Ok, we have gotten the Agenda thing going. Hopefully folks will continue to submit stuff there, and in future editions,
Time for the next project!
All of the “politically pragmatic” excuses for NOT Impeaching George and the boys are now….off the table! There is now no excuse for excusing their crimes.
But…
As always when there has been some sort of trauma…and we have had eight years of so much trauma that we are all suffering a sort of PTSD, I think, there is the urge, the instinct to …move on, to not dwell on the trauma. To put it behind us as fast as possible. But if we are to get over the PTSD, well
Meteor Blades put it far more eloquently than I can:
…..that healing cannot occur, not wholly, unless the crimes that have brought our nation to such a ruinous condition – morally, economically and politically – are investigated thoroughly and a proper penalty imposed. Most importantly, the bent machinery that allowed, nay encouraged, those crimes must be rebuilt with safeguards so that they never occur again. That’s not vengeance. It’s justice. And true healing and progress cannot come about without it.
(For more background on the Never Again theme you might want to read MB’s Palling Around with Terrorists as well, if you haven’t already.)
Healing, Justice, Repairing the past before and as we move into the future. It is not vengeance, though if anyone ever deserved retribution it is they and I am not without that impulse by a long shot, it is about doing the right thing. It is about being a people and a nation and a world that does the right thing. Retribution and revenge are not the important things here, reclamation, reparation and the Rule of Law are.
There is no doubt that they are guilty, none.
Of all of the laws, treaties, conventions and just plain moral codes they have violated, and they have violated nearly all of them, the one thing that stands out and the one thing that there is a smoking gun on is…torture.
From the Washington Post in October, when it was obscured by the election:The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.
Guilty. Guilty of the most heinous of crimes. Beyond doubt, beyond question. The only question that does remain is…are they beyond justice? Can WE allow them to be beyond justice?