On Responsibility and Bush's Crimes

New York attorney Scott Horton, who writes the blog No Comment for Harper's Magazine, has a piece in the December 2008 issue which you must read: Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration.  Unfortunately, the full text of the article is only available online to subscribers.  First of all, you should be subscribing to Harper's, anyway.  Second, go down to your local news stand (it's the thing with all the newspapers and magazines around -- no, not your computer, nerd.  The actual place where the hard-copy version of these things are sold) and pick up a copy today.  It's the one with Bush and Rumsfeld on the cover, in prison garb, in the clink.

Barring that, at least read some of the recent posts by Horton and his colleagues on the issue.

In the print article, Mr. Horton makes a very compelling legal case for the prosecution of President Bush and members of his administration based exclusively on the torture issue.  Remarkably (remarkable given my political leanings), I found myself struggling with this issue. 

Why?

Why is this a difficult issue for me?  It should be very easy.  I despise George W. Bush.  I remain bitterly angry that the American place in the world has been sullied by an illegal war and the illegal torture of "detainees" (funny -- not funny "ha ha" but funny weird -- how we call these people "detainees."  They're not detainees.  Spending what will probably be the rest of your life behind bars being tortured is not being detained.  Being stuck at Customs because your date of birth is wrong on your passport is being detained.  Those people are in prison.  They are prisoners.  The Bush lawyers can write memos and twist their words any way they want -- it won't change the basic fact that the people we are holding are imprisoned.  Rightly or wrongly, they are imprisoned, and thus prisoners).

We have even recently learned from someone that would know that torturing detainees -- prisoners -- has likely cost American lives.  Many American lives.

So why am I struggling with this? 

All I can come up with is this: because these unforgivable actions of George W. Bush and his administration are, in some part, our responsibility as well.

We are culpable, America. 

After all, it was us who allowed him to essentially steal Election 2000.  Sure, there were a few D.C. protests as the motorcade went down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House.  But it only lasted a brief time. 

With 9/11, it was as though he could do no wrong.  Everybody was in the tank for Bush.  Everybody wanted to be in the tank for Bush -- hell, it was considered un-American if you weren't.  The media flipped for the guy, and Americans figured that if he said we should go shopping, or the terrorists win, then we'd go shopping. 

I think post-9/11, everyone had a sense, maybe that something wasn't right.  But who called him on it?  Who called him on it, who called Cheney on it, as they sucked power from a willing and prostrate Congress?  No one. 

I'm sure you'd be able to find a few media outlets, a couple of articles or news clips expressing concern about the Bush Administration and the dramatic power-shift taking place.  But I am talking about something larger -- something we were all willingly blind to. 

After we invaded Iraq and it slowly began to dawn on us there were no WMD (another idiotic little cutsie thing dreamed up by the Bushies, right up there with "detainees"), we maybe began to stir -- just a bit, as though from a dream. 

Of course, we re-elected him, and this time he won more decisively.  I always thought it wasn't so much the margin of victory that caused Bush to believe he'd been given virtually limitless political capital to spend, but the fact that Kerry stopped short and ended his campaign with millions in the bank, when he could've contested Ohio at the very least.  When your enemies don't even bother to fight you, why wouldn't you take advantage of the system? 

No American voice could begin to jolt us awake from the long nightmare of the reign of George W. Bush -- it was a hurricane.  Frankly, I would prefer to prosecute the sonofabitch for the murder of an American city, if not several hundred of her citizens.

So why not prosecute George W. Bush and the appropriate members of his administration?  Why not -- as Mr. Horton suggests -- set up a kind of "truth and reconciliation" type commission to investigate just what happened, and then recommend appropriate action to a special prosecutor. 

Because I don't think Americans will let it happen.  With the exception of Election 2000, George W. Bush was willingly handed the reigns of power.  By us.  And even in 2000, nobody did anything -- nothing real. 

Colin Powell once said of Iraq, "you break it, you own it."  The Pottery Barn theory of foreign relations (which if funny, because they don't actually have that policy). 

The same thing is true in our own country.  George W. Bush broke it.  But we own it. 

-- -- -- --

That being said, let me say that if this notion that our torturing prisoners has had the direct effect of causing our soldiers to die on foreign soil, then the prosecution of the president might not be so far fetched, politically speaking.  What's more, if this is one of those things the president -- and vice president and others -- were aware of, that makes it all the worse. 

What I'm trying to say here is not that Mr. Horton doesn't lay out the perfect legal case against Bush & Company -- I think he probably does.  This is about the politics of it.  Political will in this country is a funny thing. 

We have a new leader, now, and I'm not sure that prosecuting the criminal Bush administration would be at the top -- or even the bottom -- of Obama's agenda.  Don't freak out on me: I said "prosecuting," not investigating.  There's a long way to go, as even Mr. Horton acknowledges, before we get to the prosecuting part.  Years, in fact. 

So let's move forward. 

And let's never let it happen again.