Rule of law? Screw it, says US president

Where do we go from here? Don't simply say, "Elect Obama." That might be part of the solution -- but how do we reverse the damage, moral and legal, that the Bush cabal has done?

Vincent Bugliosi has proposed a solution:

thestar.com/entertainment/Books/article/459046

Hit book's author says Bush can be charged with murder

It's the one best-seller national U.S. media have largely ignored

Jul 13, 2008 04:30 AM
Bruce DeMara
Entertainment Reporter

After having three of his books reach No. 1 on the New York Times best-sellers list, Vincent Bugliosi was dismayed his latest received a virtual "blackout" from the mainstream media.

That's because The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder lays out the legal case – citing evidence and establishing the jurisdiction of U.S. prosecutors – to seek an indictment against America's 43rd chief executive for the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Go to the URL to read entire article

Where do we go from here? Don't simply say, "Elect Obama." That might be part of the solution -- but how do we reverse the damage, moral and legal, that the Bush cabal has done? You read this stuff and it makes you sick. It ought to make us mad. Again: what can we do about this? Why has two years of Democratic control of Congress failed to stop it or reverse it?

how about...examine your own flawed premises that caused you to elect Bush in the first place, and continue to cause you to praise his minions, like Tony Snow - who, btw, almost certainly was aware that all of this was going on, and of course aided and abetted it.

Why do you continue to support and excuse people whose low ethics and "sickening" behavior you probably would not tolerate in yourself?

I believe Obama has said that one of his top priorities is to reverse the executive branch power grab - so electing him may sound "simple" but it is perhaps the key part of the solution. re the Democrats - as Daily Kos et al. keep saying - we need both more and better Democrats - and we're working on that. So if you are truly mad and sickened by what the Republicans have done, then you should follow the honorable course of blogger John Cole and other former Republicans and disavow that party and publicly support the Democrats. I understand that abortion is a potential deal-breaker, here, but that's the reasoning that got the country into this mess to start with. For all your principles, you (we) still have abortion (because you were conned), and now we have torture, too.

Hill

Where do we go from here? Don't simply say, "Elect Obama." That might be part of the solution -- but how do we reverse the damage, moral and legal, that the Bush cabal has done?

Vincent Bugliosi has proposed a solution:

thestar.com/entertainment/Books/article/459046

Hit book's author says Bush can be charged with murder

It's the one best-seller national U.S. media have largely ignored

Jul 13, 2008 04:30 AM
Bruce DeMara
Entertainment Reporter

After having three of his books reach No. 1 on the New York Times best-sellers list, Vincent Bugliosi was dismayed his latest received a virtual "blackout" from the mainstream media.

That's because The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder lays out the legal case – citing evidence and establishing the jurisdiction of U.S. prosecutors – to seek an indictment against America's 43rd chief executive for the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Go to the URL to read entire article

The last is easy, The Democrats are generally afraid of foreign affairs/defense issues. Couple that that with executive privilege rulings and a hostile executive branch. The President has become essentially a king when he dons the Commander-in Chief hat.

Where do we go from here? Harder to decide. I think we first need to acknowledge the sheer stupidity of what we have done. Note this quote, ""What was missing," Mayer says, "was a discussion of policy -- not just what was legal, but what was moral, ethical, right, and smart to do," from Bacevich's article. In a GLOBAL war we alienated much of the rest of the world. We employed torture and humiliation in Iraq. Conservatives lauded this as we were giving those good old Islamofascists what they deserved. We were also losing lots of American lives and the war. Petraeus and his bunch of eggheads, including (gasp) Harvard professors rejected all of this. Again, I highly recommend reading FM 3-24. They opposed torture, they supported talking with the enemy. They employed all the tactics conservatives at Right wing sites opposed. It worked too. Now, we need to accept that torture and holding people for more than 6 years w/o some kind of cause or process is not compatible with global success. We need to decrease terrorist's recruiting ability, and recruit other countries/religions/tribes to our cause.

Galula, in his seminal treatise on COIN noted that we are judged by our actions, while insurgents are judged by their promises. I think we need to make sure that our actions represent our values. This is specifically addressed in our latest MNF-I Commander's COIN guidance. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/06/multinational-forceiraq-comman/

I think prosecution of Bush and Cheney, while emotionally rewarding to some, has too much potential to degenerate into something ugly. I have no desire to start with a land deal and end up litigating sex. The chance to go for revenge here is too easy. I do think that we should consider going after other top officials. It has been noted many times that a private who loses a gun is more likely to be punished than a general who loses a war or battle. If there was negligence or incompetence or deliberate ignorance of accepted standards, both general and private should be held accountable. The same goes for those lawyers who found creative ways to justify administrative actions. Without some accountability, these excesses, and especially the incompetence, will not stop.

