Cops Arrest 'Hope' Artist Shepard Fairey: Generals' Revolt Threatens Obama Presidency: The Ugly Truth: America's Economy is Not Coming Back
"The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then,
to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in
broad daylight!"
- Emile Zola, J'accuse! (1898) –
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude
than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask
not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed
you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget
that ye were our countrymen!”
-Sam Adams-
GET READY!
Kennedy Ready to Cast Key Vote for Economic Stimulus, Senators Say
Edward M. Kennedy, 76, arrived on Friday from Florida, where he had been recuperating since suffering a seizure during an Inauguration Day luncheon in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. Kennedy is battling a malignant brain tumor. Read More
| |
Extend Statute of Limitations Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum933.php
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/09/leahy-investigate-bush-no_n_165227.html
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy insisted on Monday in firm and passionate terms that a comprehensive investigation be launched into the conduct of the Bush administration, saying anything less would prevent the country from moving forward.
Speaking at a forum at Georgetown University, the Vermont Democrat suggested the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission to uncover the "misdeeds" of the past eight years.
"Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong," said Leahy. "I agree. We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page."
The Senator also stated that Attorney General Eric Holder never gave assurances to Republican Senators that he would not prosecute Bush administration officials who may have been involved in illegalities such as authorizing torture or warrantless wiretapping.
"There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past," he said. "Indeed, during the nomination hearing of Eric Holder, some of my fellow Senators on the other side of the aisle tried to extract a devil's bargain from him in exchange for the votes -- a commitment that he would not make... That is a pledge no prosecutor should give and Eric Holder did not give it. But because he did not it accounts for some of the votes against him."
At one point, Leahy slammed the lectern with his right fist, underscoring the emotion he brought to the debate. His remarks referred to claims that Holder had provided Republicans on the Judiciary Committee a pledge not to prosecute Bush officials -- claims that the Obama administration denied.
Leahy framed his commission idea -- which he had not discussed publicly prior to Monday -- as a middle ground of sorts between those who adamantly oppose investigations and those who say "we must prosecute Bush administration officials to lay down a marker."
The Senate, he proposed, would "authorize a group of people universally recognized as fair-minded and without any axe to grind" to investigate the Bush administration's actions.
"Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened," he said.
This is "not to humiliate people or punish people, but to get the truth out, so we don't make the same mistakes again," Leahy said later during the question and answer session. "We fought Revolution in this country so we could protest the actions of government. We should protect that."
After the speech, Leahy elaborated a bit on what he had just announced: The commission could, if needed, be granted subpoena power and it would investigate everything from torture to the faulty information that brought the country into war in Iraq. He had not, he acknowledged, discussed the idea with the Obama administration or Holder. After 35 years in Washington, he said, "I like being able to say what I want to say."
The 2009 Marver Bernstein Lecture
“Restoring Trust in the Justice System:
The Senate Judiciary Committee's Agenda In The 111th Congress”
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee
United States Senate
Georgetown University
February 9, 2009
As Prepared
It is great to be back at Georgetown. It was at the Law Center in December 2006 that I first outlined the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda for the last Congress. It seems fitting to return to the University at the start of the 111th Congress to take stock, and to look forward. I thank Judge Katzmann for the opportunity to present this Marver Bernstein Lecture.
What an exciting time to be an American, or to be a student, or to be a student at a great university in America’s capital city – or all three. To those of you inspired by the presidential election of 2008, I feel a special kinship. It was John Kennedy, another young President almost 50 years ago, who inspired me to public service. I also had the privilege of meeting his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, when I was a law student at Georgetown.
When I spoke two years ago at the Law Center, America was slogging ever deeper into the difficult challenges that we face today. For awhile the pace was incremental. Today, as the seriousness of these problems has become ever present in every American’s life, the pace has quickened. But for the first time in a long time, there also are competing currents of hope and possibility.
When I spoke at the Law Center two years ago we were a nation at a crossroads, and we are still repairing the damage from those dark days. I spoke then about the erosion of Americans’ privacy, and the need for us to restore our constitutional values and the rights of ordinary Americans; about the importance of repairing a broken oversight process and instilling greater accountability, and about renewing the public’s confidence in our justice system. Over the last two years, that is what we have begun to do.
Our work included a steadfast inquiry into the U.S. Attorney firing scandal and politicized hiring at the Department of Justice. We exposed the partisan excesses and illegalities of the Gonzales regime that so degraded the Justice Department.
