Earthside Comments: Will there ever be justice or accountability for the many crimes committed by George W. Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, et al?
In a genuine Republic where the elected officials are accountable to the people, where the people are the government, where no man is above the law -- there would be justice.
But in this interview, professor of law at George Washington University, Jonathan Turley, delivers his very discouraging prediction: the Bushites and the Dimocrats have basically made a deal -- no accountability -- they all are going to protect each other.
As we say more and more here on this web site, we have a 'governing class' now in this country; it is beyond party and is most interested in perpetuating itself in power.
Read and weep.
From the Randi Rhodes radio program, Wednesday, November 28, 2007.
Randi interviews legal scholar Jonathan Turley.
Interview begins 35 minutes into the show, transcript begins 42 minutes into show.
Randi: You made the greatest point last night about why it is that the Republicans and the Democrats sort of looked at each other and they made a pact: we will not impeach this President and we will spend our whole time doing it -- we won’t be able to do anything else -- it will distract apparently from elections or whatever. And so they don’t WANT to have these hearings because why? What would they find?Turley: That’s the problem with the fix being in. The Democrats want to keep the controversy alive but they want to stop -- not all Democrats but some of the Democratic leadership -- want to stop just short of any event that would confirm the illegality of the domestic surveillance law or the President ordering torture because those two facts -- if it was ever confirmed by a court -- would virtually trigger an impeachment inquiry. And they have already promised the White House -- I’m talking about the Democrats -- that they will not have any impeachment inquiry for the rest of his term.
And so, one of the reasons you don’t see the Democrats tackling these issues and the reason they’re thinking about immunity for telecoms is that they can’t afford to have a court actually render a verdict. Because if they do then there is going to be very difficult questions: if the President did order illegal acts -- acts that are defined as federal crimes -- what are you gonna do about it? And the fact is that they don’t want to do anything.
Randi: That was the piece of the puzzle that was not making any sense to me. I understood they were asking for immunity -- retroactive immunity for telecoms -- and while the House has passed their version of that and it does not include immunity for telecoms, the Senate is still kind of chewing on it -- maybe we will, maybe we won’t. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out WHY. Why wouldn’t they want to see what the whistle blower Mark Klein has showed them in schematics and engineering diagrams -- they were copying everything that went over the fiber optic system of AT&T and any other telecom as well. Some didn’t even know AT&T was able to grab their stuff and copy it and provide a complete copy to the government.
Why would the Democrats and the Republicans who seem to like less government not want to know what went on when whistle blowers are saying: I’m telling you this was for permanent storage -- this was a “country tap” he called it, not a wiretap but a “country tap“ -- why wouldn’t they want that to stop? And things went through my mind, maybe they’re being blackmailed, maybe they’re being wiretapped, I don’t know.
Turley: It’s the same reason the Democrats rescued the President from the torture debacle. You could almost hear Democratic Senators hyperventilating when there was a demand for Mukasey to answer the question on torture. And I could tell you the alarms went all over Capitol Hill. If he had answered that question, if they held the line and forced him to say that water boarding is torture it would have been a disaster for these members because it would have confirmed that the President ordered not just crime but a war crime as defined by U.S. courts.
Randi: The torture thing I sort of understood but now it’s all wrapped up in a nice, understandable package for everybody to know: that this Congress is so terrified that if they investigate or if they don’t give retroactive immunity that there will be a showing that the President ordered or asked for and that the telecoms were told that they should help do crimes at the behest of the President and if a court has a finding that the President committed any criminal act -- a war crime in the torture instance and in this instance just the criminal activity of eavesdropping on his own citizenry -- then Congress would have no choice but to move ahead with an impeachment inquiry. They’d have to start it because there’d be a finding of criminality in a court.
Turley: That’s right.
Randi: And they don’t want it because it’s an election year. They want everybody to just focus on the future; they don’t want anybody to look at the bad old past, and meanwhile, it’s the Present. This is still going on, all of it. The torture is going on, the rendition’s going on, the wiretaps are still going on and they just want to sit there and say: we’ll deal with it in ‘09.
So let me ask you this: if, if in ‘09 we get a President with a conscience who says “I know what’s been going on” -- what do you think might happen in ‘09?
Turley: Well, it’s possible for civil liberties to be restored but it’s just very rare.
Randi: But will anybody -- in your best guesstimate -- be held accountable?
Turley: Well, that is very doubtful. I’m willing to bet you that the Democratic Senate will not allow any effort, for example, to prosecute people who tortured for the American government. I mean, there are people out there who have been trained to torture people and have tortured people in the name of the U.S. government. And I can promise you this: the Democrats will never allow those people to be identified and prosecuted and they will not pursue the President even once he’s out of office.
That’s part of the whole beltway mystique -- is that they protect their own and parties mean very, very little. They’re all denizens in the same city and it’s about power. And principle has very little role in the city and I hate to say that and it may seem cynical but these are not principled people in this city and many of them are really bad people. Not all of them, but many of them are bad people. They don’t really believe in principle. They believe in power and once they get power I don’t think they’re going to be pursuing principle.
Randi: Power must be so cool … ’cause nobody wants to let go of it
Turley: It’s intoxicating. The other fascinating thing is that all of these self-inflicted wounds of the Bush administration, and of the Democrats, are really due to this intoxicating effect of power. They get so detached they can’t even remember why they went into politics. When you sit down and talk to these people they can vaguely remember what motivated them and they can certainly speak of principle but they really are something different than as they started. I think the problem is that it’s a gradual bleeding that happens in this city.
Thanks to Democratic Underground message boards for this information.
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