The chorus demanding George Bush be prosecuted for torture and other constitutional abuses is getting louder
I had a good laugh when my friend Seth Gitell reported in the New York Sun on a campaign by the dean of the obscure Massachusetts School of Law to put George Bush and other top White House officials on trial for war crimes.
Lawrence Velvel, Gitell notes, wrote last month that his model was the Nuremberg trials held after second world war. Velvel went so far as to say that "we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top Germans and Japanese." Oh, my.
Though I found Velvel's apparently earnest quest as ridiculous as Gitell did, the idea of holding our leaders accountable for the crimes and constitutional violations of the past seven and a half years isn't ridiculous in the least.
We are less than a decade removed from impeaching a president and nearly relieving him of office because of a lie in a civil deposition about blowjobs. Yet when congressman Dennis Kucinich recently attempted to impeach Bush over torture, extraordinary rendition and other grotesque constitutional abuses, Kucinich's embarrassed fellow Democrats couldn't kill the measure quickly enough.
Why? Top Democrats are so complicit in what has happened since 9/11 that my guess is they dare not travel down that road. From voting in favor of the war in Iraq to holding the telecommunications companies guiltless for their role in spying on Americans (Barack Obama infuriated much of his progressive base by voting for immunity), the Democrats have often acted more as enablers than as a true opposition party. From their point of view, no doubt it's best to move on.
And yet we can't move on. Everywhere you turn, there are reminders of the demons that have been unleashed in the name of fighting terrorism. We are less democratic and less free than we were before Bush and Dick Cheney entered office following an election that they demonstrably did not win. If we don't come to terms with what happened, there's little chance of reversing our slide into authoritarianism.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/08/usa.warcrimes
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