We fought for access to the secret legal opinions of the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales Justice Department by which they bent the law to excuse illegality, from warrantless wiretapping to torture. It was in connection with a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the infamous 2002 torture memo was withdrawn. Journalists like Jane Mayer and Charlie Savage, and alienated former insiders like Jack Goldsmith and James Comey, helped give the American people an outline of what had taken place in the secret governing processes of the Bush administration.
This year is different. I was at the White House two weeks ago when President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. That bill corrects the overreaching by activist members of the United States Supreme Court who misinterpreted the law and granted license to companies to discriminate against women employees, so long as those employers concealed their illegal actions for a mere six months. The checks and balances in our system of government finally worked last month to correct that harmful error. But it took two years during which a filibuster led by Senate Republicans prevented corrective action. Instead of the presidential veto promised by former President Bush, our new Senate was able to do the right thing, and our new President proudly signed this restoration of civil rights as the first legislative bill of his presidency.
Already this year we have considered and confirmed the historic nomination of Eric H. Holder Jr. to be the Attorney General of the United States. I hope that the manner in which it concluded, with a strong bipartisan vote to confirm him, is a good sign.
Attorney General Holder certainly is a welcome change. He is committed to restoring the rule of law and, as President Obama said in his inaugural address, “to reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Attorney General Holder understands the moral and legal obligations to protect the fundamental rights of all Americans, and to respect the human rights of all. The Nation was reassured when, in answer to my first question to him at his confirmation hearing, he declared that “waterboarding is torture” and that no one is above the law.
The confirmation of Eric Holder is a marker of how far we have come as a Nation. We have come from a time many years ago when a United States Attorney General believed that the Constitution did not allow African Americans to be considered citizens, to the day when an African American now serves as our Attorney General. It was, after all, a former Attorney General who authored the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denying the humanity of slaves, former slaves and free men. That is not what the United States Constitution said. That is not consistent with the promise of America. We have come from a time, within the lifetimes of some of us in this room, when Washington hotels denied service on the basis of race. And we have also come from a time, just five decades ago, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was the place where civil rights bills were sent to die, to a day where it is the place where we work to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity in our Nation’s founding documents.
The Attorney General, however, is only the first of 28 leadership positions that need to be confirmed by the Senate to help revitalize and restore the Justice Department.
We also have more than 60 vacancies in our Federal courts. We are lucky to have Judge Katzmann serving, and I hope that he takes advantage of his lifetime tenure to serve many more years. But for the existing vacancies and those that will arise in the Judicial Branch, the Judiciary Committee has a vital role. Sometimes our work is widely known by the public; more often it is not. But it is always bears directly on the quality and temperament and public trust in a justice system that has long been the envy of the world. I believe this President’s appreciation for the courts will motivate him to nominate people of the highest caliber and qualifications. I have long supported a comprehensive judgeship bill, which is already 12 years overdue. We need to restore judicial pay and to honor the role that Federal judges play in our independent judiciary.
The Judiciary Committee has a full docket with matters ranging from review of expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act, and reforming our patent laws in order to help revitalize our economic engine, to passing personal data protection legislation and strengthening our anti-corruption and anti-fraud laws. I hope that this year we can also strengthen penalties for violent crimes motivated by prejudice and hate. The President has already moved to increase transparency in government, but we can make even greater improvements to the Freedom of Information Act, and we may finally be able enact a media shield law. These are all issues that you will be hearing about in the days, weeks and months ahead.
The President is right that we need to focus on fixing the problems that exist and improving the future for hardworking Americans. I wholeheartedly agree and expect the Judiciary Committee and the Senate to act accordingly. But that does not mean that we should abandon seeking ways to provide accountability for what has been a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong. We need to be able to read the page before we turn it.
We will work with the Obama administration to fix those parts of our government that went off course. The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department is one of those institutions that was hijacked and must be restored. There must be review and revision of that office’s legal work of the last eight years, when so much of that work was kept secret.
We have succeeded over the last two years in revitalizing our Committee’s oversight capabilities. The periodic oversight hearings with the Attorney General, the FBI Director, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and others will continue. The past can be prologue unless we set things right.
As to the best course of action for bringing a reckoning for the actions of the past eight years, there has been heated disagreement. There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past. Indeed, some Republican Senators tried to extract a devil’s bargain from the Attorney General nominee in exchange for their votes, a commitment that he would not prosecute for anything that happened on President Bush’s watch. That is a pledge no prosecutor should give, and Eric Holder did not, but because he did not, it accounts for many of the partisan votes against him.
