Via Jim Henley, Tom Englehart points out that the vast reams of quasi-legal reasoning the administration's produced designed to explain precisely which kinds of war crimes aren't really war crimes constitutes a kinda sorta confession, a weird paper trail of criminality and rationalization where a cover-up might have been smarter and less morbidly bizarre.
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War Crimes
21 Oct 2007 01:40 pm
Comments (15)
They would've gotten away with it anyway, but I suppose they needed a veneer of legitimacy to make sure their cadre would follow the orders.
Heirs of the hideous Germans who kept paper trails of their crimes to the last days of WW2, what else did you expect from these scum?
Escape punishment? Hopefully, in some future when there's moral perspective again, their names will be synonyms of Goebbels and Himmler.
Given that they're going to get away with it
Even in the face of us meddling kids and our blog.
Escape punishment? Hopefully, in some future when there's moral perspective again, their names will be synonyms of Goebbels and Himmler.
Posted by Jeffrey Davis
That, or the distant future will have a history that says "Before the anthrax attacks on 4 major US cities and 5 in Eurasia in 2012, a cabal of wealthy Leftists embarked on a successful terrorist rights campaign later blamed for weakening the effort to stop the terrorists before the anthrax attacks killed 83,000 people..They are now known as the New Copperheads, led by many of the Jewish & Gentile activists we now call traitors. George Soros, Ted Kennedy, the Sulzberger Family of the now-defunct NY Times - among others.. Their names will forever synonymous with Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling."
I'm over 14, Chris, so I remember a decade ago when Republicans were pissed that the president was fighting al-Qaeda. Because it was distracting from their efforts to impeach him over a blowjob. Weird but true.
That, or the distant future will have a history that says....
Nobody fucking cares, Reb.
Chris, that may be the dumbest thing I have seen written here in a while. (2 hours at least)
Matt,
You're right that a cover-up would have been less messy, but I think this gets to a fundamental misunderstanding you, and a majority of your readers, have about the Bush administration. They always believe that they are doing the right thing.
This is, of course, nuts, and reflects little intellectual rigor and poor self-assessment. How poor can be seen by the flailing response of the administration to it's critics. From my vantage point, it appears that they simply couldn't imagine that anyone might object to one of their decisions and never bothered to consider the possible downsides.
The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was the most blatant illustration of this. The administration was honestly surprised that conservatives objected to so poorly qualified a candidate. They had no answers for why she was a good pick, because that is precisely the sort of question they always fail to ask.
We are seeing the same pattern here. They don't have an explanation because they didn't give the interrogation policy serious thought. They just went with what seemed right (expedient) at the time.
Re Chris "white trash" Ford
Mr. Fords' affection for the draft dodging, coke snorting, pot smoking, lying, drunk in the White House certainly tells us everything we want to know about him.
Re Yglesias
Isn't Mr. Yglesias going to comment on the article in todays' Washington Post about those those bad Israelis' are making life tough for those poor Palestinians?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/20/AR2007102001307.html?sub=AR
Given that they're going to get away with it
Even in the face of us meddling kids and our blog.
I hate to add another OT comment, but: ROFLMAO, Senescent.
"Given that they're going to get away with it"
This is absolutely true.
Once again, does anybody see anybody or anything that will ever put Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest in a DOCK for criminal prosecution?
Who's going to come to the United States - or accost Bush on some future overseas trip - and arrest him, escort him to the Hague and press charges.
Especially when we have a law on the books in the US that says the US will INVADE THE NETHERLANDS if necessary to free any US individual accused of war crimes there?
Please...
Bush and company ARE going to get away with it. Not only that, they will profit handsomely from it in all ways, except possibly historical references long after they're dead and thus won't give a damn.
And that's why they did what they did. Like George Bush and his malapropisms, they just do not care.
And they have no reason to. They are under absolutely no threat to their person or their property or even their professions. They are immune from any negative consequences.
And this, the United States population calls "democracy." This, it calls a "republic."
It's a joke.
Saddam Hussein had more to worry about than Bush ever will, even if the US never invaded.
RSH,
The measure of a republic isn't so much whether it treats its leaders fairly, as whether it treats its citizens fairly. However much damage Bush may do between now and 2008, he will then leave office and we can begin to complain about his successor. Everything Bush has done to change the way America is governed can be undone - and that is the accountability that matters.
Whining about the fact that we, as a country, aren't going to put a president in jail when we have never done so (even Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for less than a year), is just childish vindictiveness.
Yeah, but we hung people in post-war Germany for crimes against humanity that the people involved in this government are prima facie guilty of.
Torture was paragraph F in in the legal statutes, and they spelled out (with good reason) that it wasn't important which or how many of the articles were broken but that it became a crime against humanity when it wasn't an aberation but a government project. What that body of legal vomit spells out to those who can read is absolutely a confession worthy of a death sentance.
Heedless again...Christ, where does the Israel Lobby, or whoever is paying these proles, find these guys?
That was an incredibly stupid post.
While I happen to believe that "punishment" is ineffective as a means of controlling crime, I DO believe that it is necessary to increase the cost of doing coercion so that it is not profitable to engage in it. This is best done by education and training, but in the cases that fall through the cracks, other measures are needed. And in current society, the process is different.
Therefore Bush, Cheney and the lot must not be rewarded for fucking up the world. Otherwise the next asshole in will continue the process, unlike your belief that everything Bush has done will be undone. Far more likely it will be made worse.
Bush, Cheney and the lot must be ostracized and prevented from earning another fucking dime from their time as the rulers of this country. And the incoming assholes must be informed that if they try anything similar, they will be kicked out of office immediately and treated exactly the same way.
And specifically on the matter of war crimes, as a matter of simple consistency, if you're going to put some low-level military grunts in prison for some years for obeying orders, then the men who GAVE those orders need to be there with them.
It's touching how you view the US Presidency as an imperial status deserving of unending respect, but perhaps you should remember that when Thomas Jefferson was President, he lived in a boarding house - and they wouldn't hold dinner for him if he was late home from work...
That, or the distant future will have a history that says "Before the anthrax attacks on 4 major US cities
Uncanny that you chose anthrax. Who was the president during the last anthrax terror attack? the last unsolved anthrax attack?
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Mr. Goodbar Sez:
Comments closed November 04, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
where a cover-up might have been smarter and less morbidly bizarre.
Given that they're going to get away with it, how could that possibly be true?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 21, 2007 1:49 PM