While I would love to see the entire Bu$h Administration paraded in front of a grand jury to answer questions on their involvement, I get the feeling it'll be tossed because there's no known fact establishing a specific crime was committed in the request for the AG to assign a special prosecutor - just hearsay because they hid their tracks.

There are still a number of innocent prisoners who were kidnapped and tortured holed up at Gitmo and CIA prisons all over the world.

Can we press for them to get out first in order to line up our witnesses to testify against the worst regime and POTUS?

Washington in your opinion may have been "dominated for weeks" by this debate, but the same could not be further from the truth among the public. Beyond the Beltway the issue is the Economy, the Economy and the Economy.

Do you think America has the stomach for a political shitstorm like the prosecutions they are seeking, one that will suck the wind out of every other piece of Obama, and the Country's agenda? Remember the sorry episode of the Starr investigation, Impeachment, etc., that sucked up more than a year of our lives? Multiply the gridlock factor by 10, and you might be on to something.

I also think it is interesting that these groups think the US Justice System is their best bet. Maybe I'm too cynical, and have been a lawyer too long, but a courtroom is the last place you go if you are looking for Truth and Justice. That's the American Way, after all.

Never gonna happen. Barrack's scrotum is as empty as Harry Reid's. Or Nancy Pelosi's for that matter....

Mailed today:

February 24, 2009

Eric Holder, Esquire
Attorney General of the United States
U. S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

"For the good of the nation," Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes and engendered the Iran-Contra scandal. "For the good of the nation," George H. W. Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra perpetrators and invited the criminality of the past eight years by the George W. Bush administration.

It is time to end this pernicious poisoning of American governance and to hold accountable those who have violated the laws of the United States.

In his stirring dissent in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928), Justice Louis Brandeis declared:

“Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. . . .”

The oath you took to defend our Constitution imposes upon you a paramount duty to restore the rule of law in America.

For the good of the nation, all of those in the Bush administration who committed crimes against the United States must be brought to justice without delay.

In the strongest possible terms, I urge you to appoint a Special Prosecutor at once to investigate and prosecute those against whom credible evidence of criminality exists.

I am, and for months, have been, deeply conflicted about this.

On the pro-side, our most solemn and important treaty commitments, commitments to the world to behave with minimal decency to our enemies, made in the hope that our enemies would treat us similarly, were breached. Our failure to show the world that we'll prosecute our own for those breaches sets a piss poor example when we implore other countries to render or prosecute butchers like Ratko Mladic. That's the right and high-minded motivation saying we should do it. It's all easy to understand and articulate.

On the anti-side, I've got nothing but grubby, filthy realpolitik concerns combined with a well-founded fear that the Republican Party would react to this in the most psychotic and socially destructive fashion possible.

Republicans think everything is political and about payback. They will, inevitably, view prosecutions as entirely politically motivated. They will, without any intentional irony, call it the politicization of justice and the criminalization of politics and interpret it entirely as payback for something or other they did--the Clinton impeachment, probably. They'll interpret that way because, in their world, the Clinton impeachment was payback for the Nixon impeachment and the Bork nomination and the 60s and every other damn thing marked down in their psychotic scorekeeping book. And, as a result, if we were to prosecute Bush or the others--no matter how justified and well founded our reasons--as surely as day follows night, first chance they got they would fake up a reason to prosecute or impeach Obama or Biden or whatever Democrat they hated most. Individually, they may be decent enough chaps, but collectively, they're sociopaths and that's how they roll. And so it would go, back and forth, becoming worse and worse as the government changed hand, hastening the collapse of the Republic in the process.

And, of course, there's the fact that the economy, and possibly civilization as we know it, are still in grave danger and I have more than a bit of a concern that the negative energy this fight would generate could be the thing that tips us over into completecollapse. There's just a flavor of bitter gunfight at the foot of an erupting volcano to it.

Ordinarily, because my "don't do it" concerns are largely based on fear and cynicism, and not a little crystal ball gazing, and my "do it" impulse is based on high-mindedness, my natural tendency would be to say don't listen to your fears and do the right thing. Honestly, though, my fear and cynicism concerns just seem more compelling to me right now. Maybe the economic crisis has unmanned me.

Or maybe, its the fact that there is one high-minded issue on the "don't do it," side of the scale for me. It just seems to me that way too many people on the left clamoring for a special prosecutor or a Truth Commission or a Grand Inquisitor or whatever are motivated by an anger that's boiled well past the righteousness mark on the thermometer and into black, crusty, bitter, malice. Maybe I understand how they got there because I so often had to have friends talk me down from that kind of anger. I still feel it welling up at the mere sight of a picture of Cheney or Yoo or Addington. (Indeed, I just realized that simply typing their names made my face spasm into a a brief furious microexpression.) Ultimately, however, I just have a bedrock conviction that no good can possibly come from actions that come from that place.

If we know the truth already, and I believe we do, what is the purpose of a truth commission?

Patrick Leahy's answer to this is that so we can prevent these things from happening again.

You can't prevent crimes from happening again if you don't even opt to prosecute those who committed them or authorized them.

There is a crisis of confidence in our government, and I don't know how people can feel assured that if we put banks into temporary receivership, that government can competently oversee the process; especially if it can't oversee itself.

I think people underestimate the potential damage that Karl Rove does to our entire society by not bothering to show up for a subpoena.

It makes our entire democracy seem powerless.

The idea of a "Truth Commission" is nothing but a front which signals that the US Congress does not have the spine nor the ethics to convene a prosecutorial commission to try our own war criminals.

To do so would put the Congress itself on trial.

I would love to see these degenerates prosecuted, convicted, and jailed for their crimes against the American public and the rest of humanity. BUT, for most federal offenses, the statute of limitations is five years, so they escape criminally for ALL of their misdeeds perpetrated before 2004 and increasingly for their actions in 2004. It is really criminal that Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, and Harry Reid gave these sociopaths a two-year "Get out of jail free" card.

Realistically, the ONLY way to hold these "people" responsible for much of what they have done -is- to have a Truth Commission, haul them before it under oath, and then have them either confess to their evilness (the Statute of Limitations having expired, they can't invoke the Fifth Amendment) or lie and try them for perjury.

I vote for the special prosecutor. Count me in with the 20 groups.