A Steady Drumbeat of Pressure to Hold the Bush Administration Accountable for its Crimes

[Time for change]

Two days ago I posted about my plans to meet with the staff of my Congressman, Chris Van Hollen, as part of a three-person delegation sponsored by Amnesty International, to request that Van Hollen support measures to investigate and hold the Bush administration responsible for their crimes.

This post is a report of our meeting with Karen Robb, Congressman Van Hollen’s Director of Policy. We began the meeting by reading/discussing our prepared remarks, which I described in detail in my post of two days ago. I’ll briefly summarize them here.

The things that we most emphasized were:
1) The creation of a strong, independent commission of inquiry
2) Criminal investigation and prosecutions initiated by the attorney general
3) Removal of barriers to full government transparency, including those based on ‘state secrets.’


Our initial remarks

I noted Bush’s imperial declaration that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to him or his country, which led to the torture and the indefinite detention of thousands of men and boys, who were stripped of all their human rights. I said that a commission will be useful if it educates the public and fully discloses not only what happened, but also why and how, so that we are better able prevent it from happening again. With regard to the need for criminal prosecutions I said:

We want to make it absolutely clear that in recommending the creation of a commission of inquiry we do not see it as a substitute for prosecutions of the guilty, but rather as an accompaniment to them. President Obama has spoken of the need to “look towards the future”. I agree with that. But we cannot look towards the future by ignoring the past and by condoning heinous crimes committed by the highest officials in our government. With that kind of attitude we may as well empty our prisons of all their murderers, on the rationalization that their crimes were committed in the past, and we need to look towards the future instead. Who would accept such a decision?

Nik Sushka said that there is no sense in discussing this issue as if it pertains only to the past. She noted that Bush assured us that ‘we don’t torture’ – and we all know how that worked out. She pointed out that President Obama has continued the Bush denial of the right of habeas corpus to our detainees, and that at least one detainee has claimed that torture is getting worse since he took office. What we need are concrete, verifiable government policies that can substantively assure us that torture, state-sanctioned extra-judicial wiretapping and other unconstitutional abuses have stopped and will not be re-started.

Paul Grenier rebutted the ‘let’s look to the future’ line by demonstrating that something worse than violations of the Constitution and U.S. law has taken place in the United States. What has actually happened since 9/11 is the introduction of a new, essentially totalitarian theory and practice of executive branch power. Deprival of the legal rights of persons to whom the state attaches an odious label; waterboarding; the use of prolonged sleep deprivation to extract statements; warrantless wiretapping of citizens – these are all typical practices of totalitarian states.

Typed copies of each delegate’s remarks were left with Karen Robb, along with Amnesty International materials.


Reaction of Karen Robb – Rep. Van Hollen’s Director of Policy

As I was making my prepared remarks, every time I looked at Ms. Robb she was nodding in agreement, either because she agreed with everything I said or because she was trying to hurry me along or – more likely – both.

There were a lot of signs that she agreed with the good majority of our message. She told us that our issues are “near and dear to my heart”. When I came to the part about a 2005 ACLU research study that revealed 21 out of 44 deaths of detainees in our custody to be homicides (many who died while being “interrogated”), she interrupted me to tell me that she works closely with the ACLU and was familiar with the study. When she got to talking about John Yoo and Dick Cheney she became animated with intense hostility. She believes that it is more important to go after the “big fish” than the little guys. The meeting went well beyond our half hour allotted time. And when the meeting was over Ms. Robb thanked us warmly, agreed to continue correspondence with us, and told us that in order to make this happen there would need to be a “steady drumbeat” of grassroots support.

However, she could not say whether or not Congressman Van Hollen would support the commission of inquiry that we asked him to support. She said that he is continuing to study the issue, but has not yet come to a final decision.

The politics of investigating Bush administration crimes
Other than noting that a “steady drumbeat” of pressure would be needed to bring a commission into being, Ms. Robb’s big clue to us regarding the politics of this issue came when she noted that it is currently not a “front-burner” issue (given the vast scope of problems that currently face our nation), and everyone would be looking towards the Speaker. I took that to mean that it is to a large extent Nancy Pelosi’s decision – which makes sense when we recall that it was basically she who made the decision to take impeachment “off the table”. On the one hand, that is too bad, since we all know how the impeachment idea worked out. But on the other hand, Pelosi has signaled her support for investigation of Bush crimes. In fact, she has gone beyond mere support for a commission, to repeatedly recommend prosecutions of Bush administration criminals.

The need to mix ‘national security’ into our arguments
She indicated to us that we would have a better chance of convincing the right people if, instead of focusing too much on the moral and human rights issues, we devoted more of our argument to ‘national security’ issues. She said that it’s a given that, as representatives of Amnesty International, we are strongly in favor of better ensuring peoples’ human rights. So, to be more effective we should indicate our concern with national security as well. In other words, argue less about the immorality of torture, and more about evidence that it doesn’t work and in fact makes us less rather than more safe.

The composition of a commission of inquiry
I felt that one of the less hopeful parts of our meeting was our discussion of the ideal composition of a commission of inquiry. We made clear that the commission’s members should include internationally respected experts in human rights and be independent of both parties and the executive branch. I believe that Robb indicated general agreement with those principles, but we were all disappointed to hear her praise for the 9/11 Commission, including Lee Hamilton. We all believe that the 9/11 Commission was a sham, and I particularly feel that Lee Hamilton was a terrible choice, not only because of his performance on the 9/11 Commission, but because of his leading role in the investigation into the Reagan/Bush “October Surprise” and on the Iraq Study Group. He is one of the major go-to guys for the powers that be. When Paul pointed out the conflict of interest of the 9/11 Commission’s Executive Director, Phillip Zelikow, Robb seemed to agree that that was a problem, but I didn’t notice her back away from her rosy opinion of the 9/11 Commission.


Next steps

As I noted above, we intend to keep in communication with Van Hollen’s office. Paul wrote up the following specific steps in a “debriefing” note to Amnesty International:

A thank you letter for the meeting, and a request for a statement of the Congressman’s positions on the policies presented.

We will also try to leverage our own prepared comments into op eds. and letters to the editor.

We made clear our readiness to assist Ms. Robb if she wants to pursue accountability, and we encouraged her to use us as a resource: we can fact check, write letters and op-eds, and generally act as advocates.

We will ask her to keep us informed regarding who the key swing voices are in Congress to help AI focus its efforts.

If the Congressman attempts to stonewall AI and avoid committing to support for our demands, we will pressure him to put his reasons for this in writing. We will make his responses public to bring additional pressure to bear.

Finally, we will maintain an ongoing dialogue with his and, if possible, other Capital Hill offices. Our approach will be to remain scrupulously polite, but also tiresomely unrelenting.

Is Obama responding to a steady drumbeat of pressure?

I’ll end this on a hopeful note. Following Rahm Emanuel’s signal that there would be no prosecutions of high level Bush administration officials, suddenly President Obama seems to have changed his mind. Asked “How do you feel about investigations, whether special – a special commission or something of that nature on the Hill to go back and really look at the issue?”, Obama opened the door a little to the possibilities of prosecuting the Bush administration criminals:

The OLC memos that were released reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings. That's why I've discontinued those enhanced interrogation programs… With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that….

What could explain this apparent about face? According to the Washington Post:

There was no immediate explanation of the reversal in Obama's position on the officials who formulated the interrogation policy, but it came amid mounting pressure from congressional Democrats and human rights activists for greater accountability regarding the program.

It looks like we may be on the right track.