There are others who say that, even if it takes all of the next eight years, divides this country, and distracts from the necessary priority of fixing the economy, we must prosecute Bush administration officials to lay down a marker. Of course, the courts are already considering congressional subpoenas that have been issued and claims of privilege and legal immunities – and they will be for some time.
There is another option that we might also consider, a middle ground. A middle ground to find the truth. We need to get to the bottom of what happened -- and why -- so we make sure it never happens again.
One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process and truth commission. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth. Congress has already granted immunity, over my objection, to those who facilitated warrantless wiretaps and those who conducted cruel interrogations. It would be far better to use that authority to learn the truth.
During the past several years, this country has been divided as deeply as it has been at any time in our history since the Civil War. It has made our government less productive and our society less civil. President Obama is right that we cannot afford extreme partisanship and debilitating divisions. In this week when we begin commemorating the Lincoln bicentennial, there is need, again, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” President Lincoln urged that course in his second inaugural address some seven score and four years ago.
Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. Sometimes the best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again. When I came to the Senate, the Church Committee was working to expose the excesses of an earlier era. Its work helped ensure that in years to come, we did not repeat the mistakes of the past. We need to think about whether we have arrived at such a time, again. We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past.
It is something to be considered. It is something Professor Bernstein, for whom this lecture series is named, might have found worth studying. We need to see whether there is interest in Congress and the new administration. We would need to work through concerns about classified information and claims of executive privilege. Most of all, we need to see whether the American people are ready to take this path.
Edmund Burke said that law and arbitrary power are eternal enemies. Arbitrary power is a powerful, corrosive force in a democracy. Two years ago I described the scandals at the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales Justice Department as the worst since Watergate. They were. We are still digging out from the debris they left behind. Now we face the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression while still contending with national security threats around the world. This extraordinary time cries out for the American people to come together, as we did after 9/11, and as we have done before when we faced difficult challenges.
That is no more improbable than the truth that came to light and laid the foundation for reconciliation in South Africa, or in Greensboro, North Carolina; no more improbable than the founding of this Nation; and certainly no more improbable than the journey the people of this Nation took over the last year with a young man whose mother was from Kansas and whose father was from an African village half a world away.
Extend the Statute Of Limitations on Bush and Cheney's Wiret ...
By David Buchan
There Must Be A Full And Meaningful Opportunity To Prosecute The Crimes Of Bush And Cheney with no 'statute of limitations'! ... There has been more than enough time for Congress to grow backbones and take these criminals to Impeachment. Are they all friends, or something? I did sign this action hoping something will actually happen on it before they flee the Homeland. Noted, and thank you David.
Care2 News Network - http://www.care2.com/news/
Progressive Democrats of America Blog » Blog Archive » Abandoning ...
By Bryan Buchan
We think of the Bush-Cheney era as having been built only on the punditry of full-fledged rightwing neocons and forget how many liberals added their voices to the screams for blood, and the points at which — at least momentarily — a ... the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union” by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush” published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. ...Progressive Democrats of America Blog - http://blog.pdamerica.org/
Leahy calls for commission to investigate Bush Justice Department
CNN Political Ticker - USA
The top House Judiciary Committee GOP member Monday blasted Leahy's proposal. "No good purpose is served by continuing to persecute those who served in the ...See all stories on this topic
Leahy calls for 'truth commission' - John Bresnahan - Politico.com
By media@politico.com (John Bresnahan)
I'm sure the GOP would ignore the crimes if Clinton had done it. hell they impeached him over a consentual sex act with an adult. give me a break and show them the inside of a prison cell. Reply Quote Report Abuse .... Lets investigate the Bush Administration officials for war crimes and violations of the Constitution of the United States of America. What was it that Cheney said to Senator Leahy? Was it "Go fu#k yourself.'? ...
Politico Top Stories - http://www.politico.com/
Gitmo Detainee’s ‘Genitals Were Sliced With A Scalpel ...
There was no impeachment. There is no Nuremberg. We are a shameful nation. With yet another shameful president. And as always a shameful Congress. We are a falling empire. Rome has burned and there is nothing left at this point but ...
Democratic Underground Latest... - http://www.democraticunderground.com/
Matthew Yglesias » People Hate Republicans
By myglesias
The book argued that right-wing Republicans voted to impeach Clinton despite the wishes of their constituents, because the sheer enormity of right-wing Republican campaign contributions actually made it in their strategic interest to ...
