During his burnishing his legacy exit tour interviews Big bro 43 consistently bellowed "Do you remember what it was like after 9/11?" As far as we are concerned he'll use his delusional Global War on Terror "GWOT" and his unitary executive authority as his defense against every crime he committed after 9/11, but it isn't only the US Congress and people big bro 43 has to be afraid of. The International Criminal Court's case against Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir could provide legal precedence for going after Bush. We are consumed with the economic crisis that big bro 43 passed onto his successor. Maybe our Congress won't have the time to investigate W's crimes and after Clinton signed the "Rome Statute" setting up the ICC in 2000 Bush then in May 2002 withdrew U.S. support for the court. He wanted to make it harder for the ICC to go after him for his crimes. Why would he have withdrawn from this unless he knew he had committed crimes? This will be an important point because he is going to repeat a claim that he acted within the laws that were described to him-the laws that John Yoo's hypocrisies violated.
On March 5, 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported that according to a senior White House official, the Obama administration may reconsider joining the ICC so W's transparent ploy probably will be negated.
How did he get US into mess? W dictated his requirements to John Yoo who wrote substandard legal memos giving W all of the power of a banana republic dictator.
With the changing of administrations some changes were obviously required and some secrets of the previous administration revealed.
On March 2, 2009 Obama's Justice Department released the aforementioned memos which outlined--among other criminal activities and possible methods for "bubble boy" to ignore treaties and International laws, kidnap and torture American citizens, implement a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants, use the nation's military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids--again without obtaining search warrants, and overrule the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.
All of these things and more could be done exclusively by big bro 43 in the name of fighting GWOT. It is just recent history but remember that since it was instituted back on September 18, 2001 big bro 43 has claimed that the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" "AUMF" enabled him to claim essentially any power he wanted. The AUMF was unsuccessfully cited by the George W. Bush administration in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the administration's military commissions at Guantanamo Bay were not competent tribunals as constituted and thus illegal.
The AUMF has also been cited by the administration as authority for engaging in electronic surveillance in some cases without obtaining a warrant of the special Court as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
The article "Memos Reveal Scope of the Power Bush Sought" at
click here
describes the above noted powers that W claimed and the article stated "Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks."
How much of a stretch were big bro 43's positions as enumerated in the memos? John Dean, famous for bringing down "Tricky Dick" said "Reading these memos, you've gotta almost conclude we had an unconstitutional dictator. It's pretty deadly and pretty serious, what's in these materials."
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on March 3, 2009 "These memos include everything that a petty despot would want." Turley believes, however, that there may be worse revelations yet to come. "These memos weren't written in a vacuum," he noted. "The question is what did they do in response? We know, among other things that they created a torture program. ... I think we're going to find out that this was the mere foundation for a greater edifice that has yet to be disclosed."
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann asked John Dean "What does this say about what we need to do now in terms of investigating this, John?" asked Olbermann. "Is this the scale-tipper for everybody?"
"It could be," said Dean, "because the public is going to be aware of a lot more than they were. There is an investigation that is ongoing that started late in the Bush administration by the Office of Professional Responsibility.
"I think that investigation, which we've heard very little about, is going to be very hard to suppress now. ... I think the Office of Professional Responsibility may make some very strong recommendations that could include prosecution."
And Dean thinks that we just can't pretend it didn't happen as he stated "serious consequences" around the world if the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are not willing to "point fingers" at Bush administration members who may be guilty of war crimes."
All our allies hate us for this and our enemies are using our crimes as recruiting tools for extremist Islamic jihadists.
On the way out W got a lackey to pretend that the crimes just didn't happen or if they did they happened it was years ago and it was because big bro 43 wanted to protect us as the "Memos Reveal Scope of the Power Bush Sought" article stated "In a memorandum dated this Jan. 15, five days before President George W. Bush left office, a top Justice Department official wrote that those opinions had not been relied on since 2003. But the official, Steven G. Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel, said it was important to acknowledge in writing "the doubtful nature of these propositions," and he used the memo to repudiate them formally.
Mr. Bradbury said in his memo that the earlier ones had been a product of
lawyers' confronting "novel and complex questions in a time of great danger and under extraordinary time pressure."
9/11 was a terrible tragedy, but it was an isolated incident. There is no doubt that we have to combat terrorists, but we don't have to dismantle the freedom of our US citizens in doing so. Big bro 43 apologists have said that Lincoln violated the Constitution during his term, but the Civil War was an actual war.
Unfortunately the GOP has a long history of callings things wars that weren't, as we all can remember Ronnie's "war on drugs" which amounted to spending nothing and having us all "just say no" and which GWOT seems eerily similar to.
Big bro 43 knew he was in trouble as the "Memos Reveal Scope of the Power Bush Sought" article stated "The memorandum issued by Mr. Bradbury this January appears to have been the Bush lawyers' last effort to reconcile their views with the wide rejection by legal scholars and some Supreme Court opinions of the sweeping assertions of presidential authority made earlier by the Justice Department.
Walter Dellinger, who led the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton
administration and is now a law professor at Duke University, said in an
interview that Mr. Bradbury's memo "disclaiming the opinions of earlier Bush
lawyers sets out in blunt detail how irresponsible those earlier opinions were." Mr. Dellinger said it was important that it was now widely recognized that the earlier assertions "that Congress had absolutely no role in these national ecurity issues was contrary to constitutional text, historical practice and judicial precedent."
Obama's team has to investigate and as the evidence clearly suggests prosecute as the article concludes "In a speech a few hours before the documents were disclosed Monday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said: "Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties. Not only is that thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good."
Mr. Holder said that the memorandums were being released in light of a
substantial public interest in the issue."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