Steve

It's small consolation, but remember that after they leave office many of these people won't be able to travel outside our borders without running the risk of being detained by local officials and being charged with war crimes. Since our influence is declining around the world -- based in large part on the whole Bush & Co. have dug us into in Iraq -- other countries are less afraid than they might once have been of what we might do. I for one would love to see Cheney in the dock in The Hague. It's almost too bad that the Dutch don't waterboard. ;-)

So, Cleveland, the deaths of our soldiers are due to liberals? Silly me, I thought they due to the fact that Administration lied us into a war we have no business fighting.

What gives with people who think that the only way to love your country is to carry a gun and blow things up?

Francis, might that be the CIA whose analysts produced reports questioning the existence of WMDs in Iraq?

Cleveland, do you deny that there is probable cause to investigate the Bush administration for violation of federal statutes? Just asking for clarity's sake...

Assign a special prosecutor, form a grand jury, and do it right. Ignore the morons who are afraid that investigations of allegations are the same as guilt. Do it right, and answer the damn questions once and for all.

Oh, and Cleveland? If they have no reason to fear prosecution, as in nothing to hide, why does the Bush administration work so hard at hiding things? Just curious...

Gee, the other day we removed 500 tons of yellow cake from Iraq. Where's that going I wonder. Yeah, Saddam wasn't really trying to get WMDs (he had em already; ask the Kurds), he just thought yellow cake was a Betty Crocker recipe.

Let's face it. . . Americans are mostly in favor of torture. It's not as if the Bush administration did much to cover up their activities. They didn't have to. . . "terrorists" deserve whatever they get.

Find me one prominent conservative who thinks that waterboarding is too awful to be used on terrorists. Merely suggesting that ANYTHING is "too awful to be used on terrorists" will cause your patriotism to be questioned.

In fact, several of the GOP presidential candidates ran on a platform of "doubling Guantanamo".

There is no mystery here. This is the genie that was let out of the bottle.

And while it served to get Bush elected, no one complained.

It is interesting that paleocons find common cause with a veteran leftie like Jane Mayer on this subject. And that they put their trust in the International Committee of the Red Cross without hesitation; last I heard, they didn’t countenance big, bad international bodies poking into national affairs.

Do you all agree with the ICRC that the use of any psychologically coercive methods of interrogation constitute torture? Try a bit of reality and read this (http://www.nationalreview.com/editorial/editors200412020949.asp):

"December 02, 2004
Red (Cross) Alert
The ICRC goes after Gitmo (again).

Yet another International Committee of the Red Cross report blasting the Bush administration's treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees in Guantanamo was
splashed — where else? — across the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday. The report, dating back to last July, demonstrates how the old ICRC — respected, scrupulously neutral, and concerned with applying the traditional laws of war — is finally dead. It has instead become another typical "humanitarian" NGO, a cross between Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It has a clear policy agenda to transform the traditional laws of war into something akin to the rules of domestic law enforcement, and is intensely anti-American and anti-Israel to boot.

Some background: The ICRC still refuses to accredit Israel’s domestic equivalent of the Red Cross. In protest of this inexcusable surrender to anti-Semitism, the American Red Cross withholds 25 percent of its dues from the ICRC. For years, the ICRC was an organization like the American Red Cross. It didn’t have any political agenda. It just showed up in war zones to make sure prisoners were afforded treatment in accordance with the laws of war. Sometime in the 1970s this changed. The ICRC became an advocate of affording national-liberation movements rights and privileges to which they aren't entitled, and it began to fellow-travel with left-wing NGOs. The ICRC's tilt can be seen in the relative indifference with which it reacted to the murder and torture of American POWs in both our wars with Saddam Hussein. It is only alleged abuses by the U.S. that prompts true indignation from the ICRC.

Which brings us to the latest report. It follows on several similar products over the last two years and features the usual criticism of the administration's Guantanamo policies, only taken up a notch. The ICRC's positions are not rooted in either law or sound policy. Consider two key criticisms in the report.

The first is the argument that the indeterminate length of detention to which Guantanamo-held al Qaeda and Taliban personnel are being subjected has been causing them such psychological and mental anguish that it qualifies as a form of torture. It is understandable that Guantanamo detainees would be unhappy about having been caught. But the notion that captured enemy fighters, both POWs and unlawful combatants, can be held for the entire duration of hostilities is at the very foundation of the modern laws of war — regardless of its effect on their psyche. Indeed, the right to detain captured combatants in this fashion arose at the same time — in the 1500s — that the obligation to accord them "quarter" emerged as the most important humanitarian breakthrough. Prior to that, most captured enemy fighters were put to the sword, while the few wealthy noblemen were held for ransom.

As we know only too well from history — backed up by the experience of the last year — captured enemy fighters who are prematurely released return to the fight. This prolongs the war on terror and causes unnecessary additional civilian and combat casualties. The ICRC seems not to care.

