Tuesday night at the monthly meeting of the largest county Democratic Party in the nation, Los Angeles, the vote was unanimous on a resolution calling for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, author of the famous "torture memo" -- aka "the Bybee memo."
Unanimous. LACDP spoke with one loud, clear voice on this. Next week, we'll be working this resolution at the California Democratic Party Convention in Sacramento. And I hope Democrats (and Republicans, too) will join together in crafting resolutions calling for accountability. It's time to dismantle the Bush Administration's torture policy, and bring its facilitators to account.
We need to counter the establishment pressure to move away from this evil with our own pressure, to support the rule of law, to recognize that justice delayed is justice denied, and that a failure to hold accountable these acts will result in them returning, in spades, in the future. Without this accounting, in a very real sense our democracy dies.
And there is an actual mechanism, a way to leverage grassroots anger and push the elected officials who can make these decisions, at least in one case. We can prove the desire for accountability in the country and take a systematic approach to restore democracy and the rule of law. And it starts with Jay Bybee.
Dday, digby and tristero have all written about it since at Hullabaloo. I agree with dday 100%. This is the beginning of how the grassroots can organize to force the beginnings of accountability in Washington. More background, info on what's to come and how to do it on the flip.
One thing that makes Obama's Nuremberg defense of CIA torturers all the more morally repugnant is his failure to honor, promote, respect, speak out for and defend those who, in stark contrast, refused to go along with the Bush Administration's long march into the darkness of moral depravity.
He has retained many members of Bush's military and intelligence teams, some who continue to fight fiercely against any sort of moral reckoning. But what of Major General Antonio Taguba, whom digby wrote of just yesterday? From the Harvard Law Record article digby linked to:
Gen. Taguba: Accountability for torture does not stop at White House door
Andrew Kalloch
Major General Antonio Taguba called for an independent commission to investigate war crimes committed by senior members of the Bush Administration in remarks in Ames Courtroom on Tuesday, April 14. The event was sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.
Taguba, who was pressured to resign by the Bush Administration in 2007 following the 2004 leak of his report detailing abuses by U.S. armed forces in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, declared in the preface of the 2008 Physicians for Human Rights publication "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," that, "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Why isn't Taguba a high-level member of the Obama Administration? Why is Thomas Tamm, the former Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration's domestic spying operation still facing the threat of prosecution? Why hasn't the case against Lt. Ehren Watada been dismissed already? Why is the death of Alyssa Peterson, who killed herself just days after being forced to witness a violent, illegal interrogation Iraq, still shrouded in shame and darkness? Why are those who struggled against the darkness that threatened to engulf our country still left suspended in some netherworld, rather than being embraced and honored for their courage, their integrity, their status as true American heroes?
In comments yesterday, someone (I can't find it now) mentioned the case of Alyssa Peterson, one of the first female soldiers to die in Iraq, who committed suicide shortly after witnessing an interrogation session that was more a beating than anything else.
Peterson is emblematic of countless other Americans--in uniform and out--who were confronted with the imperative to torture and otherwise violate the moral and legal principles we are supposed to stand for, and who reacted by fighting back against that imperative.
It's known that PTSD is primarily a response to experiencing and participating in the infliction of violence on others. It is primarily a conscience-based affliction, not a fear-based one. And those who suffer from it all too often do take their lives, as Alyssa Peterson did, or else spend many dark days contemplating doing so.
Every single torturer who is given a pass by Obama's embrace of the Nuremberg Defense represents another insult another attack on those who did not willingly go along, whether or not they found a way to effectively remove themselves from becoming part of the machinery of evil. Every single torturer who is given a pass by Obama's embrace of the Nuremberg Defense represents another bullet in Alyssa Peterson's body, another insult to her honor, her integrity, and her good name.
We need to know about her story, to understand what Obama is doing to her memory, her humanity, her integrity, with every pass he gives to those who tortured when we she refused to.
America is not Nazi Germany. But over the last 7+ years America came much closer to looking and feeling like Nazi Germany than almost anyone would have imagined beforehand. Torture became officially--if secretly and surreptiously--part of the law of the land. Not only were war crimes authorized and committed from the highest offices in the land, and violations of constitutional rights made routine, but those who dared stand up against this darkness were vilified, persecuted, and made to suffer for doing what was right.
We have pulled ourselves back from the abyss--but only just barely and tentatively, with no assurances of what the morrow may bring, especially if economic recession should deepen and prolong over a period of several years. That is why President Obama's pledge not to prosecute CIA agents who committed war crimes is so deeply troubling. It's not just a matter of letting hundreds, perhaps thousands of "low-level" criminals go free--as if that weren't bad enough by itself. It's a matter of setting a dark and unholy precedent, whose bitter fruit we may find ourselves tasting far sooner than we could possibly imagine. This cannot be. This is why I am writing this brief diary series--to widen the scope of our thinking from the so-far limited scope of the CIA officers who have been the focus of attention up till now.
While the example of the Nuremberg Trials is used often these days to describe what prosecutions might look like, few seem to remember that the prosecution of war criminals after World War II was much larger and took place over a longer period of time than most people realize. This is important when one considers the context of President Obama's granting of immunity to lower-level CIA interrogators (if they acted in "good faith" upon "authoritative" legal advice).
What even a cursory examination of historical precedent demonstrates is that after World War II prosecution of war criminals and accessories to war crimes were not limited to the famous Nuremberg 22 high-level Nazis, nor the few hundred or so prosecuted through the Nuremberg tribunals, but thousands of accused throughout Europe.
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