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.

Revisionist history and memory formation on the Cheney-Bush Administration

His failure in his duty to see that the crimes of the Cheney-Bush regime - especially the torture program - were fully investigated and prosecuted according to the law is the most significant contribution of his Administration to creating the condition that would up with Donald Trump in the White House.

And now Bush gets to play the kindly elder stateman, to the sycophantic praise of not only NeverTrumper Republicans but also by Democrats who are afraid or unwilling to fight for their own side.

A Message from President George W. Bush@TheCalltoUnite pic.twitter.com/FIn9wuOPTF

— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) May 2, 2020

George W. Bush kept the Republican Party on its path to authoritarianism and accelerated it.

Rodayah Chamseddine's Rehabilitating a Monster: George W. Bush and the Bankruptcy of Civility Politics In These Times 09/6/2018 maintains its relevance.

... a former president, who oversaw an apocalyptic shock and awe campaign, was rehabilitated as a homely and wholesome painter. George W. Bush, whose administration wantonly poisoned Iraq with nearly 10,000 rounds of depleted uranium, and gave license to torture and indefinite incarceration without due process in offshore detention sites like the notorious Guantánamo Bay, was invited last year to sit across from Ellen DeGeneres and share self-deprecating barbs with Jimmy Kimmel to the benefit of his promotional book tour. Missing were the images of children suffering the aftermath of U.S.-made radioactive weaponry and the haunting photographs of Iraqi men languishing in Abu Ghraib. There was no meaningful discussion of the global surveillance apparatus that targeted and racialized Muslims. The body politic has not even come to terms with the full extent of this bloodbath. One would think that history would have long destroyed any semblance of nostalgia for George W. Bush, but the political fanfiction abounds—in spite of it. [my emphasis]

Another former President, Jimmy Carter, is someone whose post-Presidential contributions to American public life and to the cause of international peace I regard as more constructive and important than those of his Presidency. Carter talked about the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture program in his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005):

Physicians for Human Rights reported in April 2005 that "at least since 2 002, the United States has been engaged in systematic psychological torture" of Guantanamo detainees that has "led to devastating health consequences for the individuals subjected to" it. The prisoners' outlook on life was not improved when the Secretary of Defense declared that most of them would not be released even if they were someday tried and found to be innocent. ...

The terrible pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have brought discredit on our country. This is especially disturbing, since U.S. intelligence officers estimated to the Red Cross that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees at this prison were held by mistake. Military officials reported that at least 108 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other secret locations just since 2002, with homicide acknowledged as the cause of death in at least 28 cases. The fact that only one of these was in Abu Ghraib prison indicates the widespread pattern of prisoner abuse, certainly not limited to the actions or decisions of just a few rogue enlisted persons.

Iraqi major general Abed Hamed Mowhoush reported voluntarily to American officials in Baghdad in an attempt to locate his sons, and was detained, tortured, and stuffed inside a green sleeping bag, where he died from trauma and suffocation on November 26, 2003.

The superficial investigations under the auspices of the Department of Defense have made it obvious that no high-level military officers or government officials will be held accountable, but there is no doubt that their public statements and private directives cast doubt and sometimes ridicule on the applicability of international standards of human rights and the treatment of prisoners. [my emphasis]

That was 2005. After two full Bush-Cheney Administrations, two full Obama-Biden Administration, and over three years of the Trump Administration, the disgrace that is the prison in Guantanamo is still in operation. And the legal cases against the prisoners that have been there since the Bush Administration are still not all resolved.

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer on Julian Assange

In this interview, Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, talks about the Swedish rape allegation. According to his account, the Swedish police literally made up the rape allegations. Daniel Ryser et al, «A murderous system is being created before our very eyes» Republik (Switzerland) 02/31/2020. (See also: Wie die schwedischen Behörden die Vergewaltigungsanzeige gegen Julian Assange fälschten Standard 17.02.2020.

He isn‘t questioning the credibility of the complainant. He says the records show she didn‘t report a rape at all.

Melzer explains that he declined an initial request from Assange's lawyers to review his situation. But after another request last year, he accepted the undertaking:

It quickly became clear to me that something was wrong. That there was a contradiction that made no sense to me with my extensive legal experience: Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed? ...

Allow me to start at the beginning. I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages. ...

On Aug. 20, 2010, a woman named S. W. entered a Stockholm police station together with a second woman named A. A. The first woman, S. W. said she had had consensual sex with Julian Assange, but he had not been wearing a condom. She said she was now concerned that she could be infected with HIV and wanted to know if she could force Assange to take an HIV test. She said she was really worried. The police wrote down her statement and immediately informed public prosecutors. ...

S.W. never accused Julian Assange of rape. She declined to participate in further questioning and went home. Nevertheless, two hours later, a headline appeared on the front page of Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, saying that Julian Assange was suspected of having committed two rapes.

Assange may have been a bad actor in the DNC leaks in 2016. But the government was particularly concerned about Wikileaks' earlier reporting of US war crimes. The immediate reason for his taking asylum in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London was the threat of being extradited to Sweden on the allegations that Melzer discusses. Assange feared that Sweden would immediately extradite him to the US.

Now that he's in custody in the US, he deserves a fair trial. He certainly shouldn't be tortured while he's awaiting trial.

Also, the US should refrain from committing war crimes.

From the various reports on him, Assange doesn't seem to be a very pleasant guy. He's not the first journalist to have that reputation. And his politics seem to be some kind of quirky rightwing libertarianism.

But none of that should have any bearing on his legal treatment in the US or in Sweden.