The second ICRC criticism is that the use of any psychologically coercive methods of interrogation at Guantanamo — designed to elicit intelligence information from captured al Qaeda and Taliban personnel — is also a form of torture. This view is not based upon any sound construction of the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, or any other applicable international treaty or convention. Unlike POWs, unlawful combatants can and should be aggressively interrogated, and are entitled only to humane treatment. As any aficionado of detective novels or TV series knows, the good-cop-bad-cop routine and psychological pressure permeate the questioning of even criminal suspects and passes muster under the world's most liberal constitutions. To accord more protections and sensitive treatment than this to unlawful combatants is foolish on its face.

The ICRC is entitled to speak in favor of what it believes to be good policies as much as any other NGO. But no one should pretend that this is the old scrupulously neutral ICRC, the one that wielded enormous legitimacy and properly received substantial government funding and support. U.S. taxpayers alone contribute over $200 million to the ICRC annually. This new ICRC should not be entitled to any special rights and privileges vis-à-vis sovereign governments, including the right to visit places like Guantanamo. The most important question raised by this latest report is, When will the U.S., and like-minded countries, begin to call the ICRC's bluff?"

And while it served to get Bush elected, no one complained.

I'd say you weren't paying attention.

Has anyone really thought through the implications of criminal trials for Presidents for their policies ?

One of the things that keeps what is left of American republican government intact is the notion that there are limits as to what political winners can do to political losers. Members of a party can be tossed out of office. They can be excoriated in the media. They can be reviled on blogs. In extreme circumstances, they can lose their pensions and be sent to jail. WHILE IN OFFICE. But there are limits.

To jail former Presidents---or even put them on trial for their policies while in office---is to remove those limits. Removing those limits will lead to politically-inspired violence; personal self-defense will require it. There will be nothing to prevent a President enacting a controversial policy from ordering troops to arrest or even kill his political opponents if it looks like they are going to be in power after the next election.

Suppose this policy had been in place in 2006 ? It certainly looked like Nancy Pelosi and her Senate counterparts were going to go after Bush in a big way. If they had (which may still happen, do not underestimate the extreme Statist with his/her/its hands on the levers of power), Bush, knowing that he faced long prison terms, might well be tempted to either jigger the elections to insure his tenure in office or use force to "do unto others" before they did unto him. This would reduce the American political process, such as it is, from a media-filtered dumb-show to a giant gang fight. The process would become a simple matter of coup and counter-coup. Eventually, we wind up with a dictatorship of the most thuggish.

That benefits no one. Least of all the American commoner.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

This is particularly depressing/horrifying, from Yglesias:

"The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”

I keep having this recurring dream that on the day before the election, GW Bush will be assassinated, Dick Cheney will be sworn in and declare martial law and disband Congress, the Supreme Court and imprison the Democratic leadership as traitors.

I am not making this up, I really do have these dreams. I just hope they don't come true.

Liberals spin and lie and our soldiers die. It must be a terrible existence to be a hater and a liar, especially when one is forced by avarice and cowardice to live among those who love their country and know what really is going on.

Charles- You should then lobby to have Petraeus removed from his position. He makes it quite clear in the new Army Field Manual that torture is not condoned. It is counterproductive in this kind of war (or most kinds of war). We have already conducted this experiment and it did not work.

Adriana-You should vote to dump Petraeus also. A few more terrorists released make little difference one way or another. Another Believer noted that our troops are already being shot at. What REALLY prolongs our efforts is the entire Muslim world judging us by our actions, not by our words. It is a common mistake of Americans to assume that people in the Middle East are stupid. What they see is that we are holding people for years w/o cause in many cases. Many of those at Gitmo were turned in for a bounty. There is no evidence of their involvement in terrorist acts. Many of these are Pashtun. In this culture tribal honor (nang) is paramount. If the tribes honor is compromised, say the unjust imprisonment of a tribe member, it requires badal, tribal revenge or restoration of honor. One prisoner in Gitmo may result in hundreds of enemies in Afghanistan. Gitmo is used on terrorist recruiting tapes. It is the gift that keeps on giving, as does Abu Ghraib. If you are interested in this USN Lt. Hussain just did a Mater's dissertation on it. These are just a few examples of how torture and Gitmo benefit the enemy. Lastly, you do realize who we need to get intel from to fight the bad guys? If we are viewed as people who torture, why should they help us? Why would they consider us a better option.

If what you really want is revenge, and dont care about what happens to our troops or if you want to prolong our efforts against terorists, torture is good. If you want to occupy Iraq permanently, torture is an effective means of spreading terror. Go for the torture. If you do not want to live our values, go for the torture. If you wish to follow the lead of the politicians who have mismanaged this war, go for torture. If you wish to follow the example of our military, the folks who actually turned things around, oppose torture.

Steve

The corruption of each government begins almost always with the corruption of its principles…

Once the principles of a government have been corrupted, even the best laws become bad and will turn against the State; whereas when the principles remain healthy, bad laws may have the effect of good ones; the force of principle carries everything with it…

Few laws are not good when the State has not lost its principles; and, as Epicurus relates in speaking of wealth: “It is not the liquor which has become corrupted, but the vessel that holds it.”

–Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De l’Espirit des lois, bk viii, chs i, xi (1748) in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 349, 357, 359 (R. Caillois ed. 1951)(S.H. transl.)

The above courtesy of Scott Horton (site still will not let me do links sigh). Lest we forget, the Baron is famous for his ideas on separations of powers in government. He was an influence on Madison in designing the Constitution.

Steve

A clarification. 113 fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.

To list of allies in No. 9 (above), add Israel, India, Italy.

So, What if... the "proper" procedures had been followed and

What if... the President had released those who were found to be improperly detained and

What if... a handful of those who were released went on to cause another serious attack on our country?

Then we would be sitting here lamenting the fact that our dolt of a President had been so careless as to allow these men to be released.

We are at war, people. And I don't think it was us who started it.
(This of course refers to the War on Terror and not the Iraq War, which is a whole different story)

armchair pessimist - don't forget the extrajudicial killing of hundreds of thousands of American citizens under Lincoln's watch, and the war crimes - e.g., firebombing & nuking of Japan - condoned by FDR & Truman.

could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes...
It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.

When we do the first, let us also remember that we charged Nazi lawyers who wrote justifications for war crimes. Including ones who just wrote the justifications, without issuing any orders or committing any personally, but who simply said 'Here is a way to legally justify medical experiments on prisoners' and whatnot.(1)

And for everyone who's worried about pardons and hence the inability to extradite him...remember that these fools in office are the same people who kidnapped someone from the streets of Germany. Maybe we can just withdraw secret Service protection from Bush and inform the Germans where he is at all times, and then act outraged that they've kidnapped him, at least after we've made sure their flight had made it outside US airspace. Then we will lodge a strongly worded request with their ambassador that they return our former president and that we demand a written response to that request within a year!

Alternately, I'd like a constitutional amendment that disallows the president from pardoning or commuting or shorting the sentence of any of his staff or any former president or the staff of any former president. (And, while we're at it, retroactively removing any such pardons already granted.) That was a massive abuse possibility that was overlooked by the founding fathers, and I wonder how much of Bush would have happened if Nixon hadn't been pardoned.

1) Of course, the damn Nazis actually tried to justify their behavior. They didn't actually torture many people at all, and when they did so, it was within a careful framework that ensured that it wasn't some personal vendetta and that the person being tortured actually had information. (And, by 'torture', I mean waterboarding, which was the worse torture they officially did, just like us. And stress positions, just like us.)

Eventually, of course, the entire system of laws fell apart and they were just torturing whoever whenever, just like us and the random abuse at Gitmo, for punishment instead of for information. In fact, most of the torture at the camps, which is where nearly all the torture happened, was done without official government sanction or even knowledge...aka, by 'bad apples', just like us. The torture by the Nazi government itself was a very small fraction of that, just like us.

Except they had better controls on their government torture-for-information. They, at least, had oversight in place, unlike us.

Well, having taught both Constitutional Law and Criminal Law in my day, I can assure you that the chance of the President being criminally prosecuted for his conduct during the Iraq War is less than 0%. So don't hold your breath. The way we punish Presidents who make policy decisions we don't like is by removing them from office, not by criminal prosecutions. The idea that the conduct of a war gives rise to murder liability in the President is laughable. It also strikes me as a very immature abdication of the real ways in which citizens should be exercising oversight of their politicians - by use of democratic controls that we have let fall from our hands. Since we're too busy playing video games to do so, let's get the big Judge to take care of our responsibilities.

How to fix the real problems (torture, illegal detentions, etc)? Well in my opinion, while not convinced of all of the claims in Rod's post (they may be true, but the evidence cited here is rather sketchy), the only real answer to lawless behavior in the conduct of a rather secretive war is to find and appoint trustworthy people who believe in moral limits on their behavior, including military leaders who will enforce those limits. I would think that both Barak Obama and John McCain are equally capable of finding, appointing and empowering such people.

The idea that courts will resolve problems and right wrongs that occur during war is a preposterous idea. They may have a marginal role in patrolling the farthest reaches of violations of codes of military conduct and some extremely limited and extraordinary prosecutions of "war crimes", but they have absolutely no power or expertise in over-seeing larger military policies.

Courts are also the least democratic branches of our government, so it would be an incredible risk to hand over the reigns of military control to them. For some crazy reason people think judges are somehow immune from all the abuses that beset the democratic branches of government. They are not. They are a one-generational aristocracy, and they are just as subject to human folly and immoral choices as everyone else. The only real difference is that, unlike the case with the elected branches of government, it's almost impossible to check abuses of power by judges. God help us if they become our military overlords.

Karen -
I follow your argument. The point I was trying to make was only that no matter what course of action our President takes, we will always be sitting here in the wake of his decisions, criticizing him and saying he should have done this or should have done that.

