By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Dennis Kucinich continues to call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. Impeachment is probably warranted, on many grounds, all more important than Clintonian waffling about sex, though perjury is perjury. Lying under oath is always unacceptable.
Still, Congressional enthusiasm for impeachment is limited. The Democrats need to concentrate on getting a Democratic team elected in November.
Those who believe that some very big Bush administration fish must be held responsible for this administration’s trashing of the Constitution and of universally accepted human rights norms need not feel entirely discouraged, however. This Administration will never be off the hook for enthusiastically promoting the use of torture during U.S. conducted (or requested) interrogations.
If I were George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Douglas Feith, David Addington, George Tenet, et. al., I would be very nervously aware that a paper trail, little by little, is accumulating. Congress is taking testimony and following up. The A.C.L.U. is gaining access to damning documents, which may be examined on their website. Knowledgeable administration underlings are beginning to squeal, if not from principle, then from the natural instinct for self-preservation.
Here are some of the sorts of people who ought to feel insecure: those who drew up legal documents to legitimize torture, those who asked for those documents, those who approved the application of those documents, those who did the torturing, those who supervised the torturers, those who shipped victims for torturing abroad, Congress members who facilitated the torture, the commander in chief.
It may take years to get the evidentiary ducks in a row, but time is not necessarily on the side of the torturers. It took a long time for the Chilean legal system to catch up with Augustin Pinochet, who was responsible for so many extra-judicial killings in Chile. And only now are the generals responsible for the “dirty war” in Argentina being dealt with. From a news story datelined today:
A court in Argentina sentenced a notorious former military leader to life in prison for atrocities committed in 1977 at a clandestine torture center used by the military dictatorship where only 17 of more than 2,200 political prisoners survived.
Thanks probably to changes in government in Belgrade, another monster has recently been apprehended, after 13 years in hiding. Bosnian Serb wartime president Radovan Karadzic, who was responsible for the genocidal murder of thousands of Muslim men, should be extradicted to the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague shortly.
Given its fondness for torture and unilateral action on the international stage, one can easily understand why the Bush administration has tried to undermine the International Criminal Court.
The United States government has consistently opposed an international court that could hold US military and political leaders to a uniform global standard of justice. The Clinton administration participated actively in negotiations towards the International Criminal Court treaty, seeking Security Council screening of cases. If adopted, this would have enabled the US to veto any dockets it opposed. When other countries refused to agree to such an unequal standard of justice, the US campaigned to weaken and undermine the court. The Bush administration, coming into office in 2001 as the Court neared implementation, adopted an extremely active opposition. Washington began to negotiate bilateral agreements with other countries, insuring immunity of US nationals from prosecution by the Court. As leverage, Washington threatened termination of economic aid, withdrawal of military assistance, and other painful measures.
Needless to say, poor countries have made the necessary compromises to get the money they need.
Yet Dennis Kuchinich should not be discouraged. In the near future, he will find plenty of support for punishing leaders who have acted in contempt of U.S. law and also acted in brutish disregard of norms that Americans once stigmatized others for violating. The support for prosecution will come from many Americans. It will also come from the international community.
Bush supporters will call it a vendetta. The rest of us will call it justice. As George Bush himself likes to say, “The terrorists will be brought to justice.” Just substitute one T-word for the other. “The torturers will be brought to justice.”
Once that happens, those annual State Department human rights reports may have some stature, some clout, again.
There’s speculation that President George W. Bush will pardon his torture team. Or maybe Congress will legislate immunity as was done for telcoms assisting the administration’s illegal wiretapping program. Some contend that pardon is the only way to get to the bottom of the conspiracy to subvert the Constitution and trash treaties in order to "win the war on terror." Somehow I don’t see the man who calls himself the decider (except when decisions backfire) in the confessional mode under any circumstances. Moreover, as Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, observed in a conversation on with Bill Moyers tonight, if you justify the current crop, how will you prevent the next crop of leaders from thinking they can get away with it, too, and then what happens to our system? It would be defunct—and God help us when our home grown torturers turn on us.
At that point, perhaps, we can only hope that the ICC or the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal will be mobilized to do the job we have failed to do, prosecuting Bush and Company for crimes against humanity. The legal house of cards they erected to justify themselves will be condemned for what it was: enablement pure and simple.
But I really hope that Congress, the Courts and we ordinary Americans will have the vision and courage to do our own cleaning up. Supposedly, U.S. law is no respecter of privilege. No one is beyond its reach. The Bush administration may not be responsible for death and pain on the scale of Pinochet and Karadic, but torture is torture. And there's this to consider, too: what the U.S. does sets an example for the world. At the moment, that's a scarey thought.