Last Tuesday Glenn Greenwald was right to call out the Washington media on the stupidity of excusing their cheerleading for the War on Iraq seven years ago with the idea that “nobody knew” it would be like this:
I could literally spend the rest of the day quoting those who were issuing similar or even more strident warnings. Anyone who claims they didn’t realize that an attack on Iraq could spawn mammoth civilian casualties, pervasive displacement, endless occupation and intense anti-American hatred is indicting themselves more powerfully than it’s possible for anyone else to do. And anyone who claims, as Burns did, that they “could not know then” that these things might very well happen is simply not telling the truth. They could have known. And should have known. They chose not to.
While Avedon Carol is also right to notice that he had missed one particular high profile politician who had been arguing against the invasion from the start, somebody who should have been taken serious but wasn’t, because, well:
Oddly, Glennzilla does not mention in his list of people who predicted disaster if we invaded Iraq one of the foremost voices who was inexplicably dismissed and derided by the entire press corps, presumably because the man we had elected to be President of the United States is fat.
What both miss however is something much more important: “nobody knew” inside the Washington Beltway what a disaster the War on Iraq would become, but outside it, “nobodies knew” it was a bad idea from the start. At least fifteen million people worldwide demonstrated against the war back on the 15 Februari 2003, with the largest demonstration ever held taking place in London that day and huge demonstrations all over America and Europe, smaller ones in Africa and Asia and South America and Australia and even one in Antarctica (!)
All us little people outside of the loop and not professionally blind to the idea that invading a country on spurious grounds is in itself a bad idea were perfectly aware the War on Iraq was going to be a disaster. We knew that the best we could hope for was a repeat of the first American-Iraqi Gulf War, a US blitzkrieg that would once again kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians and deliver the final blow to an infrastructure that was never allowed to recover from the first war. Literally no one I spoke to during the runup to the war — family, friends, coworkers, passing strangers — no matter their political allegiance thought it was a good idea. And while the serious people would later grudgingly accept that we were right, they’ve never given us credit for it, prefering to think our opposition was just an emotional reflex rather than a reasoned position…
Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.
Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.
Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
[…]
And that, contrary to reports that the Harman investigation was dropped for “lack of evidence,” it was Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush’s top counsel and then attorney general, who intervened to stop the Harman probe.
Why? Because, according to three top former national security officials, Gonzales wanted Harman to be able to help defend the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about break in The New York Times and engulf the White House.
It’s a clusterfuck of corruption with members of congress lobbying on behalve of dodgy organisations to get nice jobs in return and a even more corrupt administration using this corruption to help legalise their own crimes. Surprising? Not very. The deep structures of the state — the intelligence services and permanent bureaucracies — have always used these methods.
And so it comes to an end, eight years too late, not with a bang but with a whimper. George Bush is no longer president, Dick Cheney is out of power and America finally has a president again we can be disappointed in, but also have hopes for. Things won’t get perfect, but there now is a chance they will get better. Goodbye Bush. You won’t be missed. So long Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Rove and the rest of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. If only that chopper could fly all the way to Den Haag and the International Court of Justice. It’s been a long eight years of anger and despair but they’re finally over.
“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
Now we’re at the beginning of a new era, perhaps “the early days of a better nation”. With the election of Obama Americans rejected not just everything Bush stood for, they first rejected the old school centrist Democratic Party politics of his rival, Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama, though he himself may not be, is the president of the left and with his inauguration a space is created for those of us on the left to help built an America that adheres to the ideals and spirit of the broad left, as Bush created a space for all the worst in America. This is our chance and our responsibility to help create a better America, a better world and Obama is the symbol of that chance. One woman I heard interviewed earlier this week, when asked about all the hopes and dreams invested in Obama and how difficult it would be for him to fullfill all those dreams, said it best when she said that Obama’s election slogan was “yes, we can”: he doesn’t need to do it alone, we all have to work with him.
Communist fellow travellers sing red propaganda song at Obama inauguration party shock!
My first political memory is of hearing Carter lose the election to Reagan on the radio when I was six. Since then the US has never really had a president you can be proud of. Reagan was a shambling corpse held together by cuecards and tons of makeup, Bush 41 was a charmless CIA bureaucrat who barfed up his dinner in the lap of the Japanese prime minister, Bill Clinton had his charms but no substance, a bit of a clown and finally Bush 43 was a smirking fratboy asshole and a (not so) dry drunk to boot. But Obama just looks good, like a regular human being, not warped by too many years in Washington yet. Bush was hyped as a regular guy you’d like to have a beer with, but Obama actually fits that description and what’s more, you could see him as an actual leader, not just in the White House, but equally well
in a local neighbourhood activist group or something like that. In all the coverage of the election campaign and after, I’ve never seen him look uncomfortable or anything other than himself. He just looks like a proper president.
And yes, appearances aren’t everything, and yes, as a socialist or any sort of leftist he’s sure to disappoint us, he’s not going to get the revolution started, he’s not going to change the system. But dammit, it’s been so long since there actually has been any president who is even capable of disappointing us.