Personally, I am happy with the efforts our government (and others around the world) is making in fighting terrorists. Many plots have been foiled and there have been no more major attacks on US soil since 9/11. I say, keep doing what you're doing.

Now I know some of you will think I am naive, or intellectually immature, or whatever. The truth is, I have four little kids and I really don't care about much right now except raising them in a country where we can be safe from fanatics who will dance in the streets when thousands of Americans are killed. If it means a few men will be mistakenly detained or held for a long period of time, then so be it.

Wake up, Jules. A few men detained makes little change in the possibility of one or more attacks. Those "many plots" that were "foiled" depended on nothing learned by torture. I make that assertion on the simple principle that most of the detainees at Gitmo have been there for years, and could have known next to nothing of importance about any of them.

Any elected official who does the wrong things should be prosecuted, and if convicted of a crime, punished. That is a far cry from second-guessing and 20-20 hindsight, neither of which have anything to do with the actions known to be initiated by or carried out by members of the Bush administration.

How often must we fill in our name and email? Every post?

"Any elected official who does the wrong things should be prosecuted, and if convicted of a crime, punished." - Franklin Evans

I agree. The key words here are "does the wrong things". Whether or not our President has done the wrong things as it applies to Gitmo depends on whom you ask.

"If we persist in alienating Muslims who might otherwise be sympathetic or neutral to our cause, you create breeding grounds for new terrorists." - Steve

Sorry, but I am not in the least worried about alienating Muslims, sympathetic or otherwise.

I am constantly amazed, not just by comments on this site, but all over the internet and in real life as well, by how many people seem to have forgotten how awful 9/11 was. We all should still be as mad as hell! It was an act of pure evil, perpetrated by Muslim fanatics. So forgive me if I am not worried about a few Muslim prisoners being held against their will while we sort things out.

We are, after all, talking about our 'Rule of Law'. That's the subject of the thread. And there are reasons why objectivity is the goal in the enacting of justice. We specifically try to avoid invoking anger, rage and fear as a policy, or as the basis for a legal action, or judgment.

It is our greatest challenge. It can be too easy for a group of people, any people, to transform from a civilized society seeking security, prosperity and some measure of freedom for its people, while enacting justice and even punishment upon those who, through investigation and the due process of law, have been deemed to be transgressors.. into a riotous mob, vigilantes not looking for justice, but to vent their rage on any who are even like those they believe did the crime.

Fear and anger are no good basis for law, or policy.

The rule of law is important, but it is not an end in itself. It is a means to several ends, among them being the maintenance of social peace. Strictly speaking, the "upholding the rule of law" would have required prosecuting every Confederate veteran for treason; this was not done, for the sake of social peace. Strictly speaking, "upholding the rule of law" would require rounding up & deporting every single "undocumented immigrant"; arguably, we'd be better off not doing that, again, for the sake of social peace.

If there was a near-universal domestic consensus that the Bush et al committed/condoned criminal actions worthy of prosecution, then I'd be far less leery of impeachment. As it is, I see no such consensus. In the absence of one, I fear that prosecutions of Bush et al, particularly if conducted by the other party, would be viewed by a non-trivial portion of the public not as "upholding the rule of law", but rather the pursuit of a partisan political vendetta. From which the take-home message would not be "Don't do illegal stuff", or even "Don't get caught", but rather, "If you hold political office, never let go of power, lest your enemies hound you 'till you're in chains". This would not be a healthy development for the Republic.

[FWIW, I don't think Clinton ought to have been impeached, either, because the prosecution struck me as being basically political. Not sure about Nixon, since I'm not familiar with the history of the era.]

Thank you for putting this post up, Rob. It renews my faith that we can work across party lines to put an end to these injustices.

Cleveland, there comes a time (more than once) in the life of every country where the basic question must be answered: are we to be ruled by law, or by political expediency?

I've used the latter term pejoratively before now, but this time I mean it sincerely and with all seriousness. We've come to this crossroads many times, in lesser and greater urgency, and we have stumbled dramatically as well as spawned heroes of our nation.

I'll pick just one example, because it is close to my heart. Harry Truman (a man and leader my father* admired [he wanted to name me after him], and that's saying something) was faced with a choice: spill the blood of thousands of Americans after an already long and bloody war, to invade and pacify Japan, or kill thousands of strangers whose only "crime" was being citizens of a country who attacked us.

With understanding and respect to Jules -- I have three children of my own -- 9/11 was not Pearl Harbor. Not in degree, not in indications of things to come, and certainly not in our ability and will to respond to it. We conquered a sovereign nation in response.

With Iraq -- and I stipulate the second-guessing for now -- we were in no such straits, not even close. Indeed, if one wishes to draw a parallel, US intelligence was much more culpable in 1941 than in 2001, because an entire nation was geared up for war and had already invaded its neighbors.

I will step back at my personal anger towards Bush, and I will state without hesitation that no matter his motivations, no matter how sincerely he believed he was right, we was wrong, he should step up to the podium and admit it, and he should step forward and be prosecuted for his mistakes.

