor, of course, were the actual torturers and the doctors who advised them in any way censured or criminally charged in American courts.
Indeed, many of their careers only advanced as they took jobs like a federal judge, a professor at a prestigious law school, or a well-remunerated author. When suggestions for leveling criminal charges or holding congressional hearings and investigations were raised, the Obama administration decided not to proceed. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that "the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt," while President Obama insisted that the administration should "look forward as opposed to looking backwards." Accountability was once again abandoned.
And looming over the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, and those torture policies was a refusal to hold any agency, administration, or anyone at all responsible for failing to stop 9/11 from happening in the first place. The 9/11 Commission Report might have been an initial step in that process, but as journalist Philip Shenon put it in his book The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, the report "skirt[ed] judgements about people who almost certainly had some blame for failing to prevent September 11."
Evasion Elsewhere
It wasn't only in relation to the war on terror that accountability vanished. The government responded to the 2007-2008 banking crisis with a similar determination to avoid it. At that time, the men who ran the nation's largest banks had played upon the greed of investors to leverage mortgage investments until, lacking government bailouts, their companies would have gone under. In response, both the Bush and Obama administrations bandaged the losses with federal funds. Yet when it came to a classic dive into irresponsible and even illegal financial behavior, they offered stern warnings and nothing else.
Accountability had been similarly elusive for corporate crimes for decades. Take, for instance, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that covered 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline with oil, while killing thousands of birds, otters, seals, and whales. Lawsuits brought by that state did result in payments of more than $1 billion after the federal government indicted ExxonMobil for violating the Clean Water Act. However, only the captain of the ship, whom many experts felt had been scapegoated, was convicted of a criminal offense.
A separate lawsuit filed on behalf of local fishermen, native Alaskans, and landowners fared less well. In our post-9/11 era of unaccountability, the penalties that had been leveled against the oil company were reconsidered. In 2008, the Supreme Court reduced a $5 billion punitive damages award by 89% to $507.5 million dollars. And in 2017, in the early months of the Trump administration, 26 years of litigation came to an abrupt end when a federal court in Alaska decided not to pursue a final ExxonMobil payment of $100 million for damages from the spill.
As it turns out, (lack of) accountability is increasingly not just a matter of the law but of politics, as the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016 highlighted. No matter how much information Mueller and his team collected demonstrating violations of both law and policy in future president Donald Trump's dealings with Russia, or how much information a series of career diplomats and national security officials provided on his quid pro quo approach to Ukrainian officials, escaping blame, not to mention impeachment, has proven all too easy for the president.
As Attorney General Barr told the nation, misrepresenting the essence of the Mueller report, the investigation "did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election." More accurately, the report concluded that the evidence "does not exonerate" the president.
Subsequently, nine individuals, seven of them members of the Trump team, were found guilty and 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted (though charges against two of the companies have been dropped by Barr's Department of Justice). And while five of those convicted went to jail, Donald Trump commuted the sentence of his close associate Roger Stone. Meanwhile, the prosecution of his first National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is still in turmoil after the Department of Justice directed and a federal appeals court ordered the case to be dropped. As the Flynn episode demonstrates, even when individuals were held accountable, the president and his administration have, in essence, refused to accept the judgments of the courts.
In other words, the mechanisms for shining a light on government wrongdoing are being systematically undermined and abolished. In that spirit, in April and May at the behest of the president, numerous inspectors general, tasked by law with investigating and reporting on wrongdoing in their agencies, were fired, including those for the State Department and the Intelligence Community, as well as the acting inspectors general for the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Transportation.
In the age of Trump we're reaching the end of the line when it comes to accountability in the halls of government. Increasingly, it's no longer an American concept.
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