Let’s NOT Forgive and Forget
Paul Krugman on the rule of law [user id and password here]:
Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.
At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.
The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.
Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.
There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?
Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?
Because it’s politically uncomfortable. That’s what all the reasons we’ve heard add up to. But there is no rule of law without accountability. Those two sentences — “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” and “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” — contradict each other. If “looking forward as opposed to looking backwards” means overlooking egregiously illegal behavior in the previous administration, then essentially Obama is saying that some people are above the law.
Americans in general do not like to look back, or examine past mistakes too closely (or at all). But it seems to me that Barack Obama of all people should know that dwelling on the past and learning the lessons of the past are not the same thing.
“Let’s look foward, not back” is one of those bits of folk wisdom that is not always as intuitive as it seems. How can you enforce the law if you don’t look back?
And, look, the idea of enforcing the laws inherently involves the idea of looking backwards. If John Yoo walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and shot a guy in the head, we wouldn’t say “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” even though it would be as true as ever that it’s important to look forward. And more than one person has died as a result of Bush-era torture policies. …
Libby puts her finger on, if not the real reason then a big part of the reason, why there is so little enthusiasm for accountability among D.C. insiders:
There’s no political will inside the Beltway to pursue it because clearly many of the power brokers on Capitol Hill, on both sides of the fence, would be found to be complicit in enabling the abuses. All the more reason the people need to demand “bi-partisan” accountability.
John Conyers, Jr., has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post titled “Why We Have To Look Back.” It ends with this resonant paragraph:
Some day, there is bound to be another national security crisis in America. A future president will face the same fear and uncertainty that we did after Sept. 11, 2001, and will feel the same temptation to believe that the ends justify the means — temptation that drew our nation over to the “dark side” under the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. If those temptations are to be resisted — if we are to face new threats in a manner that keeps faith with our values and strengthens rather than diminishes our authority around the world — we must fully learn the lessons of our recent past.
Tags: rule of law
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