Nixon's Lawyer on Torture

by John Dean

Remarkably, the confirmation of President Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, is being held up by Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, who apparently is unhappy that Holder might actually investigate and prosecute Bush Administration officials who engaged in torture. Aside from this repugnant new Republican embrace of torture (which might be a winning issue for the lunatic fringe of the party and a nice way to further marginalize the GOP), any effort to protect Bush officials from legal responsibility for war crimes, in the long run, will not work.

It is difficult to believe that Eric Holder would agree not to enforce the law, like his recent Republican predecessors. Indeed, if he were to do so, President Obama should withdraw his nomination. But as MSNBC "Countdown" anchor Keith Olbermann stated earlier this week, even if the Obama Administration for whatever reason does not investigate and prosecute these crimes, this still does not mean that the Bush Administration officials who were involved in torture are going to get a pass.

With few exceptions, the discussion about what the Obama Administration will do regarding the torture of detainees during the Bush years has been framed as a domestic matter, and the fate of those involved in torturing has been largely viewed as a question of whether the Department of Justice will take action. In fact, not only is the world watching what the Obama Administration does regarding Bush's torturers, but other countries are very likely to take action if the United States fails to do so.

... read the rest, and there IS more, after the click.

My comment: The whole world is watching. What an unholy, unmitigated, intergalactic, everlasting embarrassment it would be if someone should take the responsibility for cleaning up the mess WE, in a panic, allowed.

Until this minor detail is addressed, we can no longer claim to be a nation governed by laws (not men). We can no longer claim that "no man is above the law" for we will have made exceptions. Our mouthed platitudes about respect for the law will be greeted by international snickers. We will have demonstrated that when the going gets rough, we are just another comic opera banana republic willing to prosecute others for crimes against civilization (see the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet and the trial of Slobodan Milošević) but totally unwilling to take responsibility for our own transgressions. We will have become a nation that believes laws are for other people and don't apply to us ... and that there are those among us to whom no laws apply what-so-ever.

It won't be the end of the world as we know it, but it will be the beginning of the end. We will have sacrificed our stated principles embodied in our laws for the sake of domestic political expediency - for the fear that those supporting this lawlessness might interpret the pursuit of justice under the law as somehow being petty political revenge.

To say that we believe in the rule of law while ignoring fundamental crimes against civilization would be the ultimate hypocracy.

I love my country ... I'm just not particularly proud of some of the things done in her name.