Letters to the Editor
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Re: Retroactive immunity for past crimes?
When I took Constitutional Law 101 in college last year, we were taught that there is no such thing as "retroactive legalization" of crimes committed in the past. We were taught that if an action was forbidden by law at the time it was committed, then it's a crime, period. The same action, committed after the legislative branch has legalized said act, is no longer prosecutable, or criminal.
How is it that no one's questioning this particular assertion of unconstitutional power to legalize actions committed in the past? You'd think that any U.S. Representative or Senator who'd graduated law school (there are many such, as we know) would spot this one right away, as being totally out of bounds.
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A dose of reality
Whoever comes into power -- be it 2007 and the legislative branch, 2009 and the executive branch, or 20XX and the judicial branch -- will never, EVER demonstrate the testicular fortitude to bring any charges against anyone from the Bush administration, legality and legalese notwithstanding.
They'll just say something like, "for the good of the country, we must move on" (MoveOn...that's catchy...I like that), or the ever-popular, "we don't want to over-burden John and Jane Q. Taxpayer."
It just ain't gonna happen...
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see below re: reality...
(as much as you or I would like it to)
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What happens when a new Pharoah arises in Egypt?
The courts tend to be deferential to the Executive in matters of foreign affairs, particularly where national security is in the picture. And the Republican-controlled Congress has been eager to rewrite laws as necessary to keep even the minimal court activism seen so far on the subject at bay. Spokesmen for the newly Democratic Congress have been utterly silent on the question of pushing back these Congressional countersignatures on the hall passes. It is therefore not unrealistic for Bush to expect that these two branches of our Federal govt, the Judicial and Legislative, will not indeed revoke his self-written hall passes.
But what about the third branch, the Executive? Sure, for now, Bush is the Executive, decisively unchallenged in his assertions of Unitariness for that Executive (He'ld say, "l'Etat, c'est moi!", except he's as illiterate in French as he is in English.). But in January of 2009, at the latest, he will no longer be the Executive. Maybe a Republican successor would not want to tear up the hall passes Bush wrote for himself, though even that is not clear, with the President's sinking poll numbers making him so toxic that even a Republican winning in 2008 might want to stage a quick show trial of the ex-President to prove his independence of his predecessor in the most decisive way possible. It would seem that a Democratic successor would be even more prone to exercise the power of the Executive to tear up those hall passes. Not only would he see more benefit in a trial of the ex-President, and less of the downside that might restrain a Republican successor, that the taint of Bush's illegal actions would wash off on all Republicans. But a Democratic successor to Bush, assailed by warhawk Republicans as "soft on terror" for any suggestion that he might want to scale back in Iraq, on the war on terror, or on the American gulag, might see a trial of Bush for initiating these things illegally as the only way to silence the critics and make any progress in restoring us to the rule of law in our international relations.
While a trial of the ex-President would be an almost unalloyed good thing in itself, a highly predictable trial of the soon-to-be-ex-President by a successor who forthrightly calls his crimes what they are, would probably make Bush highly motivated to not submit meekly to becoming an ex-President. This is how the Roman Republic ended. Their conduct of foreign affairs gradually became so disconnected from the traditional forms of their democracy that they could only manage the provinces of their empire by granting dictatorial powers over those provinces, unsupervised by any elected body, to proconsuls. These proconsuls had no choice but to rule their provinces by extralegal means, leaving them subject to prosecution once they surrendered their commands and returned home to Rome. After two generations of repeated factionally-inspired prosecutions of leaders of the other factions who were undoubtedly guilty of systematic oppression, but so was every other proconsul, Julius Caesar finally ended the charade by crossing the Rubicon without surrendering his command of the legions with which he had conquered Gaul.
Hopefully Bush wouldn't get away with a coup and therefore wouldn't even try it, though I wouldn't bet on it if there was some even half-way plausible Reichstag Fire they could use as rationale for a state of national emergency. But if we allow this pattern of extra-legal governance by the Executive, which BushCo has admittedly brought to its furthest fruition, but which is hardly his invention, to progress further, sooner or later we will have a situation in which the military and other security services do think it advisable to step in and not let a soon-to-be-ex-President whom they actually respect (as opposed to Bush) face prosecution once he leaves office, for acts admittedly extra-legal, but by then an expected and routine duty of the Executive.
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Where's Lynndie England's immunity?
I reckon Lynndie England and Charles Graner were too low in the pecking order to get any immunity. At the very least, Bush and his administration should suffer the same punishment as England and Graner.