Obama's Opportunity to Show Respect for the Rule of Law

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

For a downloadable MP3 copy of this Black Agenda Report commentary visit our archive page here.

"Dick Cheney has made his own prosecution a simple matter,
by voluntary confession."

Barack Obama can either quickly get on the side of the law,
or become complicit in his predecessors' lawlessness. Back in april, Obama promised that he would ask
his attorney general to "immediately
review" information indicating crimes were committed by the Bush
administration. As always, Obama was careful to qualify his remarks. He had
previously ruled out calling for George Bush to be impeached while in the White
House. But Obama claimed to be open to taking action once he became President -
as long as it would not appear that he was on a "partisan witch hunt" that
would "consume" his first term in office. Well, what better trigger could there
be for an investigation into high crimes in and around the White House, than a
confession? We have one, from Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney has gladly fessed up to helping get the CIA's
waterboarding torture program started. Cheny has no regrets about personally
approving a form of torture for which Japanese commanders were convicted in the
Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Four decades earlier, the U.S. military
court-martialed its own soldiers for the crime of water-boarding prisoners in
the Philippines, while putting down the Filipino independence struggle. The
historical and legal precedents are clear and indisputable: water-boarding is a
war crime. Dick Cheney has made his own prosecution a simple matter, by
voluntary confession. There are no mitigating circumstances, since Cheney is
unapologetic about his crimes.

"Any president who turns a blind eye to blatant
lawbreaking is himself a lawbreaker."

Cheney should have lots of company. The Senate Armed
Services Committee reports that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
"other senior U.S. officials" are culpable
for crimes committed against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu
Ghraib prison, Iraq. The record of criminality begins with a February, 2002
memo from George Bush declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to
his war on terror. This set in motion a chain of actions that led directly to a
number of murders of detainees, for which Rumsfeld and others are responsible,
according to the Senate Committee. In addition to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld,
former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft were
also involved in discussions of torture techniques to be used against
prisoners. That's called a criminal conspiracy.

So, what more does President-Elect Obama need to justify an
investigation? Obviously, all that's missing is the political will. Barack
Obama's political will is closely connected to his own sense of political
convenience. He knows the law - he's a constitutional scholar, after all - but
Obama has also told
us that "we've got too many problems we've got to solve" to get bogged down
in making the Bush Gang accountable to the law. With that statement, Obama
reveals that the rule of law isn't a big priority of his.

The United States can never consider itself a nation of laws
when its highest officials systematically violate both the law of the land and
international law. And any president who turns a blind eye to blatant lawbreaking
is himself a lawbreaker. Barack Obama understands the principle - but will he
govern by that principle?

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted
at [email protected].

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