Why Nixon's pardon was a great mistake

Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought

I felt strongly at the time that Nixon's pardon, (broadly praised by politicians and pundits), was a great mistake. In the absence of the full incriminating details, Nixon's observable low character alone showed that he was undeserving of leniency. The nation, however, would be denied the full accounting that it did deserve. The precedent being set constituted a moral hazard not unlike that which even now protects criminal bankers and GWoT torturers. Every failure to prosecute the criminal acts of the powerful and politically connected is actually a crime against the public, an assault upon the rule of law and another slip further into corruption and despotism.

Obama doesn't need no stinkin' badges.

In Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes that "Obama's whistleblower war suffers two defeats". What this is all about is that the Obama administration, through its Justice Department, is using harassment and intimidation to deny due process and to non-legally punish alleged whistleblowers instead of pursuing honest prosecutions. This is very consistent with his defense of Bush Administration torturers, his flip-flop over granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies for their role in FISA violations, his Libyan bombings in disregard of the War Powers act and numerous other violations of his oath of office to faithfully execute the law.

So help me, it appears that his reputed Constitutional scholarship must have been entirely devoted to figuring out ways to defy the Constitution and undermine the rule of law.

War and the law

War profiteering, marauding mercenaries and such have been part of war throughout the history of war. Likely the problem is even worse when war is chosen for dishonest or dishonorable reasons. It might not be immediately obvious on the outside but insiders would know that an anything goes tone has been set and that all manner of crime would be quietly countenanced in the heat of battle. Misdeeds up to and including outright atrocities are covered up or rationalized away in order to not distract from prosecution of the war or cause questions to be asked about its propriety. Being the ultimate exercise of power, war is also the ultimate source of corruption. Lawyers should be among the first to recognize the danger except so many of them are merely mechanics using the tools of law to achieve ends defined by the providers of their pay checks. While war fever holds sway, they can't be bothered to also be defenders of the rule of law. More often they are among the agents of its corruption.

Torture, assasination and who knows what else?

Rights groups sue over U.S. authority to use terror kill list

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the U.S. government's authority to target and kill U.S. citizens outside of war zones when they are suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Obama reaped a harvest of praise when he ordered an end to torture, ("enhanced interrogation"), but he left loopholes: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12041
Neither has he done anything at all to inhibit the un-banning of the full torture regime by a successor Administration -- or even his own. The ban has the earmarks of mere expedient political posturing as opposed to an act of either moral principle or fidelity to the rule of law. It therefore comes as no surprise to this observer that the President, like many a shabby third world despot, is also comfortable with the deployment of death squads.

How governments defy the rule of law

Reported by chief political correspondent Nicholas Watt in the guardian.co.uk website, Wednesday 21 July 2010:

Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, wrote to Sir John Chilcot on 25 June to allow the inquiry to publish more documents relating to the legal advice. The most significant of these documents was a note on 30 January 2003 by the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to Tony Blair.

In the note Goldsmith wrote: "I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of [UN security council] resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council."

Goldsmith famously changed his mind on the legality of the war in March 2003 after Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the former chief of the defence staff, demanded a clear undertaking that military action would be lawful. Boyce feared that British forces could face legal action unless the invasion had legal cover.

This is, of course, very similar to the US Justice Department memos written to give cover for torture of War on Terror prisoners. Successor governments in both countries, even when of opposite parties, are loath to acknowledge that illegal acts were commited under cover of dishonest opinions issued by politically motivated government lawyers for fear that it would facilitate bringing well justified war crime prosecutions in legal forums with international jurisdiction. Citing traditions dating from the Magna Charta, "Anglosphere" countries have laid claim to being exemplars of the rule of law but, in fact, politics trumps law when it really matters.

The terrorist's best friends

There are cowards who care only that someone is "keeping us safe" from terrorists -- preferably a megalomaniacal outlaw who will stop at nothing. They call themselves "conservatives" but they know nothing of the American values they pretend to conserve; nothing about rule of law, nothing about checks and balances, nothing about the Constitution and its requirement that treaties signed and ratified by the US be upheld as the supreme law of the land. They believe in a cartoon version of government where Rambo, Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer know better than those law abiding wimps on "the left".

These ignoramuses are the terrorist's best friends. They would destroy our liberties and way of life in order to save them.