US Constitution

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Lists dominated the weekend news. As always, there were more casualty lists for US, Afghani and Iraqi people, including Iraqis imprisoned and tortured by Iraq security forces. We had the list of officials who were fired and more who were outraged over the care of wounded veterans. There were lists of Presidential candidates speaking to one group or another, with Republican hopefuls pandering to the Conserative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Joe Klein gave us a list of all of the strawmen misconceptions he has about liberals and progressive bloggers, which readers immediately recognized as a list of reasons why no one should ever take Klein seriously. (Atrios has been keeping a running tally so we don't have to.) We had more to add to the list of Dick Cheney's unrealistic and/or belligerent statements, and still more for the list of Presidential expressions of how much he cares about the latest victims of natural disasters, victims who will quickly join the list of those he forgets and abandons as soon as the photo-op is over.

But the most important list of the week was the one compiled for the lead, half-page editorial in Sunday's New York Times, which included a Must-Do List of measures the Congress needs to take to end some of the most egregious actions of the Bush/Cheney Administration, many of them relating to the treatment of so-called "enemy combatants" under the Military Commissions Act. Here are just the topics, but I urge you to read the full editorial if you can (it may be Times Select) because it provides a more complete description of each action:

Restore habeaus corpus

Stop illegal spying

Ban torture, really

Close the CIA prisons

Account for "ghost prisoners"

Tighten the definition of "illegal enemy combatant"

Screen prisoners fairly and effectively

Ban extraordinary renditions

Ban the use of tainted evidence

Ban secret evidence

Better define "classified" evidence

Respect the right to counsel

All Americans should take a close look at that list. It is not simply a list of things America could do better or a list of policy preferences from one side of the respectable political spectrum about which reasonable people might disagree. It is not a list of things that happened in the past, but are now discontinued, and shown here merely to preserve the historical record. No, this is a partial list of egregious and continuing violations of the law by the Bush/Cheney regime.

These are actions the Administration is carrying out today that are violating the United States Constitution, federal statutes, international law and treaties the US has signed and solemnly agreed to obey. Many of them are felonies, which means they also qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors. If these were drawn up as criminal indictments, there would be multiple counts under each category; hundreds of them. Several of the categories probably qualify as war crimes. They have been committed by officials who are still in the US government and have not been brought to justice; they are still being committed by the US government today, and in our name.

We have seen lists like this before, and we need to be honest about where. Lists like this have been compiled to describe the crimes of fascist dictators in Argentina or Pinochet's Chile or Generalisimo Franco's Spain; they are the signs of lawless behavior of regimes on their way to becoming dictatorships or totalitarian regimes. When we talk about regimes like Chile's or Argentina's dictatorships and compile similar lists of their crimes, it is always with the recognition that we are describing outlaw regimes who turned their backs on democratic principles and became a menace to their own people and international pariahs.

Lists like this describe regimes that deserve and eventually receive almost universal condemnation from civilized nations. And when these regimes fall, as they all have, the crash is always greeted with universal relief and cheering, followed by a commitment to bring to justice those responsible and a promise, never, never, to allow people like that to gain power again. Does anyone really believe that officials in our regime will escape this history? Can any patriotic citizen believe they should?

This needs to be said, loudly, clearly, repeatedly. Yet I watched the news/talking head shows this weekend, and every weekend, hoping to find someone who would say this. I've read the columnists who pretend to be the guardians of what matters in this country. Most have been silent. Should I conclude they are indifferent? Complicit? Afraid? By their silence, they have forfeited the right to be taken seriously.

Glenn Greenwald has more on why all of these issues will require extensive investigations by Congress and the media before the public gives Congress the will to finally stop this lawless administration.

That is what we need now. But we do not have it because the administration even in the wake of its defeat in the November elections — one could even say especially after the election — continues to aggressively exploit and manipulate the terrorism threat as a tool to conceal their own conduct and protect themselves from accountability and consequences. Until that ends, no progress on any of these issues is possible.

Just look at some of the developments in the last few weeks alone. The administration successfully convinced an appeals court last week to uphold dismissal of the lawsuit brought by Khaled el-Masri — the German citizen who was abducted by the CIA, shipped around to various countries for interrogation, and then dumped on the side of the road in Albania once it was determined he was innocent. The administration claimed that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would risk disclosure of "state secrets" — a doctrine previously confined to a very narrow scope of cases but which the administration has expanded beyond recognition in order to all but entirely shield its conduct from judicial review and to shield itself from accountability under the law. . . .

Democrats in Congress need to realize right now that the administration will not produce or disclose any meaningful evidence unless and until they are truly forced to do so, and forcing them to disclose meaningful information is going to require a willingness to fight hard. Vague little threats of future action or pseudo-tough allusions to subpoenas are pointless. Far more than legislative solutions that will go nowhere and have no chance of passing (absent real changes in the focus of public and media attention), what must be the first priority are efforts to shine a bright light on what this President has been doing in the dark for years.

When the time comes, will we be able to count on the Democratic Leadership? There are many courageous, wise and responsible Democrats who have spoken out loudly and consistently against the crimes of this Administration. There are many who saw through the lies and deceptions that led us into this horrendous war and who, seeing the dishonesty and sensing the lack of judgment in Bush and Cheney, did not make the obvious "mistake" of voting to enable a belligerent regime that had already told us they would engage in pre-emptive war. These are the men and women to whom the party leadership should turn at every opportunity they have to speak for the Democratic Party.

But instead the leadership chose Joe Lieberman, the man who championed the worst foreign policy disaster in our history, who voted over and over again to enable the Bush/Cheney regime and who voted with the Republicans for the hideous Military Commissions Act which sanctions many of the crimes on the NYT list. What were they thinking? And why should we ever trust them again?