Elizabeth Holtzman - Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution? and What We Can Do about It

How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and
Plotted to Avoid Prosecutionand What We Can Do
about It

Elizabeth Holtzman
WITH
Cynthia L. Cooper

BEACON PRESS
BOSTON

We would like to dedicate this book to those in the U.S. government who, regardless of personal risk, stood up against the Bush administrations assault on the rule of law, on peace, and on human rights.

FOUR Accountability at Home: Redressing
Bush Administration Misdeeds

Before President George W. Bush left office, many people speculated that he would pardon himself as protection against possible future prosecution for crimes. People assumed he would do the same for Vice President Richard B. Cheney and his top cabinet officials, advisors, and aides. There was a good deal of discussion on cable TV news, blogs, opinion columns, and political talk shows: How extensive is the pardon power? Had self-pardons been tried before? When would it happen?

In Bush Final Days, Are Pardons in the Works? asked NPRs All Things Considered on November 23, 2008.

The president did nothing of the sort. Instead, he retired without a seeming ruffle of tension, helicoptering out of Washington, D.C., and heading to a new home in a Dallas suburb and his ranch in Crawford, Texas. When he publicly emerged, two years later, he was touting a newly published memoir, and proudly proclaiming that he had approved a form of torture, waterboardingDamn right, he said in his memoir, Decision Points. The former president had no apologies for starting a war in Iraq that had taken the lives of thousands and ruined many more: he thought the world was better off for it, even though no weapons of mass destruction, his ostensible reason for the war, were found in Iraq.

The vice president didnt even wait for his term of office to end before

Neither seemed perturbed by the prospect of prosecution. Now we know why.

While in office, they had already created walls of protection to prevent the sting of the law from reaching them. Behind the scenes, President Bush and Vice President Cheney workedtirelessly, it seemsto inoculate themselves against every manner and form of accountability for misdeeds.

They passed provisions changing the laws that they had violated, then giving the changes retroactive application. They made existing laws so convoluted and confusing that probably no prosecutor could enforce them. E-mails in their computers conveniently disappeared, and the retention systems failed. They stamped state secrets on legal actions that might open their misdeeds to scrutiny. They set up straw facades and fake justifications, and even slipped them in the law as pop-up defenses.

In short, in an unprecedented way in American history, they engineered and fixed the system from the inside, building buffers of protection for themselvesbehind a moat, on a hill, locked and gated, seemingly above the law. This book explores how the Bush administration used its power to manipulate the system, cheat justice, and get away with crimes.

Except... they had a lot of ground to cover. Their transgressions were so vast that they left open some small keyholes where the law can still reach them. This book is also about how to hold them accountable for the crimes they committed.

In the years since they departed, more information has emerged about their actionsdocuments have been declassified, investigative reporters and authors have probed, nonprofit groups have filed Freedom of Information actions; in some areas, Congress has conducted inquiries. Former White House personnel have stepped forward; whistleblowers have revealed secrets and leaked documents; lawsuits have pried open hidden truths. Bit by bit, the record is unfolding. The president and vice president have even incriminated themselves.

This book describes the multifarious ways in which President Bush and his team violated Americas criminal laws and the sophisticated counter measures they took to avoid being held liable for these violations. Showing a breathtaking contempt for the rule of law, they disregarded laws that got in their way and, when exposed, rushed to Congress to push through a rewritten version of those laws to their specifications to get off the hook. They did this while much of the nation was still absorbing and rebounding from the attacks of 9/11.

Understanding the depth of their crimes highlights one thingit is even more important for our democracy that we refuse to let them get away with it.

A president and vice president who have committed serious misdeeds in office must be held accountable. Fortunately, this is a situation that the framers of the Constitution anticipated. The founders were wise enough to know that presidents would be fallible and, as such, might commit a variety of crimes. The presidency, the founders knew, was not always going to be held by people who did the right thing or acted honorably; they explicitly provided for impeachment while presidents held office, and prosecution of presidents after they left office, too.

Thus far, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their team seem to have gotten away with their misdeeds. Their motto seems to be Catch me if you can, and they remain unindicted, unprosecuted, and unaccountable.

Why do we need accountability at all? To ignore the misdeeds of the president and vice president is to signal to the American people that their crimes are of no importance. To give them a free pass for their illegal activities and violations is to send a message to future presidentsdo what you will, break any law, dont worry. To turn our backs and look away is to say that we, the people, are oblivious, blinded, unaware of their deceits and destructionor, worse yet, that we are nodding in agreement and giving our consent. Without strong action holding them responsible, the precedent of a runaway lawless administration will continue to haunt us. Have we celebrated 220 years of our Constitution to reach a point where, like a banana republic, our highest elected leaders can engage in crimes of illegal surveillance, lying to take the nation into war, torture, disappearance and degradation with impunity? Lets hope not. Failing to hold the most powerful among us accountable is the sign of a democracy that is losing its way.

In order for a movement for accountability to rise and for the sake of generations to follow, its important to say that some of us were not blind, that some of us were willing to act.

It may be a difficult path to follow, but the alternative is more difficult to imaginean America without accountability and justice.

As someone who witnessed Watergate up closeI was on the House Judiciary Committee that voted for the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973I became increasingly concerned about long-lasting ramifications of the illegal acts and injurious decisions of the Bush administration.

While President Bush and Vice President Cheney were in office, I advocated for their impeachment. For me, the model was what happened when President Nixon committed grave offenses against the Constitution and laws of the United States. In response, the country came together and refused to allow a president to take the law into his own hands. The American people were outraged by his systemic abuses of power and his lies. The House Judiciary Committee reviewed dozens of volumes of evidence about illegal behavior by President Nixon extending over several yearsincluding the covert bombing of Cambodia, illegal wiretapping, the Watergate break-in, and the conspiracy to obstruct justice, that is, the cover-upand came to the conclusion that impeachment was necessary. The vote reached across party lines, and the country accepted the verdict.