Truth and Reconciliation
Not to waterboard a dead horse, but here’s one last vote for calling Bush administration criminals to account for their illegal, un-American acts. We published a post on the subject earlier this week (”A Pardon for Bush?”) and have since sent the following letter to the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post -Gazette.
It’s a bit milder than our own mood, but the main thing is — let’s not just pretend that such egregious acts can be good-naturedly winked at and forgotten as if they were minor indiscretions, just part of the game. They are not. They were a deadly serious attempt to hijack the American way, and the perpetrators are smugly unrepentant.
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To the Editor
Democrats are split on the question of whether to prosecute Bush administration torturers, wiretappers, and other lawbreakers. The Obama team (and perhaps the country) seem to lack any stomach for such a massive distraction regarding past sins and wishes instead to keep their focus on the future.
Still, laws have been broken. War crimes have been committed. And at least on the issue of torture, this is the world’s business, not just ours. Every signator to the Geneva Convention and the Anti-Torture Treaty has the right, in fact the responsibility to prosecute our war criminals if we don’t. Then what would we do? Defend them and their acts?
Our failure to treat these violations of international law as crimes would make the Obama administration, in fact all of us, accessories after the fact.
Here is a third way. A president can pardon a presumed criminal at any time, including the time before he or she is convicted or even charged with a crime. Barack Obama, in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, could issue a series of presidential pardons, one each to every member of the Bush Administration known to be complicit in torture and possibly other illegal acts.
A presidential pardon makes it clear to all the world and for all time that the person pardoned is the likely perpetrator of a crime.
Such pardons could be confined to instances where the facts have been firmly established or have been admitted, as in the case of Bush and Cheney within the past week as to having authorized “enhanced interrogation.†The pardons could also be narrowly drawn, exempting only a particular crime or abuse and not others — so that the possibility of future prosecutions or civil suits would not be closed off.
Either by prosecution or by presidential pardons, unless we definitively disown the crimes and twisted values of the past eight years, we relinquish our claim to America’s core principles and the nation’s historic anchor in the rule of law.