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I’m struck by the tenor of this article. The entire focus is on whether a costly and cumbersome prosecution would bear fruit in terms of convictions of the various players within the Bush administration who, in spite of all advice and international norms to the contrary, engaged in the worst kind of tortures in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention. I’m also struck by the fact that neither the Geneva Convention nor the Supreme Court decision Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was mentioned in this article.
Basically, what one comes away with from Benjamin’s assessment is that, because of the difficulty imposed by the passage of amendments to the War Crimes Act in 2006 – amendments that were pushed by the administration as a direct result of the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision to uphold and invoke Article 3 of the Geneva Convention -- the option to prosecute the crimes committed by the Bush administration would possibly be viewed, as Benjamin characterizes, as “wrongheaded, partisan retribution.”
He further goes on to quote Kermit Roosevelt of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law who opines that perhaps, for the sake of “healing the country and moving forward,” a blanket pardon of the thousands of actors involved “followed by something like a truth and reconciliation commission . . . might not be such a bad outcome.”
I guess I have a very different definition of “healing the country.” It seems to me that, not content simply to continue the more than 100 year tradition of undermining democracies all over the world, the United States has now set its sights on itself, subverting and auto-cannibalizing its own democratic principles to the point of burlesque.
The decision is this: To prosecute such heinous acts and uphold democratic principles (and thereby truly take our medicine), or take the expedient route of treating the rule of law like an “etch-a-sketch” and simply turn it on its head and shake it till there’s nothing left but a blank slate.
I have no doubt what choice will be made. I also have no doubt that the actions employed by the Bush administration, actions that literally subvert our own democracy and international law, will continue to be the American modus operandi for many years to come.
