Blasts From The Past Leading To The Present, Plus
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Blasts From The Past Leading To The Present
Still under the weather and got stuff to do later (drugs to do later—it’s an esketamine day) so I’m going to cheat today by quoting liberally, in relation to my post yesterday, from something I wrote a few years back before Covid turned my brains to mush.
Yesterday’s sick day meditation was on the regime’s declaration of war-ish against “transnational drug cartels,” saying that the regime can kill anybody suspected of being a bad’un outside our borders (so far) but not inside anybody else’s (so far), because this is a “non-international” thing.
The Associated Press story I referenced said the move posed stark questions, including whether or not Congress would exercise their responsibilities under the War Powers Act (by which I think the writers mean the War Powers Resolution of 1973 but I ain’t no legal beagle), to demand accountability, as in give us an account of what you’re doing so we can determine whether to authorize a continuation of it.
The answer to that particular stark question, as I explained, is an equally stark “no.” I mean, obviously. It’s not even a question. Moreover, as I also said yesterday, we can’t count on the military to uphold the law. They already haven’t.
My beloved and invaluable brother sent me a link to an article in Lawfare, the Brookings Institution-affiliated online magazine about eponymous subjects. (The editor there is Benjamin Wittes, a knowledgeable law guy known for brooking no bullshit.) The article, “Venezuelan Boat Attacks: Utterly Unprecedented and Patently Predictable,” is written by international and humanitarian law expert Gabor Rona.
I was surprised by the characterization of the attacks as utterly unprecedented, but it turns out that Rona means without legal precedent more than he means shit nobody has previously done. Which, I mean, the shit we’ve done. . .
To be clear, these attacks are meaningfully different from the lethal attacks conducted by prior administrations; in that sense, they are unprecedented. But the legal abuses of the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations form a foundation upon which the Trump policy is built. A useful analysis—one that provides the context for determining what needs to change to retreat from such unlawful conduct—requires acknowledging that the unlawful policies and practices of the previous post-9/11 administrations make predictable the Trump administration’s current legal overreach. The degree of overreach is an important factor in appreciating the legal risks faced by those who follow illegal orders to conduct these attacks.
If the boat’s occupants were running illicit drugs destined for the United States, the proper—and entirely feasible and precedented—response would have been interdiction, arrest, and trial. The Trump administration’s summary execution/targeted killing of suspected drug dealers, by contrast, is utterly without precedent in international law. In fact, there is precedent for considering such attacks, when committed on a widespread or systematic basis, to be a crime against humanity. Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is currently facing charges in the International Criminal Court for exactly that reason.
All the regime officials involved in these decisions are—and this is important—white and from the US, conditions which historically shield high-ranking persons from accountability for war crimes or crimes against humanity, so Duterte’s situation isn’t really relevant beyond what he’s charged with.
Rona goes into considerable detail on which presidents got away with what by claiming it was legal, paving the way for the next man up in the wake of 9/11, and it’s well worth reading.
Which brings me to what I wrote three years ago regarding all the inexcusable shit we do, our presidents and their factotums do—and not only since 9/11—and then go on to excuse, and my partial remedy for the practice.
Most recently in the field of “bygones,” President Obama seems to have given less than a thought to encouraging his justice department to investigate the crimes of George W. Bush, which include launching an illegal war of choice and legalizing torture.
As it happened, little investigation needed done: the first crime played out on television for years, and Bush acknowledged the second one in prime time and in print.
But Obama let him skate, himself violating every day for eight years the UN Convention Against Torture, which requires signatories to investigate and, if evidence supports, prosecute torturers or send them someplace that will.
It also anticipates to the word the excuses Obama made on Bush’s behalf—it was war time, exigent circumstances, men of good will, lawyers said it was legal and so on—and shit-cans them one and all. You can’t legally torture people, and you can’t legally excuse the torturers.
The treaty further requires signatories to support legal redress for torture victims, which Obama’s DoJ blocked in court throughout his tenure.
(We saw not one single contemporaneous story mentioning the treaty in connection with Bush’s or Obama’s violations of it. Way to go, media.)
Obama had issues other than those arising from torture. Assassinating an American citizen, and then the citizen’s citizen son (and Trump killed a daughter about a week into his presidency); the Libyan adventure, in which Obama avoided the War Powers Resolution calling for congressional approval after 30 days of hostilities by redefining “hostilities” to exclude air wars in which U.S. military personnel are not substantially at risk; and his St. Augustine- and Thomas Aquinas-approved drone wars.
We’ve done Bush fils’s obvious crimes.
Unlike Bush and Obama, Bill Clinton never went on television to confess violating a treaty against torture and coverups. He just aided a notorious terrorist group that sided with him in the Serbian air campaign, blew up an embassy and killed a bunch of civilians. Fundamentally an uninteresting president.
Bush père invaded Panama in the most open and blatantly criminal fashion imaginable; his kid at least tried to make some sort of excuse for his big invasion.
Père also presided over Iraq-gate, in which the U.S. gave, or had others give, billions in loans and material support to Iraq, and which earned former two-time Attorney General William Barr his first big-league coverup experience, prompting former Nixon administration adviser and speechwriter Bill Safire, then a New York Times columnist, to dub Barr “the Cover-up General.”
And that’s only the immediately apparent. Who knows what the elder Bush got up to as CIA director, or with Iran-Contra as Reagan’s vice president.
Which brings us to Reagan, and that same Iran-Contra affair which his administration used to fund the drug-running, mass-murdering psychos trying to bring down the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Reagan thought, or pretended to think, or was told that he thought, that the Contras were akin to America’s founding fathers.
Reagan. What a motherfucker. Dressed the Birchers up in movie star clothes and installed them in the White House.
We incline toward giving Carter a pass considering his post-presidency career, but one really can’t overlook his assistance to the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, which Ford and Kissinger initially propelled.
Nixon: fuuuuck. The man left no category of crime untouched. Secret bombings, slush funds, B & E, even a little light treason, as the elder George Bluth would have it.
One can make a decent argument that regularly trying past presidents for their crimes would be disruptive, but we think the basic reason presidents don’t hold their predecessors accountable is that they don’t want their successors doing the same.
Thankfully, we’ve devised a solution which addresses both the potential for political and social disorder, and the self-preservation angle: a Constitutional amendment mandating a minimum five-year post-presidency prison sentence. President comes in, president goes out, president does time.
Problem solved, and we’re convinced potential candidates wouldn’t be put off by the measure. We’d get the same sterling we get now.
Partisans would have the expectation that their successful candidate is bound for the pokey no matter what, thus short-circuiting the shock and rage that might accompany a trial and conviction.
People concerned about war crimes and the like might be disappointed by the brevity of the term but why let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
(Finally found a legitimate use for that exhausted old exhortation.)
It is, frankly, genius. It is even-handed. It is better than any president deserves. It is social engineering at it’s finest. We can’t imagine any reasonable person objecting.
We do need a name, though. Maybe the Equal Time Amendment.
Really depressing that this stuff is eternally relevant, but man that was a nice piece of writing.
Music!
Viagra Boys, Cave World, “Punk Rock Loser”
Grian Chatten, “Fairlies”
Lambrini Girls, “Love”
Warmduscher, “Midnight Dipper”
The Coral, “I Remember When”
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And that, my comrades in thoughtcrime, is all I got. Be well; take care.
Absolutely. People who think this stuff is new don't realize the precedents for it. All that's happened is that it's been jacked up to 11 under Trump.