RS: Do you foresee a scenario in which senior members of the Bush administration are actually prosecuted?
PELOSI: I think so. The American people deserve answers. Where we are now, in terms of prosecution of White House staff, is that we have charged them with contempt of Congress. We’re talking about Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten and Karl Rove. The natural course of events from here is that the speaker will determine what charge we’re going to pursue, because there are more than one. Under Bush, the Justice Department told the U.S. attorney not to prosecute the case. So the beat goes on – it just gets worse. We don’t know what will happen, because they’ve delayed it a long time.
Pelosi later said that “we should have a full examination” of the Bush administration’s alleged crimes, adding that what Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) “is putting forward, in terms of a truth-and-reconciliation committee, has always been helpful. It was helpful in South Africa, [and] it was helpful in Rwanda.”
Why is Pelosi stating that the US Justice System is as ineffective as Rwanda’s? Our situation is quite different than South Africa or Rwanda.We are not dealing with the same situations…are we? As far as I can tell, there were a small group of criminals at the top of our government for a relatively short eight years. Has our Justice system been so corrupted by them during that time that it is no longer capable of actually….prosecuting criminals?
Or is it possible that since the new administration is apparently continuing some of the Bush Policies from the Global Whine on Terror, that a Truth Commission is easier to control?
Via The Termite
In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.
The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.
And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information.”
If the unconstitutional and WRONG Bushco policies are embraced by the new administration, real investigations by a First World (unlike Rwanda) Department of Justice might prove….inconvenient.
Or perhaps it is just the obvious. She and the ohter Congressional Democrats are just plain disconnected….and stupid.
Though I can’t find a clip or link…or access the Rolling Stone Interview, on the teevee last night I heard her quoted as saying some thing like…..if there is evidence of crimes found, we will prosecute. If I recall correctly she has made some statement before that she needed to see evidence.
Hey Nancy, you might want to talk to that guy Conyers, who has been collecting evidence for eight years and has reams of it. If someone can find a quote of her saying that, it could be the basis for a nice little e-mail campaign….Send Nancy The Evidence. Anybody got a Rolling Stone subscription?
Beware Nancy! As more and more …evidence….emerges in the Great Unravelling, such as this article by yet another Bush torture victim, the de facto coverup you have been running for the last couple of years will become untenable. Despite your weak efforts to get out front of the wave by pushing a Banana Republic Truth Commission, you might find YOURSELF in the spotlight for your inaction, your previous (unacted upon) knowledge of the Bushco crimes. I believe that is called being an accessory after the fact.
Top ranked Democratic lawmakers knew what was happening….and didn’t stop it. I guess they think a Truth Commission, rather than an actual criminal investigation, will be kinder to them.
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also topple top Democrats?
Not if they actually investigate and prosecute.
It’s almost as though our representatives are trying to buy us off as though we were cranky children on a road trip.
“Hey! If you stop pressing for full rights as citizens in petitioning that everyone should be held accountable under the law, we’ll buy you a cookie! AND say very very bad things about the folks who caused millions to die and others to be tortured to death! Ok, that’s not enough? How about some ice cream, too??”
This is not a bargaining session. Argh.
When was the last impeachment of a President in Rwanda? Or don’t they have tables there either?
If she thinks she can pass herself off as supportive of “justice” and pass the blame to someone else she’s even more deluded that I thought she was.
Although, maybe there is enough support to impeach the Speaker by now?
Tar and Feather Commission, if anyone is asking.
lost all belief in politics. It may set the stage, with the next act but if the players remain and are allowed to play their bogus roles (including Conyers) as protagonists, to a script that stinks and we all must root for the hollow grandstanding which always has a bad outcome, who wants to root them on. No matter which side of the aisle the reality they all uphold is an abomination. They ALL created this with decades, no centuries, of malfeasance that plays against the progress humans make towards a better world.
Rwanda is in better shape then we are. They at least had a reality that made it clear what went down was evil. They had a will to try and reconcile with what they wrought. We just want to pump them some money and move on. Leaving behind the concepts and legal framework for inhumanity, directed at tearing down our history both here, in this unique try at democracy, and globally. Were pissing in the wind, politics has managed to circumvent history.
The history of our human struggle is universal timeless but we have managed to take down the meager rights we established with the twits who wrote the sacred documents. The bill of rights was a document that established our rights beyond the legislative, the real ones the ones that lay outside of politics. Here we are again begging these dicks to do the right thing, Instead of support we get haggling over legalities and bs about power and politics. The law may be king but it needs to be out of the hands of lawyers and pols. They are myopic in their quest for power.
Nancy Pelosi sends me a “thank you for your support” letter. In it she outlined her agenda stating her intentions to continue Bush’s Satanically evil concept know as the Global War of Terror.
Needless to say that fact alone was all I needed to know about Nancy Pelosi.
Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991