Matthew Yglesias - http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/
Joe The Plumber Joins Limbaugh As Republican Advisor
|
|
The clock is ticking. Unemployment is rising, foreclosures are up, and economists say we are at an all-time low, but the GOP continues to oppose President Obama on the passage of his stimulus package.
Could it be that the Republicans know something the Democrats don't. Well, let's take a look at who is advising the GOP these days.
This week, "Joe the Plumber" (shown here) visited Capitol Hill to speak with a group of Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart Republican economic strategy. Joe was critical of the president's stimulus plan and tax strategy. He offered advice and counsel, drawing from his reservoir of experience on both domestic and foreign affairs.
Rachel Maddow Slams Republicans for Unpatriotic Actions
| Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy |
(Nothing Better to Do?) Cops Arrest 'Hope' Artist Shepard Fairey
He was charged with two counts of damage to property, i.e. graffiti--the art form for which he is best known….and Bush and Cheney, Lying, Killing War Criminals are walking around free.
Two nights ago, artist Shepard Fairey was arrested in Boston on two outstanding warrants as he was about to enter a sold-out dance event at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The event was the kick off to his ICA show Shepard Fairey: Supply & Demand.
He was charged with two counts of damage to property, i.e. graffiti--the art form for which he is best known. Local anti-graffiti activists had complained that the artist was the subject of a museum show.
The charges stem from last month when he'd painted his "Andre The Giant" graffiti near an entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike and the Boston University bridge across the Charles River.
Because of his arrest, Fairey was unable to DJ the opening party which was such a hot event that tickets were scalped on Craigslist for up to $500.
Fairey attended Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1992. The artist made a street name for himself while in college when he launched the "Obey" series of stickers and posters plastered up throughout the Boston area.
During the 2008 presidential campaign Fairey--who had designed album covers for the Black Eyed Peas, Led Zeppelin, and the Smashing Pumpkins along with the poster the the movie Walk the Line--created the iconic Hope poster for the Obama campign. He distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of the posters and stickers for free, funding them through sales of his fine art. His portrait of Obama was featured on the cover of TIME magazine and the original hangs in the National Gallery.
His triumphant show at the Institute of Contemporary Art had been announced with banners at City Hall and Fairey was recently seen with Mayor Thomas M. Menino promoting the exhibition. The opening weekend is full of festivities and artist talks including a joint lecture series on the subject of design as an agent for social change.
| | | | |
http://www.thewashingtonwatch.com/
Why We Didn't Impeach George W. Bush
| | | | |
Generals' Revolt Threatens Obama Presidency
If an article by Gareth Porter in run by InterPress is correct that CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq Commander Gen. Ray Odierno, backed by a group of lower-ranking generals, are planning to mount a public campaign to try and undermine President Obama’s plan for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months, Obama needs to act fast and nip this dangerous act of insubordination in the bud.
It was a similar act of insubordination on the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that effectively destroyed the Clinton administration almost from day one. Recall that one of President Clinton’s first acts following his inauguration was to make good on a campaign promise to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. His initial order was to simply end the ban on homosexuality in the military. But the Joint Chiefs publicly rebelled, and Clinton caved, coming up with the ridiculous and unworkable “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, under which gays and lesbians could serve in the military, but had to hide their sexual orientation or face ouster.
When Clinton, as commander in chief of the armed forces, allowed his generals to defy his orders, and, instead of sacking them all for insubordination and stripping off their stars, left them in their offices and surrendered to their objections, he didn’t just cave in to the military. He also alerted the Republican opposition that he was a political pushover.
Obama, on a much more serious issue—the conduct of and termination of a war—is now apparently being more or less openly defied by his top generals, who after all get their glory and power by having troops in battle, and who are also worried that a collapse of the puppet regime in Iraq could leave them looking like losers. They are thus opposing a pullout from Iraq (and a hardly precipitous one at that!) out of self-interest and self-preservation.
If Commander in Chief Obama allows this insubordination and political opposition to exist among his senior generals, his presidency is toast. He will be a prisoner to a militarist policy in Iraq and Afghanistan that will drag down his presidency in the same way that Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was destroyed by the generals running the Vietnam War. Furthermore, just as Republicans in Congress saw Clinton’s weakness in his dealings with the Joint Chiefs and began dogging his every move, they, and Obama’s opponents among the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress, will see weakness and move against him.
