Barack Obama and crimes of the Bush-Cheney Administration

This story is an excellent example of a serious problem, not only for Obama himself as a President but also for the Democratic Party more generally: their acceptance of Presidential impunity for criminal actions and the larger circle of immunity that flows from that. Obama Voices Concerns For Dropping Charges Against Gen. Flynn In Private Call MSNBC 05/09/2020:

Obama's own Administration was remarkably free of corruption based on what has come to light. And that should be a model for other Presidents to follow.

But one of Obama's most consequential Presidential legacies is this: David Johnston and Charlie Savage, Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs New York Times 01/11/2020, Bush's criminal torture programs in particular are referred to here:

In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

“And part of my job,” he continued, “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.”

The Bush administration has authorized interrogation tactics like waterboarding that critics say skirted federal laws and international treaties, and domestic wiretapping without warrants. But the details of those programs have never been made public, and administration officials have said their actions were legal under a president’s wartime powers. [my italics and bolding]

The only thing Dick Cheney couldn't give his Unitary Executive experiment under the Bush Administration was a subsequent Democratic administration that granted de facto immunity from prosecution for serious crimes committed by Bush-Cheney officials. Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder from 2009-2015 gave him that. The same was true of his successor under Obma, Loretta Lynch.

This wouldn't have to have been a "political" investigation and prosecution. There are a variety of laws and organizational structures intended to prevent politicized prosecutions. The case of Michael Flynn which has been prominently in the news the last week was one in which a former Trump Administration official was investigated, prosecuted, and convicted by the Justice Department under the Trump Administration.

Eric Holder could have directed such investigations to be done in the regular Justice Department structure. He could have recused himself from decisions on such prosecutions to minimize the effect of inevitable Republican accusations that the investigations were partisan. He could have established a Special Prosecutor like Robert Mueller's investigation on Russian election interference. Obama could have asked Congress, which had Democratic majorities in both Houses in 2009. to establish and Independent Prosecutor, although the reckless and irresponsible Ken Starr tarnished that idea badly. He really did run a crassly partisan investigation.

But regardless of the particular organizational approach used, the Obama Administration had the most serious kind of responsibility to investigate and prosecute crimes committed in the torture program and the deliberate deceptions the Bush-Cheney government engaged in to persuade Congress to approve the invasion of Iraq based on phony claims made to Congress in knowing bad faith.

Instead, Obama adopted a policy of de facto impunity under the slogan of looking forward not backwards. Which, of course, is not the standard applied to crimes not committed by CEOs or senior government officials.

That was a real failure. Trump as President would have been corrupt and otherwise criminal. Because that's who he is and what the Republican Party is now. But it would not have been so easy if crimes during the Cheney-Bush Administration had been professional investigated and prosecuted.

See also:

• Mark Thompson, Obama's Growing Dilemma on Torture Prosecution Time 04/22/2009
• David Cole, Obama’s Torture Problem New York Review of Books 11/18/2010
• Glenn Greenwald, Obama's justice department grants final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers
• The Guardian 08/31/2012 Adam Serwer, Obama's Legacy of Impunity for Torture The Atlantic 03/14/2018

Trump is now suggesting that his Administration will concoct some kind of completely bogus charges on which to prosecute Obama himself. So his generosity to officials of the preceding Republican Administration is apparently not reciprocated by the subsequent one. The result: Republicans think they are free to break the law in their official positions, including ginning up phony charges against Democrats.

But that particular tradition of granting immunity for criminal acts of torture was continued under Bush-Pence, and expanded to include what seems to be the entire government: Michael McGough,Like Obama, CIA nominee [Gina] Haspel wants to ‘look forward’ on torture questions Los Angeles Times 05/09/2018.

From 01/06/2008: George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush

I'm re-upping this post from 12 years ago (slightly edited for clarity):

Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".

And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined as a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public good when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.