{"id":5281,"date":"2009-03-05T18:10:23","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T17:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=5281"},"modified":"2009-03-05T18:10:23","modified_gmt":"2009-03-05T17:10:23","slug":"the-case-for-prosecuting-bush-officials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/politics\/the-case-for-prosecuting-bush-officials\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Prosecuting Bush Officials"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daphne Eviatar<\/a>\u00a0|<\/p>\n

The Senate Judiciary Committee\u2019s \u201cGetting to the Truth Through a Nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry\u201d convened this morning to consider Sen. Patrick Leahy\u2019s (D-Vt.) proposal for a sort of \u201ctruth and reconciliation\u201d commission.<\/p>\n

The hearing was full of all the predictable, lofty statements from illustrious supporters about why a commission would further the American people\u2019s understanding of our nation\u2019s past and true values, and also demonstrate to the world our commitment to truth and justice \u2013 most of which I agree with. But what was most surprising was that the Senate Republicans and their witnesses, in the process of ripping apart the idea, made the strongest case I\u2019ve heard yet for why the Department of Justice should prosecute former senior officials of the Bush administration.<\/p>\n

Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking committee Republican, after noting his previous support for judicial review of the Bush administration\u2019s terrorist surveillance program, referred to the recent disclosures of Office of Legal Counsel memos as potentially supporting the case for prosecutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve had some rather startling disclosures, with the publicity in recent days about unusual\u2013to put it mildly\u2013legal opinions\u201d to justify broad executive actions, including homicide. \u201cThey\u2019re all being exposed now,\u201d he said, and noted that a forthcoming report from the Office of Professional Responsibility in the Justice Department will likely expose even more. They\u2019re \u201cstarting to tread on what may disclose criminal conduct,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Rather than going off \u201chelter-skelter\u201d and conducting a \u201cfishing expedition,\u201d said Specter, \u201cit seems to me that we ought to follow a regular order here \u2026 If there\u2019s reason to believe that these justice department officials have given approval for things that they know not to be lawful and sound, go after them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The witnesses called to present the Republican opposition to Leahy\u2019s proposal made the same point.<\/p>\n

David Rivkin, a former Justice Department official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and now a partner at the law firm Baker & Hostetler, said a truth commission \u201cis a profoundly bad idea, a dangerous idea, both for policy and for me as a lawyer for legal and constitutional reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Objecting that Congress would be improperly delegating its oversight power, and that witnesses would be called out for criminal conduct without the right to defend themselves in a trial, he said: \u201cthis is to establish a body to engage in what in essence is a criminal investigation of former Bush administration officials,\u201d and that \u201cthe subject matter areas, which such a commission would investigate \u2014 among them the interrogation and handling of captured enemy combatants and the gathering of electronic intelligence \u2014 are heavily regulated by comprehensive criminal statutes, and ensures that the commission\u2019s activities would inevitably invade areas traditionally the responsibility of the Department of Justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeremy Rabkin, a law professor at George Mason University who also opposes Leahy\u2019s idea, similarly insisted that in the United States, where we have a fully developed legal system, prosecutions \u2013 not truth commissions \u2013 are the appropriate course. A truth commission is something that countries like South Africa and Chile have had, not something we should do here, he said. \u201cIn those countries they had to have commissions because they couldn\u2019t have prosecutions. Peace was really in doubt in those countries \u2026 they had to trade off prosecutions for peace. We\u2019re not in that situation. If people think we need to have prosecutions, we should have prosecutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Proponents of the truth commission idea, meanwhile, while not ruling out the idea of prosecutions, saw a truth commission as serving a different, and broader, purpose. But it was surprising that, at a hearing cautiously called to discuss \u201ca nonpartisan commission of inquiry,\u201d we heard the strongest case yet for the prosecution of former Bush administration officials \u2013 being made by Republicans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Daphne Eviatar\u00a0| The Senate Judiciary Committee\u2019s \u201cGetting to the Truth Through a Nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry\u201d convened this morning to consider Sen. Patrick Leahy\u2019s (D-Vt.) proposal for a sort of \u201ctruth and reconciliation\u201d commission. The hearing was full of all the predictable, lofty statements from illustrious supporters about why a commission would further the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1616],"tags":[49],"class_list":{"0":"post-5281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-politics","7":"category-usa-news","8":"tag-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}