A Modest Suggestion: Offer Immunity To Everyone.

[chieftain]

Then call everyone who touched the torture issue to testify. You lose your immunity and subject yourself to criminal prosecution if you lie, refuse to testify or take the 5th. Get it all out, every bit of it. This is a powerful teaching moment for the country. I am willing to forgo the pleasure of watching the Bush thugs doing a perp walk if we can put as full a record of what happened in front of the American people as possible. My guess is that the most venal of the W cabal will find a way to forfeit the immunity offer. By doing this in this fashion we will get the truth and justice and not have to listen to the caterwauling of Rove and Broder and anyone else who wants to paint the search for America's soul as mere partisan politics.

[bbinacan]

1. Not a bad idea. n/t

[ZombieHorde]

2. As long as marijuana smokers still get to go to jail, lets allow the torturers to go free. nt

[cliffordu]

3. Yeah...That's a classy set of laws...

[Overseas]

4. Sorry friend, not me. I watched a lot of Iran Contra hearings

and heard about criminal activity done in service of our country, and they were pardoned.
Then many of those same criminals re-emerged to perpetrate or participate in further abuses of international law. It was not "a powerful teaching moment for the country." Or perhaps it was, as long as the key word is MOMENT.

The less viable word is TEACHING. Even after the Abu Ghraib photos came out, we just put a few of the lower level functionaries in jail and left those who justified the breaking of international laws and the Geneva COnventions untouched. So we sure didn't learn much of lasting value from those Iran Contra hearings.

Or even from the BCCI hearings.

We know a great deal about what happened during the Bush Regime's repeated violations of our Constitution and international law. Hearings will confirm the details of what we were witnessing in agony during the Bush Regime's long 8 years. Their actions were so horribly abusive that just to get another good look at what they did and consider that enough punishment is very dangerous.

That will lead the next power-hungry group of sociopaths who think they know what is best for America and want to rule from the executive branch feel that
Hey, All we've got to do is be ready to make dramatic confessions later when we get out of office and whatever we want to do now is cool. I mean, the Bush Gang got off with only a dramatic hearing even though the US government executed Japanese soldiers who did the same thing! The US public saw photos of horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib and didn't impeach the executive branch people. All they had to do was a long boring hearing. We can handle a hearing, can't we?

Maybe the Cheneyites already felt that way, having seen the Iran Contra teams get off Scott free, with just a dramatic series of hearings.

I am hoping it is time for some real change.

[karynnj]

6. BCCI didn't have the problem of offering immunity

Kerry, who had been an excellent prosecutor, did not offer it. The problem there was that a Senate committee could investigate and could provide the proof used to indict, but they can not prosecute a case. When the leaders brought Kerry's committee to an end, ending his subpoena power and jurisdiction, he took the information to the the Justice department to prosecute and when they wouldn't. He then took it to Morgenthau, who as a Manhattan DA had jurisdiction. There were important people who actually went to jail on BCCI charges and the international bank was closed down.

He also wrote a report and briefed both GHWB and the incoming President Clinton on BCCI, including a list of 20 items that still needed investigation. Number 1 was to investigate how AQ Khan, with funding from BCCI was able to develop his bomb.

I agree with you on Iran/Contra, too many Senators and Congressmen used it to showboat. They really made a mess of it, making North, who had lied to the earlier Kerry committee - for which again - no immunity was offered, a national hero. (His perjury charges were because in the Iran/Contra hearings, it became clear he lied to Kerry.

[Overseas]

7. Thank you for reviewing this shared history with me.

I hadn't remembered that no immunity was offered. But I guess none was needed for Iran-Contra. Because I too was quite disgusted that Ollie North emerged as some kind of two-bit pundit for a while. He was regarded as heroic for lying to the citizenry for the administration in power at the time.

I didn't remember that the DOJ of the time would not prosecute what Kerry uncovered with BCCI. But I do remember things moving on to Morgenthau, and that some big names went to jail.

So what you say makes me rather glad that we have yet to codify a way to investigate the legal deviations of the Bush-Cheney Cabal. Maybe it is better that we flounder for a while, as more disturbing information comes out. Discuss the various options that could be pursued to analyze the information most productively, before settling into any familiar channels.

But I also recently wondered what resonance the BCCI stuff might have with the recent CDO frenzy. I was glued to those hearings but it has been a long time. Now they're just a fantasy chat line: "Wanna come up and check out my BCCI tapes?"

[karynnj]

8. My sentence on Iran Contra was convoluted - you were entirely right that

the House/Senate Iran/Contra hearing that got incredible coverage DID give immunity. There were two hearings on the Contras. The first one was pretty much just Kerry, started when he had been a Senator for something like 3 months. Some vets had come to him speaking of having been recruited to fly the arms to the Contras and cocaine to the US. They checked out so Kerry went to Lugar, then chair of SFRC to get authority to investigate it. Lugar agreed if he could get a Republican to agree. Kerry was able to persuade an extremely unlikely Republican - Jesse Helms, who was a strong supporter of the Contras, but very anti-drug.

