On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Vice President-elect Joe Biden whether high-level Bush administration officials should be prosecuted for prisoner abuse. “The questions of whether or not a criminal act has been committed…is something the Justice Department decides,” Biden responded. “That’s a decision I’d look to the Justice Department to make.” While stating he was “not ruling it in and not ruling it out,” Biden underscored that he and Obama are are “focusing on the future.” “I think we should be looking forward, not backwards,” he argued. |
Fine Joe. Let's look forward. In fact, let's look forward to prosecuting people for torture. It would be a tremendous injustice if people who were responsible for this monstrous stain on our national record went unpunished.
While I'm willing to give Team Obama the benefit of the doubt and wait until they take the wheel to start worrying about what they aren't doing, this isn't the most heartening thing I've heard so far.
We may have to pile on congress to get them to take up the slack here. We shouldn't have to, but we may.
While I'm willing to give Team Obama the benefit of the doubt and wait until they take the wheel to start worrying about what they aren't doing, this isn't the most heartening thing I've heard so far.
We may have to pile on congress to get them to take up the slack here. We shouldn't have to, but we may.
3 comments:
As I see it, there are two possibilities.
One: GWB will issue presidential pardons to everyone who might conceivably be prosecuted for torture. That will leave Obama the choice of prosecuting GWB himself, or no-one.
If Bush doesn't issue those pardons, I'm reasonably sure that Obama won't want to start the kind of prosecution we'd all like to see. The military and security establishment already looks on him with suspicion; if his first official act as president is to institute a witch-hunt in their ranks, it's not going to endear him to them.
What I suspect will happen -- what I'd do if I were Obama -- is something on the model of the South African post-apartheid "Truth & Reconciliation Commission": a full-scale, open public inquiry, chaired by someone of unassailable integrity, with guaranteed amnesty for everyone who's prepared to stand up in open court and tell the unvarnished truth, no matter how nasty it is.
That way, he can get credit for dragging all the abuses into the light, credibly promise that it won't happen again (because of the changes he'll institute after the inquiry), and avoid the bitter, brutal backstabbing that will (make no mistake about it, will) arise if he starts prosecuting.
It's not justice, but it's a reform. It worked well in South Africa. And it's well within his presidential powers.
I'm afraid I wouldn't be in favor of a truth commission. The only reason S. Africa went that way was because crimes on both sides were so common that a significant portion of the population would've been in prison if everyone were charged. There's no danger of that here.
Still, that won't stop it from happening and I'm just as afraid that you might be right. The idea's got a sort of Obama flavor to it.
I don't think we have to worry about pardons. The Bush people still think they were right about everything -- about Iraq, about Afghanistan, about torture, about curtailing civil liberties and, now, about drilling off the California coast. Those blowhards are and have been so out of touch, they probably would love a chance to defend themselves on the big stage that a criminal prosecution would offer them.
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