Has the Republican moral collapse metastasized to the rest of the country?

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It’s like getting cancer. You go through horrendous procedures and get turned inside out. Then, they put you back together, set you on the side of the bed and tell you everything is clean as a whistle, that they got it all, that you are A-OK again. Then, three months later, during a routine check up, you are told it’s back.

Make no mistake. Cheney, Gonzales, Feith, Bush and their supporters in Congress would not have betrayed the American people to such an extent if they had been convinced we, the American people, would hold them legally accountable and prosecute them for their crimes.  The Justice Department under the Bush Administration was given clear instructions: find the language to make our unconstitutional policies appear constitutional.  When Justice Department officials and others objected, they were told to do it or leave. This is all part of the public record. Some left. Most stayed. Many are still there. It will take years to root them out. If we don’t prosecute, it will take even longer. If we fail to find the courage to face this and deal with it in our courts the disease will remain and reoccur.

Just so as in this from the NY Times, April 9^th, “…in a statement to employees [of the CIA], the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, said agency officers who worked in the program “should not be investigated, let alone punished” because the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had declared their actions legal.”

Christine Bowman, in her April 9^th analysis on buzzflash, cites recent events at the Department of Justice (DOJ):

“To summarize, the DOJ wants to allow the (National Security Agency) NSA to keep doing unrestricted electronic surveillance; the DOJ wants to keep the NSA's secret documents from being used in court; and they want the Jewel v. NSA case thrown out. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) wants Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable invasion of privacy upheld for American citizens. They want the case to be heard. They seek to stop what they call the government's "iillegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance ... of millions of Americans." As Kevin Bankston told BuzzFlash, the EFF "believes and alleges based on widespread news reports and whistleblower evidence" that the NSA is intercepting not only the transactional information but also the contents of "practically everyone'" emails and phone calls illegally.”

Tim Jones explains the DOJ's arguments in the case further at the EFF website: 

“Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses "sovereign immunity" from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government's ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Administration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.”

So, there it is in all its unadorned ugliness. There is no end to this. It’s not about moving on, taking care of business, forgiveness, Christian charity or nurturing a functional partisan atmosphere in which our government can function. If we don’t prosecute rapacious criminality on the part of our executive officials we not only put the republic at risk, we are betraying our constitution and ourselves.

In the absence of the will to seek justice and defend the rule of law, the constraints on the national security state are removed & we as citizens have no effective control over the imperial ambitions of the extreme right and their enablers to the left.  There is a one to one correlation between the far right’s extremism and fear mongering and the interests of the predatory oligarchy seeking to suppress open government and full accountability on the part of our political leaders.

All governments lie to their citizens in order to persuade them that if they do not support the de jour war and demonstrate their support by making their children available to die in them, that their country and they personally will be destroyed. A misinformed, poorly educated, financially stressed, apathetic, conservative population is much more easily persuaded and therefore very compatible with the interests of an oligarchy.

Never in our history has our government lied to the American people and the world so brazenly and transparently on behalf of corporate war profiteers as the two Bush administrations lied to us about the Gulf War and the Iraq War. A key tool for accomplishing this has been, and is, the main stream media’s “professional” journalists and the corporate interests running the show. Governments and corporate managers cannot successfully lie to anyone in the presence of a genuinely unmanipulated, uncensored, free press void of partisan, ideological agenda. We haven’t had that in this country for a very long time.

Our situation is not new. It is an ancient, reoccurring problem.  Julius Caesar was assassinated because he defied the oligarchy of Rome with his reforms. Eisenhower warned us this was coming. For years numbers of historians and political analysts have been warning us about the gathering shadow of imperial militarism. Its greatest evil is that it inevitably strengthens the pernicious corporate elite addicted to war profiteering while it weakens and degrades the rest of us.

How?

Defense spending numbers are not reliable because a high percentage of the public funds consumed by military and intelligence budgets are black, but what we do know is appalling. Americans allowed the military to consume $711 billion in 2008 alone. That was 48% of all military spending in the world for that year. That number does not include intelligence budgets, nor all the military weapons labs like Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia and others operated by civilians and miscellaneous universities around the nation. Whatever the numbers are, we know they are vast and well beyond anything most of us can imagine. We also know that we have allowed ourselves to become a nation perpetually at war. We know that we have allowed our military and intelligence services to turn us into torturers and assassins. We know that it clearly does not improve our lives while America’s parasitic wealthy elite get richer and richer.

We know that our government is flooding the world with U.S. dollars which are being used to finance speculation and corporate takeovers which destabilize the governments of defiant states.

We know that foreign central banks underwrite our debt through investments in our U.S. Treasury bonds effectively being forced to finance the expansion of America’s encompassing military empire. See Prof. Michael Hudson’s article Economic Meltdown: The "Dollar Glut" is What Finances America's Global Military Build-up on Global Research.

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.

For an excellent background peace on this, see “The Bush Six” in the April 13, New Yorker, Jane Mayer’s discussion of Queen’s Council Phillipe Sands, author of the book, Torture Team and Baltazar Garzón who, in 1998, issued an international warrant for the arrest of Chilean president Augusto Pinochet regarding his responsibility for the deaths and torture of Spanish citizens.

The big question facing all Americans, and particularly Republicans, is whether we have the courage as a nation to face what we have done and set it right. Listening to Limbaugh, George F. Will,  William Kristol, Glenn Beck and other influential Rebublicans, it is very clear their moral bearings have been irreversibly lost.

What we must have now is an unambiguous and forceful signal from President Obama and Democrats of every stripe that we are not going to simply stand by in obtuse, silent denial and watch other nations do what we know is our moral responsibility.

Somehow, Americans must find the courage and the will to prosecute the crimes of the Bush Administration and we must do it now.

Authors Website: www.abqmurals.com

Authors Bio:
Richard W. Overfield is an artist/writer currently based in New Mexico after living in Vancouver, Canada for 20 years.His paintings are represented in over 300 public & private collections in the U.S., Canada, Switzerland, France, England, Japan & who knows where else. Paintings have a habit of migrating to strange places. He has done numerous murals in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California & Kansas. He is currently on the Board of Directors of the Northern New Mexico Regional Art Center in Española, New Mexico.