There is only one answer to this challenge to presidential authority: President Obama must sack both Petraeus and Odierno, and any other general who tries—openly or behind the scenes--to move politically against his military strategy and orders. The model for this action is President Harry Truman—widely viewed, whatever his faults, as a forceful leader—who fired the popular Gen. Douglas McArthur when McArthur went behind his back to Republicans in Congress to push for a wider war in Korea.
This is not just a matter of salvaging an Obama presidency. It is also a profound constitutional issue. There is no greater threat to democratic freedom than a military that refuses to accept, or that actively works to undermine civilian authority. Generals and admirals certainly have a right to object to the decisions made by their commander in chief, but they cannot act in defiance or those decisions while in uniform. Admiral William Fallon took the right course of action. Opposed to Bush/Cheney administration plans to attack Iran, he chose to resign his post as CentCom Commander and to resign from the military. If Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Odierno oppose Obama’s plan for a pullout from Iraq, they should do the same and then speak out if they wish.
For the past eight years, the biggest threat to American democracy was that a president and vice president attempted to convert the office of president into a military dictatorship, with the position of commander in chief subsuming and replacing the position of president. Now the danger is that the nation’s top generals are trying to eliminate or emasculate the president’s role as commander in chief, making the generals the leaders of the nation’s military. Both dangers are equally threatening to constitutional government.
Follow the Money: Are Taxpayers on the Hook for Hundreds of Billions of Dollars for a Credit Crisis that Was Overblown?
— dlindorff
This article appears in the current issue of Treasury & Risk Magazine
Key members of Congress were stunned to hear Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson say on Sept. 18 in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill that the country was “days away” from a complete financial meltdown—one that could lead to Depression-like runs on banks, widespread violence and ultimately even to a possible declaration of martial law. It was a vision of Armageddon, but, of course, 10 days later, the House rejected a Wall Street bailout package sent over by Paulson, only to pass one in a more limited form—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act—a week later that gave Paulson less power and only half the money he wanted.
Meanwhile, the financial system did not collapse and while a few banks were failing, there were no runs on them, and martial law wasn’t invoked. One reason things didn’t fall apart when Congress didn’t immediately act as Paulson and Bernanke demanded, may be that there wasn’t any danger of a meltdown in the first place. So say three senior economists working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who in October examined the Fed’s own data, and concluded in an article titled Facts and Myths About the Financial Crisis of 2008 that the claims that interbank lending and commercial lending had seized up were simply not true. “Bank lending to consumers and to non-financial companies had not ceased, and banks were lending to each other at record levels,” says V.V. Charri, an economist at the Minneapolis Fed. “Maybe Bernanke and Paulson had information that they were not making public, but the available data simply did not support what they were saying.” Charri and his colleagues and co-authors Lawrence Christiano and Patrick Kehoe agree that with companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Citigroup foundering because of toxic debt instruments, there was a sense of a financial crisis brewing, but they say it wasn’t a credit freeze. “This was a lot like the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003,” says Charri. “You had people in government saying: `We’re smart guys, trust us.’ But they were either wrong or they were lying.”
Adds Kehoe: “Normally, when you’re going to spend a lot of money, you present the data and the economic theory to support it, yet here’s the biggest non-military government intervention in history since the Great Depression, and there was no evidence presented to support it, and no detailed economic argument made about what market failures this $700 billion was going to fix.”
The Ugly Truth: America's Economy is Not Coming Back
The Real News Network | THE REAL NEWS CAFÉ | On Demand
| |
This Is Going To Be Neat (Ed.)
Around The Horn: In Other News
“Sometime in the near future a lethal combination of transnational terrorism and criminal gangs is going to cross the U.S. border in force. According to some, it already has,” Robert Killebrew leads in The Armed Forces Journal. “God help the citizens and people of Arizona, whose government has forgotten and betrayed them if this war spills into the United States,” Betsy Ross breathes heavily on News Blaze. Before even asking approval to visit Tijuana, southern California’s Marines and sailors “first must complete anti-terrorism training and be 18 or older,” North County News’ Mark Walker adds.
More on the border: Along the U.S.-Mexico front line, a steadily expanding Border Patrol “is like an occupying force whose hundreds of new agents don’t understand the borderlands or respect its residents,” Tom Barry charges in an Americas Program Report — and see Tom Miller in The Washington Post on a borderland crushed “between a collapsed economy to the north and brutal drug thugs to the south.” The Border Patrol “settles into the 21st century . . . with plenty of baggage, from a reputation for ethical haphazardness to being viewed as a lesser partner in federal law-enforcement huddles,” Tucson Weekly’s Tim Vanderpool spotlights.
