[Sosfbay-discuss] Harper's's Scott Horton at Stanford Law School Wednesday

[Fred Duperrault]

    The Green Party should make accountability of Bush-Cheney
    Adminiatration an important item of the action agenda.

The "Harpers" article  reveals how  Obama is  backing out of his 
"intention" to take up the issue of accountability. The Green Party 
called for impeachment early on.  Shouldn't we, now, be raising hell 
about Obama's evasion of bringing justice and allowing the dangerous 
precedent to remain unchallenged?
Fred D.
 


    *I'm told that "The Accountability Imperative", a speech  Harper's's
    Scott Horton gave at Amnesty Int'l on 3/28/09 greatly resembles his
    remarks at Stanford Law School Wednesday.    I've cut his text from
    almost 2800 words to a bit over 1600 below in hopes of achieving a
    wider audience.  For his original, unvandalized work, see   *

    http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004641

    * *




    The Accountability Imperative   (abridged version)

      Obama's campaign rhetoric opposed torture as strongly as that of 
McCain, who said “Torture is the defining issue of our age.” In his 
first two days as president, Obama banned torture techniques, terminated 
the Bush Administration’s practice of extraordinary renditions through 
which persons were snatched and sent off to other countries to be 
tortured, and suspended the Guantánamo tribunals. He fulfilled his 
campaign commitments, but we're not done yet. How we close this question 
will define us to the world and to future generations.
    Consider these developments:
*Criminal Investigations Begin in Spain*
March 28, Spanish newspapers reported that the Audencia Nacional 
Española, the Spanish national security court, has opened a criminal 
investigation into the Bush Administration’s torture practices at 
Guantánamo. Targets include:

    *

      John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice
      Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), now a professor of law
      at UC Berkeley;

    *

      David Addington, former legal counsel and chief-of-staff to Cheney;

    *

      Jay Bybee, former assistant attorney general at the OLC and now a
      federal appeals judge for the Ninth Circuit;

    *

      Alberto Gonzales, former White House legal counsel and attorney
      general;

    *

      William J. Haynes II, former general counsel at the DoD, now a
      lawyer at Chevron;

    * Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense, now a senior
      fellow at the Hudson Institute