The Reagan administration stonewalled in giving him documents that he legally asked for - even when Kerry's requests were repeated by Lugar. In addition, some of the Republican staff (or Senators) at one point linked stuff to the administration. The administration also harassed witnesses and tried to discredit them. They also harassed Kerry and his staff - having the Washington Times accuse Kerry of interfering with FBI (Or CIA I can't remember) investigations.

The Kerry hearings got almost no coverage. All the Republicans and half the Democrats favored supporting the Contras legally. The coverage it got was entirely negative with Newsweek calling Kerry a conspiracy nut. When the plane carrying weapons crashed, it immediately confirmed a lot of details that a witness had given on the arms smuggling - down to the specific plane.

Slightly before that the Iran arms sales and the hostage deal made news. After this broke, it was combined with the other and the Iran/Contra hearings were planned. Kerry, a very junior Freshman Senator, was not included on the panel investigating it. That panel of senior people did give immunity. (Here's an interesting link to comments from Kerry's chief from 2004 on that -

"So he takes on the issue of Nicaragua, and it ruffles feathers, doesn't it? He doesn't even get to be on the committee.

You mean the Iran-Contra committee? Well, there was a lot of water under the bridge, between his trip to Nicaragua, and Iran-Contra. He had been investigating Oliver North and Contra drug trafficking, and other violations of U.S. law at that point for about a year and a half. He'd been making a lot of charges about what's going on, which the wiser and grayer heads in the Congress said were false, which the Reagan administration said were absolutely false.

I remember Dick Cheney attacking John Kerry in 1986 for things John Kerry was saying about the Contras and the NSC and Oliver North. Every single thing John Kerry said was true. The attacks were aggressive, and were based on hopes, wishes, and politics -- partisan politics, not reality. John Kerry's reality was proven -- and it was proven -- when the plane went down in Nicaragua, and it turned out that that was tied to the National Security Council, and money out of Saudi Arabia, and money from the Iranians, and ultimately, as we showed, related in part to narcotics money, at least in other elements of the Contra infrastructure.

There were a lot of people who were mad at John Kerry for having been right. The Reagan administration was, of course, furious. They didn't want him anywhere near the Iran-Contra investigation, because he knew too much and he was too effective. That's what I believe it was about. …

Several people were convicted. So John got as a consolation prize his own subcommittee for the first time, and subcommittee staff, and the ability to continue the drug investigations, which led to his investigation of Manual Noriega's drug trafficking, where he worked very closely with Jesse Helms."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2004/interviews/winer.html

I followed the big Iran/Contra hearings, but only vaguely heard anything about BCCI. Even though I did read the NYT at least somewhat in that time frame, sometimes it was very "somewhat" as I had three kids born from 1985 to 1990 and other than taking a year off with each was working. Reading all this in 2004 and hearing little about it in the mainstream, it was exciting that we could really elect someone who had fought all those battles that should have made him unelectable as many people prefer to believe that the US has always been entirely a force for good internationally. (In 2004, there was no way, shorting after the death and cannonization of Reagan that Kerry could have explicitly used the excellent work he did on the Contra investigation.)

[Overseas]

10. Providing immunity too broadly enables revisionist historians to do their work

more freely, like lionizing Ronald Reagan for the US audience.

If there are no convictions on the record for Bush Gang crimes, then the revisionists can pretend that "they kept America safe after the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil."

Rather than the sad truth that the Bush Gang ignored a great opportunity to form alliances around the world to defeat Al Qaeda in favor of rushing the USA into a war of choice against an enemy unconnected with the Al Qaeda attack. And that their actions strengthened our enemies, rather than defeating them.

[lunatica]

5. In the long run that would probably be a serious mistake

If they're offered immunity then they'll all talk till we vomit in revulsion and then what? What's to stop them from doing it again? Or anyone else who decides to corrupt the country again.

The point of prosecuting is that it is meant to hold people accountable for their criminal actions. Offering immunity doesn't do that. It basically gives people permission to break the laws even more because they never pay the price.

[TexasObserver]

9. I like it, except for one thing: if there's no prosecutions, there's no reason to talk.

Offering immunity to anyone below the rank of General might work, but they'd all have to identify who gave them their orders. Once a few generals had their careers hanging in the balance, get them to roll on Rumsfeld, et al.

[noamnety]

11. This is not a Powerful Teaching Moment

Teaching requires students who are interested and active participants in the learning process.

Poindexter was convicted in 1990 on five felony charges of conspiracy, making false statements to Congress and obstructing congressional inquiries related to Iran-Contra.

Dubya appointed him Director of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, and we let that happen.

Next time anyone brings up merit pay for teachers, think back on this.

[Orsino]

12. The Tutu option, eh?

Depends on who's taking the testimony, I suppose, and how vigorously perjury would be punished.