What form that prosecution should take, I abstain from comment at this point. Impeachment has never been a judicial process. It is rife with political quid pro quo -- just like our legislative processes at every level -- and I am not confident in it at all since the fiasco around Clinton.

If we, as the body electorate, stand up and demand the highest standards from our elected leaders, then I will stand still and quiet for every Clintonesque impeachment because it would mean Bush being impeached for violating FISA, Cheney for his energy dealings (see also Spiro Agnew, eh?), and no one would have ethical room to complain.

So, as we stand facing each other over a political divide, I do not hesitate in sharing your outrage at the way politics are played. I will accept criticism of my political fellows, but my questionst to you, Cleveland my friend, are of a more abstract connotation: when you are ready to point a rational finger at your political fellows, you and I can return to a more relaxed debate of the issues on the ground, which get lip service at best.

* For those readers who don't know this reference: my father was a professional soldier, trained in espionage, and an officer in the Yugoslav Army that was defeated by Tito's communist partisans. When it came to military theory and history, he knew whereof he spoke.

"Fear and anger are no good basis for law, or policy." - Karen

Aren't just about all laws the result of some type of fear or anger?
Don't we pass tougher drunk driving laws because we are angry that someone killed someone while driving drunk?
Don't we have laws against burglary because we are afraid it will happen to us? Murder? Assault? Rape? Same thing.
At the root of all policy is some sort of fear or anger that the masses will get out of control and anarchy will reign.

"This is not a question of liking Muslims, being angry at Muslims or any feelings about Muslims. It is simply wanting to eradicate the conditions that allow terrorism to proliferate." - Steve

I agree that something needs to be done to make terrorism a less appealing choice for young Muslim males (and females, in some cases). Having said that, I don't think that our holding or releasing the prisoners at Gitmo will do much to change anything. There are so many other forces at work on these young men, forces which are out of our control. As long as there are fundamental Muslim factions who shun western lifestyle and civilization, there will be terrorists. What can we do about that? That's the million dollar question.

It has become increasingly obvious that this administration has little regard for our Constitution. Congress has sold out and has pretty much supported the administration on wadding up the Constitution and it's safeguards. I am absolutely disgusted and outraged.

Thought experiment:

A woman is raped and murdered, reasonably called an act of terrorism. Her father, as convinced of the guitly party's identity as a jury would be in convicting him after a trial, hunts the party down and kills him.

Under US law, the father would be tried, convicted and imprisoned for murder. Stripping away the emotions just for a moment, a rational person could construct a reasonable argument that the father was morally justified. His crime was in taking the law into his own hands, regardless of what the probable outcome of due process would be.

When we talk about the rule of law, I think that there can be only one standard: it applies to everyone, no exceptions. Moral justification cannot be sufficient cause to exonerate a person for committing a crime.

Granted, the direct connections in my analogy are arguable. I insist that we must hold our leaders to the highest standard, if only because while their actions can serve to protect and preserve the nation, they can also harm us well beyond the proportion of what we fear in the moment. A leader who makes mistakes -- albeit honest ones -- is dangerous. A leader who makes mistakes and is incapable of recognizing those mistakes, is more dangerous. A leader who knowingly takes an action that is a mistake is beyond dangerous.

As a comparison point, not only do I label the conquest of Afghanistan morally justified, but it was also de facto a legal act, based on the reactions from and support of the international community.

Franklin Evans - some thoughts:

1. For whatever reason, Americans view terrorist attacks by foreign parties as being inherently different from ordinary crime. Perhaps they shouldn't be, but the fact is that they are. If tens of thousands were being killed, on our soil, annually, by terrorists, Americans would be far more likely to view the government as being negligent in its duties, than they would about an equivalent number of "ordinary" murders. Assuming, arguendo, that our post-9/11 policy was an overreaction, the aforementioned fiference in perception probably had a lot to do with it.

2. I understand what you're saying WRT to the rule of law. However, successful law enforcement requires that the bulk of society agree with the law in question. When such agreement is absent, then either the law stops being enforced, or its continued enforcement is seen as an act of oppression. Hence my concern, as expressed in my 8:10 post, WRT to the potential prosecution of Bush et al.

3. WRT the application of legal restrictions to foreign policymaking, my view tends to be that of Jack Goldsmith - i.e., that there are too many such restrictions in place, that the proper mode of calling a President to account for errors in foreign policy is elections (*). My preference would have been for Bush et al to seek the repeal of such restrictions once they realized that proper (in their view) post-9/11 foreign policy was incompatible with them. Alas, they did not do that, but instead decided to be clever & try expanding executive power while also fighting a war. Now we have a situation that, IMHO, is roughly analogous to Pournelle's take (**) on the Clinton impeachment: yes, the President may be guilty of a crime - but it should never have gotten this far in the first place.

