Why I agree with President Obama that the Bush Co cabal should not be prosecuted.

[Savannahmann]

17. OK, so how do you do that with the current "understandings"?

I put Understandings in quotations for a reason. Remember, we enabled the CIA to do just this sort of thing. We never passed laws prohibiting the CIA from doing it. We passed resolutions, that were non binding. We always find exceptions to those laws. Again, it was the idea that we could do bad things for good reasons that got us into this mess.

In the 1950's, the CIA overthrew governments that looked to be going Communist. They fought a secret war in Laos in the 1960's, remember Air America? The CIA fought the Russians in Afghanistan, and helped Hungary to revolt. Bay of Pigs, all of it. Despite the failures, the abominations, we've never passed laws saying the CIA will be held accountable. We always find reasons not to hold them, or the Administration accountable.

I'm saying that before we start the accountability game, we have to let everyone know that from now on the rules will be followed, and people will be held accountable. That means we begin by passing laws. Laws that make it clear that all the exceptions and excuses will not be tolerated. We pass laws that hold our Government accountable to the same laws that we the people must follow.

That is step one. After those laws are passed, without exceptions for national security. We then enforce the law with a vengeance.

I was just listening to a book, the Cold War. It has a long chapter about this behavior, and how it got started. We quickly learned that we could not take direct action to thwart the plans of the Soviet Union. We were unwilling to stand aside and see how things played out. We, Democrats and Republicans, pushed the boundaries time and time again, until basically nothing was verboten. We pass Executive Orders prohibiting Political Assassinations. Then we sign a document saying that this assassination is excepted because it's not political. We classify the entire thing as ultra top secret and put it in a file never to be opened.

President Obama is doing those things, those bad things, for the hoped for good outcome. It is a flawed argument, the idea that the ends justify the means, but we've been following that argument for more than sixty years. People who are looking forward to retire have never known a time in which it wasn't done that way. We have to change the rules that the game has been played by. And we have to mean it.

Because right now, if we did prosecute Bush Co and the rest of the cabal. This discussion would be held in front of a jury. Now, the defense attorney would be allowed to show the chain of events that Presidents, all Presidents, from Truman on have added a link to. Eisenhower and the illegal flights of the U2 over Russia. Kennedy and the same flights over other nations, the Bay of Pigs, and undermining efforts of democratic representation in other nations. Uganda and Haiti, we would see it all out there as historical precedence for the actions of the President.

I honestly don't know how that trial would turn out. If Bush was found guilty, then the same fate would await President Obama, and the next President, and the one after that as smaller and smaller crimes were prosecuted. When one was prosecuted for failure to insure that the records keeping act was followed to the letter by storing the documents in a box that was the wrong color, we would be on the verge of a dictatorship. Because why leave power if you know you will be charged with some criminal action or another?

I want it to stop. I want it all to stop. The torture, the black sites, the spying on citizens, all of it including the things I haven't mentioned in the line above. I want it all, all to stop. But I understand how we got here, each subsequent President decided that the precedence allowed him to do a little more that would be considered unethical. Certainly Harry Truman never imagined we would end up where we are now. But who can blame him for wanting the tools to accomplish the goal of preventing the fall of several nations, including Italy, to Communism. If Italy had fallen to Communism, then it's likely that Europe as a whole would have fallen too.

That's how it begins, one little thing, a laudable goal that can't be reached by strictly legal means. From there, we move on, we've taken one step across the line for a laudable goal, why not take another for what seems to be an equally laudable goal.

We have to shove the nation back across that line, and inform them that we never cross that line again. We can't decide that twenty one steps across the line was just too much, we should have stayed at twenty steps, that would have been acceptable.