     What inspired Spain, a NATO ally of the USA which actively 
supported Bush's war on terror and sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, 
to a criminal investigation of Bush’s torture lawyers? In July 2006, the 
Spanish Supreme Court concluded that the evidence of torture at 
Guantánamo was substantial; it labeled the facility a “legal black 
hole,” and barred official Spanish cooperation with its operation. The 
current investigation grows out of a probe of the mistreatment of 
Spaniards held at Guantánamo. The prosecution's cache of 6,000 pages of 
Bush Administration documents includes extensive evidence that the 
targets conspired to introduce torture at Guantánamo by crafting a legal 
“golden shield” for those who implemented the torture policies. The 
criminal complaint quite properly views the torture memoranda as 
evidence of a conspiracy to introduce and authorize a regime of torture, 
and notes that the team met and conspired together regularly.
    The investigation is managed by Judge Baltasar Garzón Real, who 
prosecuted Basque terrorist groups and is credited with having broken 
Basque separatist terrorism, headed a criminal probe into Al Qaeda in 
North Africa, and prosecuted Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. Garzón is 
not the sort to be stymied or bullied by politicians.
*A Criminal Probe in Britain, Too*
     On March 26, Lady Scotland (Attorney General for England and Wales) 
answered a parliamentary inquiry by announcing that she had conferred 
with the Crown Prosecution Service about the start of a criminal 
investigation in Britain of the CIA's rendition of Binyam Mohamed to 
Morocco and Pakistan for torture. Mr. Mohamed has said CIA agents or 
British intelligence agents were frequently present during the periods 
in which he was tortured. Demands by High Court judges and pressure from 
parliament has yielded a British criminal probe into these crimes.
*A Steady Stream of Confessions from Bush Officials*
    Lately Bush Administration officials ave begun acknowledging that 
torture occurred with Bush’s approval. Susan J. Crawford, the senior 
Bush Administration figure responsible for detainee treatment at Gitmo 
told the /Washington Post/ that her legal conclusion was that a prisoner 
had been tortured in a regime approved by Donald Rumsfeld. (1) Colin 
Powell’s chief-of-staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson acknowledged that the 
Bush Administration knew all along that 90 percent of the Guantánamo 
detainees were guilty of nothing, but held them, presumably because 
admitting their innocence would be bad politics. March 27 Vijay 
Padmanabhan, a State Department lawyer responsible for detainee cases, 
publicly labeled Bush’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” as 
"torture". (2)
    Articles 4, 5 and 7 of the Convention Against Torture, to which the 
United States is a party, require the USA to make torture a serious 
crime and to investigate any credible reports. Under 18 U.S.C. sec. 2340 
and 2340A torture and conspiracy to commit torture are felonies. Are Ms. 
Crawford's quasi-judicial determination that torture occurred and public 
admissions by other officials not “credible evidence”? When our closest 
allies do criminal investigations of Bush's crimes, how can our own 
Justice Department do /nothing/?
    We know part of the answer. The former attorney general, Michael B. 
Mukasey, improperly blocked any investigation of torture done under 
Bush's authority. At Justice Department premises, criminal acts were 
plotted, supervised and implemented--and suspects in the latest Spanish 
case include Mukasey’s predecessor as attorney general and two other 
senior Justice Department officers.
    A senior foreign dignitary who recently asked Eric Holder why he 
does nothing characterized Holder's answer as “senseless twaddle.” Even 
calls for a commission of inquiry on Bush’s torture program—which 
remains enshrouded in secrecy and lies—draw scoffs from TV chatterboxes: 
"the Republicans will bring Washington to a stand-still," they say. 
Childish tantrums must not hold sway. Spare the rod and spoil the child.
    Leave well enough alone, turn the page, we are told. Forget it, move 
along. But accountability is essential to our nation and our world. I’ll 
give you three reasons why.
*Ending Torture Precedents*
    While we're celebrating Obama's executive orders ending torture, 
let's remember that what a President does by executive order, he or his 
successor can undo with a stroke of the pen. Our society is governed by 
precedent. If we don't call Bush to account for eight years of torture, 
its precedent can be cited and followed by subsequent administrations, 
lodged like some lethal bacillus in the fabric of our society, dormant, 
ready to emerge again. Obama's orders can't protect us from this torture 
legacy. That is not an acceptable resolution, or any resolution at all. 
Only a process of formal accountability can end the precedential effect.
*Security*
   America’s last warrior-president understood that our national 
security cannot be grounded in force. “Only justice, fairness, 
consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of 
eternal peace,” insisted Dwight D. Eisenhower. His view was unswerving 
that America must not give up its values to achieve “security.”
    America emerged on the international stage before World War II 
holding high the banner of human rights, leading by combining its 
strength, wealth, and technology with its fundamental ideals of 
“inalienable rights”, of a “decent respect” for the opinion of our 
fellow nations, of a command to know and observe the “laws of nations.” 
In the war years, America invoked the Four Freedoms, and in victory 
called for a restatement of the rights and obligations of nations in 
terms that commanded respect for the individual. That dawn of the true 
era of human rights glowed with the cinders of the holocaust.
    No nation can always live up to its ideals, but none of our slips 
and falters have ever shamed and soiled our banner as Bush's stain of 
torture. It can not be swept aside easily, but must be worked at with 
attention and care.
    Barack Obama's promises to once more take up leadership among 
nations, demonstrating again our respect for human dignity and the rule 
of law can be credible only if we purge the Bush taint through 
accountability. If America truly upholds the laws of war, and truly 
believes torture is a crime, then those who while occupying positions of 
power and trust consciously violated the law must be held to account. We 
must ferret out the truth and apply the punishments the law requires. 
The process must respect the accuseds' rights and afford them every 
opportunity to make a defense. It may entail clemency or pardon for 
some. To “move on” and ignore what happened is not justice—it is a 
decision to spurn accountability, a wink to those who may engage in 
torture and abuse in the future.
*Are We All Torturers Now?*
    Gross human rights abusers in the modern era have a tried and proven 
defense: by implicating society as a whole, as Mark Danner argues, they 
spread the guilt and blame as broadly as possible to inoculate 
themselves against future accountability. Since April 2004 we have known 
of the Abu Ghraib photos, but we've done little to stop such practices. 
We elected a government committed to end torture, but is torture really 
ended without accountability?
    The Obama Administration can’t address every problem at the start, 
and our current crises take priority. Accountability may take time. But 
with every day that passes in which Obama's team uses Bush tricks to 
cover up past abuses; every crime it perceives and fails to investigate, 
Obama slowly takes ownership of the Bush crimes. America need not take 
on the shame and guilt of the Bush years. Upholding the law and holding 
accountable those who violated it need not be a traumatic process, and 
may forge a new national consensus as past sins are expiated. Turning 
away from this important duty would be a grave error.
    Amnesty International has existed for more than three decades. It 
has documented and memorialized past wrongdoing, protected the victims, 
and held those in positions of power and authority to account for their 
lawlessness. Amnesty’s broad-based call for action provides the 
essential map to take America out of her current dilemma. We can, we 
must demand accountability, seeking not vengeance but justice we owe to 
ourselves and to future generations. We are defining the world they will 
inhabit. We can't eradicate torture, but we can ensure that it's a crime 
and torturers and their abettors will be held to account. That is within 
our grasp, if we fight for it.



1. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011303372_2.html


2. 
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gjD0weHpCkMwMc94iRSiCgw0UAMQD976KNNG0


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