Woah, what a night. How was it for you, Ron Paul supporters?
Ah. Maybe I shoudln’t have asked.
I have to say myself I’ve never been so glad to say I was wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong, double underlined wrong, in illuminated letters wrong. The Republicans didn’t ratfuck the election, martial law was not declared, no-one was assassinated, the American people spoke up louder than this cynic could ever have hoped and finally, the right thing was done.
After 8 years of unbelievable criminality and ineptitude, there’s a breath of hope in the air.
But while we’re all sharing a metaphorical post-coital cigarette and basking in the afterglow, let’s not relax too much; that’s always the moment when you accidentally roll onto the wet patch.
The wet patch in this instance is a proper conundrum and it’s a key question for the incoming Democratic administration – what is to be done about George Bush? Will he, his sidekick Dick Cheney and their many criminal associates be allowed to walk away from their numerous crimes? Will Bushco ever face any kind of justice? If you listen to campaign rhetoric, the answer’s yes:
In an Obama-Biden administration, we will not have an attorney general who blatantly breaks the law,” Biden said at a town-hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, his voice at times drowned out by applause. “We will not have a president who doesn’t understand the Constitution. And I will not be a vice-president who thinks he’s not part of any of the three branches of government.”
Biden ripped the Bush administration for wasting a chance to unite the nation in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“George Bush and his administration are going to be judged harshly by history,” said the Delaware lawmaker. “Not for the mistakes they made, but for the opportunities to unite America and the world they squandered.”
Biden also promised to go through the Bush adminstration’s records with a ‘fine-toothed comb’ for criminality:
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“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation,” he said, “they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution – out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law.”
What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.
So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.
Experience teaches us different. It’s become customary for incoming presidents to pardon their predecessors’ crimes; presidents can even indemnify against crimes yet to be committed; the person pardoned need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime.
Many pardons have been controversial; critics argue that pardons have been used more often for the sake of political expediency than to correct judicial error. One of the more famous recent pardons was granted by President Gerald Ford to former President Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974, for official misconduct which gave rise to the Watergate scandal. Polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the pardon and Ford’s public-approval ratings tumbled afterward. Other controversial uses of the pardon power include Andrew Johnson’s sweeping pardons of thousands of former Confederate officials and military personnel after the American Civil War, Jimmy Carter’s grant of amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders, George H. W. Bush’s pardons of 75 people, including six Reagan administration officials accused and/or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, Bill Clinton’s pardons of convicted FALN terrorists and 140 people on his last day in office – including billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, and George W. Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison term.
I see the outgoing President Bush has already started on wangling for his own presidential pardon, inviting President-elect and Mrs. Obama to the White House. Although he has, in effect, already pardoned himself, it’s thought to be unconstitutional to do so:
But there’s one person at least who won’t let Bush leave without a reckoning and that’s former mafia prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi:
I may be sounding presumptuous to you right now, [Amy and Juan], but I?m telling you this: I am going after George Bush. I may not succeed, but I?m not going to be satisfied until I see him in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first-degree murder.
[…]
we know?not ?think,? but we know?that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October the 7th, 2002, Cincinnati, Ohio, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. So if we had nothing else at all, this alone shows us that he took this nation to war on a lie, and therefore, all of the killings in Iraq of American soldiers became unlawful killings and therefore murder.
But it gets worse. October 4th, three days after the October 1st classified top-secret report, Bush and his people had the CIA issue an unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report, so that this report could be issued to the American people and to Congress. And this report came to be known as the ?White Paper.? And in this White Paper, the conclusion of US intelligence that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country was completely deleted from the White Paper. Every single one of these all-important words were taken out. And the question that I have is, how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George Bush and his people be? And yet, up to this point, unbelievably?and there?s no other word for it?he?s gotten by with all of this.
Indeed he has. It’s not enough for me, and I doubt it’s enough for everybody else either, that Bush be out of office, out of the White House and out of power: there has to be a reckoning too. Some crimes stink so high that there has to be justice – and if the new president won’t do it, then the people, even in the person of Bugliosi and who knows how many other outraged lawyers, will have to.
Bugliosi again:
This is a very real thing that we?re talking about here. I?ve established jurisdiction on a federal and state level for the prosecution of Bush for two crimes: conspiracy to commit murder and murder. On a federal level, we?re really only talking about the Attorney General in Washington, D.C., operating through his Department of Justice. But on a state level, I?ve established jurisdiction for the attorney general in each of the fifty states, plus the hundreds of district attorneys in counties within those states, to prosecute George Bush for the murder of any soldier or soldiers from their state or county who died fighting his war in Iraq. And with all those prosecutors?
Well quite, if only all that collective pent-up outrage doesn’tget swamped by the big, pink, fuzzy wave of post-election euphoria. However, there are encouraging signs that the sins of George Bush have not been forgotten, that there may well one day be a reckoning, even if I don’t live to see it. The people (and not just the American people) will see that it’s so: and if anyone should respect the power of the people to do what they say, it’s Obama.