Feds: “I sure hope she’s bringing a load of two things this humongous agency totally lacks: common sense and common decency,” Jim Hightower sighs of new broom Janet Napolitano in a Pocono Record op-ed excoriating DHS’s border fence. Several hundred DHSers “are finding it much easier to get to sleep these days,” thanks to $11,200 spent binding a collection of ex-chief Mike Chertoff’s speeches into a 315-page gift volume, the Post’s Al Kamen cracks wise. It remains unclear whether elements of the Homeland Security Council — probably to be subsumed into the NSC — will remain as a separate body within the White House, the Post’s Karen DeYoung also recounts.
Senate Should Pursue Truth About Bush-Cheney Abuses (Addendum: The Nation | The Beat - by JOHN NICHOLS
Proposing the creation of a "truth commission" to examine the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush-Cheney administration, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy declared Monday that, "The past can be prologue unless we set things right."
"As to the best course of action for bringing a reckoning for the actions of the past eight years, there has been heated disagreement," the Vermont Democrat explained in a lecture delivered at Georgetown University under the title: "Restoring Trust in the Justice System: The Senate Judiciary Committee's Agenda In The 111th Congress."
Outlining differences of opinion on the issue, Leahy said:
There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past. Indeed, some Republican Senators tried to extract a devil's bargain from the Attorney General nominee in exchange for their votes, a commitment that he would not prosecute for anything that happened on President Bush's watch. That is a pledge no prosecutor should give, and Eric Holder did not, but because he did not, it accounts for many of the partisan votes against him.
There are others who say that, even if it takes all of the next eight years, divides this country, and distracts from the necessary priority of fixing the economy, we must prosecute Bush administration officials to lay down a marker. Of course, the courts are already considering congressional subpoenas that have been issued and claims of privilege and legal immunities – and they will be for some time.
There is another option that we might also consider, a middle ground. A middle ground to find the truth. We need to get to the bottom of what happened -- and why -- so we make sure it never happens again.
To that end, Leahy continued:
One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process and truth commission. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth. Congress has already granted immunity, over my objection, to those who facilitated warrantless wiretaps and those who conducted cruel interrogations. It would be far better to use that authority to learn the truth.
During the past several years, this country has been divided as deeply as it has been at any time in our history since the Civil War. It has made our government less productive and our society less civil. President Obama is right that we cannot afford extreme partisanship and debilitating divisions. In this week when we begin commemorating the Lincoln bicentennial, there is need, again, "to bind up the nation's wounds." President Lincoln urged that course in his second inaugural address some seven score and four years ago.
Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. Sometimes the best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again. When I came to the Senate, the Church Committee was working to expose the excesses of an earlier era. Its work helped ensure that in years to come, we did not repeat the mistakes of the past. We need to think about whether we have arrived at such a time, again. We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past.
Though he acknowledged that the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush-Cheney administration were worse than the Watergate-era abuses of former President Richard Nixon and his aides, Leahy was unduly deferrent to the White House, saying that, "We need to see whether there is interest in (in this proposal from) the new administration."
In fact, Leahy and other members of the legislative branch are making a mistake when the defer to the executive branch when it comes to taking the steps that the Judiciary Committee chairman says should be taken to repair a broken system of checks and balances.
This was made painfully clear at Barack Obama's press conference where, after being asked about Leahy's proposal, the new president did not exactly wrap himself in the Constitution.
President Barack Obama said Monday he would examine a leading senator's plan to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against former Bush administration officials, but was "more interested in looking forward."
Though he acknowledged that "nobody is above the law" and said that his administration would leave "no doubt" that the United States does not torture, follows the Geneva Conventions and respects the rule of law, Obama stuck to the line he has clung to for months: "generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than looking backwards."
"I will take a look at Senator Leahy's proposal," the president said, "but my general orientation is to say, 'Let's get it right moving forward.'"
If Obama was teaching a Constitutional law course, he would have taken a different line. Unfortunately, he has decided to play politics with the matter of executive accountability.
Leahy should not wait for an O.K. from the White House.
The establishment of a truth commission -- first advanced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich as a compromise short of the impeachment that George Bush and Dick Cheney so richly deserved -- is the least that Congress can do to begin taping together a shredded Constitution.
No comments:
Post a Comment