War Handwavium

A group of people committed a massive number of crimes over the last few years. Do we prosecute them or not? Do we bring them before a court of law, give them due process, and let justice be served?

Put the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, Fortune’s Nina Easton, Time’s Rick Stengel, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in a room and ask them if we should prosecute people believed to have committed a crime. Apparently, their answer to that question for some people is: “It depends.”

Ask them if we should prosecute Bernie Madoff. I’m pretty sure they’ll say “yes”. Ask them if we should prosecute the people who committed war crimes, and suddenly the justice system is “vengence”, suddenly due process is “vindictive”, suddenly the notion of rule of law is “anger and retribution”. They will tell you with a straight face that it is more important that we “look forward” than it is to apply the rule of law.

For those of you just tuning in, here is what you need to know: The noise you’re hearing from these suckups and sycophants is nothing more than the henchmen arguing that Dr. Evil shouldn’t be prosecuted because they’re afraid that once Dr. Evil is convicted, then the justice system will then go after them. And they know they’ve helped Dr. Evil do illegal things.

Waterboarding is a war crime. We convicted Japanese soldiers of war crimes for waterboarding Americans during WWII. Now Americans have waterboarded a bunch of people and done it hundreds of times. And it’s exactly the same crime. It’s a crime to waterboard someone. It’s a crime for a superior to order people under their command to waterboard someone. It’s a crime to release “memos” trying to handwave the law away and declare that waterboarding is not illegal.

And while it isn’t a crime to be a right wing lackey mouthpiece working at some place like Fox News, it certainly doesn’t look good when you spend 8 years acting like a mindless cheerleader for the Bush administration, and then suddenly have it come out that Bush and all the behaviours that you were cheerleading were actually violations of international law.

So, all the noise you’re hearing from the blowhards saying we shouldn’t investigate these crimes? It’s coming from people who committed those crimes or people who spent the last eight years cheerleading those crimes. That’s all you need to know.

Prosecute war crimes.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/20/prosecutions/index.html