There is no longer any reasonable doubt that numerous government officials, ranging from the White House all the way down to ass-end of various federal organizational charts, have broken the law the last eight years. Of those crimes, the three most prosecutable are probably torture, wiretapping, and politicizing the Justice Department. (Perjury accompanies all three like an eager puppy.) As we inch closer to the official transfer of power the question of what is to be done about all that is growing more prominent.
The criminals involved have so far hidden behind a very friendly Justice Department. Despite that, there is already more than enough damning evidence in the public record to give a lot of them good reason to be nervous, and my strong hunch is that what we know is only the tip of the iceberg. The information we have is the result of the ACLU, investigative reporters and plain old conscientious Americans working against an iron curtain of governmental stonewalling which is going to start coming down a week from Tuesday. Whether or not it comes down all the way is an open question; but it isn’t going to be nearly as robust as it has been, that’s for sure. To take but a small, prominent example, John Conyers is about to gain the ability to have his subpoenas enforced. Chaos is likely to ensue.
To take another small example, dday had an encouraging post yesterday up at Hullabaloo about two pending pieces of litigation in San Francisco. The first is about the al-Haramain charity foundation which is trying to prove that it was the subject of illegal government surveillance (it was; the government accidentally handed over classified transcripts of illegal wiretaps); the second is about the EFF’s efforts to nullify the retroactive immunity provisions of last summer’s grotesquely un-American FISA bill. In both cases the government has hit some roadblocks, but dday’s conclusion contains the truly interesting point:
It will be interesting to see what the Obama Administration does with this once they come into office. The legal team assembled over the last few weeks doesn’t seem like they’d be willing to carry forward Mukasey et al.’s warped legal theories, and yet Obama himself voted for immunity. Should be another early test.
That is the real nut of it. The legal challenges to the Bush Administration’s various psychotic policies aren’t going anywhere just because the man himself is on his way back to Texas. John Conyers, Henry Waxman and others still has their gavels. The incriminating memos and e-mails still exist and the criminal statutes are still on the books. The question isn’t whether or not illegal deeds were committed – they were; the question is what are Barack Obama and his people going to do about in the face of ever increasing evidence of it?
Ignoring everything and letting bygones be bygones has its appeal, but it isn’t a realistic course of action anymore. Too much is already known and there is probably more waiting to come to light. The December issue of Harper’s and the 15 January issue of the New York Review of Books both make the suggestion that the only way out of this is with one of those fabled “Blue Ribbon, bi-partisan commissions”. (Scott Horton in Harper’s has a particularly thorough run down of just what such a commission might look like.) That may indeed be the only viable solution; but those types of commissions are notorious for papering over the misdeeds of those at or near the top and it is precisely those people who need the most scrutiny. It would be nice for some justice to be served, but more importantly, the next crop of high ranking government officials needs to know that there are limits to their authority and penalties for overstepping it.