4. We already have a mechanism for dealing with incompetence in the Presidency: elections, and Presidential term limits.

(*) And impeachment, but I would tend to reserve that for extreme circumstances, e.g., deliberately refusing to prosecute a war which everyone agrees is necessary for national security; or willfully collaborating with parties that everyone agrees are enemies of this country; or waging war in the face of near-unanimous Congressional & public opinion to the contrary. For disagreements over policy - e.g., how a war is run, particular actions taken during the war - the proper recourse is elections.

(**) jerrypournelle.com/alt.mail/altmail4.html#view

Franklin Evans
When we talk about the rule of law, I think that there can be only one standard: it applies to everyone, no exceptions. Moral justification cannot be sufficient cause to exonerate a person for committing a crime.

I'm going to have to disagree with this by agreeing with it. Or something. Moral justification cannot be sufficient cause to disregard the rule of law. People who commit 'morally just' crimes should be subject to the rule of law just like everyone else.

However, the rule of law itself includes the idea that moral aspects should be taken into consideration. This is why we're tried by a jury of our peers and not by robots.

This is why I had so much objection to the stupid 'ticking time bomb' scenario and actually managed to blog about it more than two years ago. (And I blog about almost nothing, preferring to ramble on other people's blogs.)

Basically, I said that, if there actually is reason to torture someone to immediately stop the death of others, if this 'ticking time bomb' actually happens, it should be illegal to torture someone, and they should do it anyway, and they should end up in court where they almost certainly will be found not guilty. Or pardoned, or any of the other ways people can be not charged with a crime.

The key there is, if the law is unjust, if the law is wrong, if the law does not provide room to operate within, if it is truly an emergency, then the law itself has a solution:
1) Break the law
2) Show up in court admitting you broke the law
3) If society (That is, the jury, or appeals jury, or legislators, or chief executive, or judge, or prosecutor, or whoever) agrees with your reasoning, you will go free despite having committed the crime.

This isn't precisely civil disobedience. Call it 'civil exceptionism' ...you agree with the law in principle, but feel society would agree with your violation of it in this very very specific situation, and, just like civil disobedience, you intend on appearing in court to argue that. It is, of course, a risk, you might be entirely wrong about society and convicted, but that's a feature, not a bug...we don't want people doing it willy-nilly.(1)

The problem with Bush, of course, is that he didn't bother doing anything beyond step 1, and in fact lied repeatedly about his lawbreaking, and didn't bother attempting to change the law even when the lawmakers were actually asking his opinion about it. If he had broken the law on 9/11 onward, and shown up in congress on 9/14 or whenever and said 'Help me, I'm wiretapping without a warrant in violation of FISA, and I need a new law', that would be one thing.

He didn't. He instead assumes that laws do not apply to him, and that he can in fact order people to break the law. And, if it comes to light, the legislature will allow his behavior, without him actually admitting what that behavior was.

And Bush, for once, appears to be entirely correct.

1) It's worth pointing out that this is actually encoded into the law in many ways. For example, 'self-defense' statues not only allow you to kill someone, but allow you to break the law yourself in the preservation of yours or someone else's life. For example, you can steal a random person's car to escape from someone trying to kill you. These are laws now, but they started out as juries agreeing that, despite you clearly having broken the law, you had a very good reason to.

"If you want your kids to be safe, then support eliminating Gitmo and torture." Steve

Steve, I am not a good enough wordsmith to know how to say this any other way. It is not my intent to insult you; it's not, please believe me. For all I know, you and people like you really are gullible enough believe the things you say on this board.

People who think and act as you do are what allowed 9/11 to happen. None of the Islamo-fascist murders of Americans, pre and post-9/11, here and abroad; none of their threats to do so; none of their purely evil, Hussein-boys style of rape, torture and murder of women for purposes of culture or "pleasure"; none of their use of WMD on their own people; none of their unspeakable torture of little children in front of the kids' parents for political purposes; none of their at least financial support of terrorism in other countries; none of their attempts to build or otherwise acquire nuclear bombs; none of their return to killing Americans after release from Gitmo; in fact, nothing imaginable seems to distract you and people like you from the anti-American, anti-common sense hatred of everything Bush.

How do you face your God after repeatedly saying in public, during a time of war, that we are torturing prisoners at Gitmo? Don't you fear God? Don't you know that you and your ilk are recruiting more evil people to kill Americans?

And maybe your children will be safe if the evil bastards are released from Gitmo, but everyone else's children won't be. May God protect us from people who think as you do.

"Please [Rod,] keep showing the people what is being ignored by our leaders." neo

Don't hold your breath, neo. Rod can't show you any more proof that President Bush is torturing prisoners than Steve can. And note carefully, neo, Rod knows better than to come right out and say that the President is lying--that he really does torture prisoners.

