Bush Burns the 'Midnight Rules' Oil

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/04-2

Bush Burns the 'Midnight Rules' Oil
He is trying to preserve his legacy with a flurry of decrees and interviews – but the issue of torture may well return to haunt him

by Rupert Cornwell

snip//

But there is one problem for the departing Bush that neither a special "midnight rule" nor any amount of history rewriting, and perhaps not even a pardon, will make disappear. I refer to the alleged war crimes committed by his administration: its refusal to comply with the Geneva Conventions, its forced "rendition" of terrorist suspects to countries where it knew they were likely to be tortured, and above all its own use of torture.

Already Cheney and the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, will be carefully checking future foreign travel plans, to avoid a "Pinochet situation" - when the former Chilean dictator was arrested in Britain in 1998 on a warrant issued by a Spanish magistrate for atrocities committed against Spanish citizens.

But a separate threat also exists, of possible legal action within the US itself, prompting speculation that Bush could issue pre-emptive pardons to top officials at the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon who were responsible for drawing up the "coercive" interrogation rules, and to the CIA personnel who put them into practice.

Such a step would not be new. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon just a month after taking office in 1974, while Bush's own father pardoned Reagan's former defence secretary Caspar Weinberger on Christmas Eve 1992, to spare Weinberger trial on felony charges arising from the Iran-Contra scandal. But it would be political dynamite. As he tries to push through an emergency economic recovery package, the last thing Obama wants is a distracting and bitter row with the Republicans, stoking up the partisanship he has pledged to reduce.

But sooner or later something will happen. The stain on the country's reputation is too large, the outrage at the violation of the US constitution too great, and America's sense of decency and justice (albeit sometimes delayed justice) too ingrained for the whole torture scandal to be swept under the rug for ever.

"We owe the American people a reckoning," Eric Holder, the incoming Attorney General, is on record as saying, and sooner or later that reckoning will come. Maybe a special prosecutor will be appointed, or perhaps Congress will carry out an investigation along the lines of the 1975 Church Committee that probed the misdeeds of the CIA. One way or another, Bush will have plenty to think about when he's not writing his memoirs (and reading books) in the golden years ahead.

[HowHasItComeToThis]

1. DID THE NEW MEXICO DOJ DO THIS HIT JOB ???

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