"Cleveland, a logical rebuttal question: do you believe that the US is morally accountable for terrorist attacks outside our borders? I'm think of Spain and England as examples." Franklin

Old buddy, I fail to see why that's a logical rebuttal to my pointing out that the lies about our president are unsupportable, and that such conduct by Americans harms our fight against the sub-human evil that is Islamo-fascism. The more we give aid and comfort to the beast, the more likely it becomes that our kids and grand kids will have to spill a lot of their own blood to finish the job. Evil respects only moral force; something some Americans forget or won't admit, so that our kids have to die proving over again.

Nevertheless, my answer to your question is no; only terrorists and those who appease them (in any country) are morally accountable for terrorist attacks.

And while I'm at it, allow me to tie up another loose end: after President Bush is convicted in court of crimes, and also is found to be as morally degenerate as Clinton with various women victims in and out of the White House, then, my friend, you would have grounds to talk about impeachment.

"I must gently and respectfully point out that on the chance that Bush is actually guilty of impeachable crimes, we will never know about it..."

My friend, he has been and continues to be investigated by Congress, the media and haters in and out of the government to an extent I've never imagined possible. Yet absolutely nothing except pre-existing, unsupportable allegations have resulted. You have built your house on sand--not like you.

"That secrecy you laud for 'national security' extends to every single thing done, said or thought in the Bush administration."

Not so. Some of the "secrecy" involves an appropriate reaction to Democrats unconstitutionally fishing around in the Administration's constitutionally protected discussions with its advisors. Only present-day Democrats pretend to believe that separation of powers is something new and evil, yet scream bloody murder when the tables are reversed.

"So long as you are quick to brand anyone divulging evidence in that direction as bitter traitors (replace with equivalent epithet of your choice), and so long as it remains impossible to acquire admissible evidence... we'll just have to leave it be, eh?"

Now you are reduced to defending treason-like acts by some despicable people on the Hill, like "Leaky Leahy", the one-time vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had to resign the post in disgrace after acknowledging he divulged secret information to a reporter. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/699093/posts

I do agree that "political prostitute" rather than "political whore" would be the more correct epithet.

"I'm mildly (really, only a little bit) insulted that you'd throw in the sexual peccadillo part [about Clinton]. When a large proportion of the men who'd vote on and conduct an impeachment proceeding fit that description, it becomes irrelevant, rather. :-\"

Franklin, I gave you no reason for insult, but you have to admit that it might be over the top for you to say that many of those who voted for impeachment were as bad as he was. You have no basis for saying that. More to your point, Clinton was not impeached because he was a shameless abuser of women or because he was a laughing stock and international embarrassment for America. He should have been impeached on that basis, but you will recall that "merely" perjury and obstruction of justice were the reasons.

Your serve.

PS: I'm not trying to be a smart ass; it's just that all the facts in this case are on my side. Strange that a man of your character would not be for the innocent underdog.

Cleveland, I would come right out and say that prisoners WERE tortured at Abu Ghrayb, and at Guanatanamo, and at an unknown number of overseas sites. There have been criminal cases against U.S. soldiers as well, in the most extreme case soldiers raped an Iraqi girl, and killed her family, and burnt her body to try to hide the evidence. In doing so, they brought dishonor on their units and on the Army - and we are one organization that does not take honor lightly.

I'm no softie, I'm in the U.S. Army. I have no qualms about the men I've helped target for lethal operations. They probably deserved it, I don't stay up nights wondering if they didn't. To our best knowledge, these operations were justified.

I have nothing against "stress positions." Even in recruit training we are subjected to some of these - exposure to extreme temperatures, disruption of sleep cycles, sleep deprivation, disorientation, exposure to CS and explosions, being yelled at, belittled, forced to hold uncomfortable positions, and forced to exercise past the point of physically being able to go on. This is not particularly harsh treatment - and the Drill Sergeants are very careful to avoid injury (not least because we can't afford to lose a single recruit with two wars on.) But it is, in combination, a lot more pyschologically stressful than one would think. And part of its purpose is to show us we can handle rough treatment, if we are ever captured.

I'm no "Bush-hater." By regulation, I really can't be.

But given all that, I can't fully understand your point. What does being against torture have to do with God? Leaving aside the question of whether it was officially permitted, why does it seem impossible to you that American citizens have tortured detainees, or knowingly permitted it? If it is not "torture" per se, what do you call the behavior that has come to light in photos and official reports, and would you still admit that this behavior was at least wrong, even if not "torture." Do you think we are incapable of doing wrong, and our enemies incapable of doing right? That is the sort of dangerous thinking which permits behavior like torture and the repression of civil rights to filter in.

At some point you can veer into dangerous territory where you are breaking your own rules, rules which were a large part of what defined and separated us from oppressive societies such as there are in the Middle East. Once we've undermined our very values in that fashion, we really have no leg left to stand on, as far as preaching democracy and civil rights. It's a matter of integrity really.

AnotherBeliever, please refer to my last reply to Franklin.

Please also refer to http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/30/00303.shtml

Sorry, Cleveland. Testimony by a retired judge before a congressional committee is not even close to a duly administered court proceeding.