Simple Answers to Easy Questions

David Broder asks, in the context of possible criminal trials for high-ranking Bush officials who ordered and sanctioned torture (a word he does not use, of course):

Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

Uh, yeah. That’s exactly what I would like to see. I believe in accountability, and I believe that people who commit crimes should be prosecuted, and I believe that applies to everyone — even the former Vice-President of the United States.

Broder tells us that he does “agree on the importance of accountability for illegal acts and for serious breaches of trust by government officials — even at the highest levels.” He believed in accountability for Richard Nixon, and he believed in accountability for Bill Clinton.

Well, as it turns out, he’s being less than truthful about Richard Nixon:

In 1974, Broderella wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of Nixon beating the impeachment rap and Republicans surging in the midterms. While he lies about that in today’s piece, he does admit that he supported Nixon’s pardon. He’s been covering for Republicans for so long he must feel like an umbrella.

D-Day also notes “something very interesting, if unintentionally so,” in what Brder writes immediately above that sentence about Cheney:

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

“If accountability is the standard.” Nice.

Glenn Greenwald gets to the heart of why the possibility of “Cheney standing in the dock” is so unthinkable to Washington media insiders like David Broder (emphasis in original):

That media elites — ostensibly devoted to accountability for the powerful — fulfill the exact opposite role by demanding immunity for their lawbreaking is why elite lawlessness is so rampant.  But that’s well-established by now,  so I want to focus on another point raised by this Broderian opposition:   a completely self-serving falsehood that lies at the core of the debate over investigations.  The standard claim made by investigation opponents in the media is that we all know that torture is abhorrent and that what was done is terribly wrong, but that prosecutions would just be too disruptive.  Broder asks:  ”Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock? . . . The cost to the country would simply be too great.”

But it’s simply not true that these journalists vehemently objected to torture as abhorrent but now merely believe prosecutions are an over-reaction.  The reality is that they did not object to the torture regime as it was implemented.  They did the opposite:  they mocked those who objected to it and who tried to stop it as overheated, hysterical, fringe leftists — as Broder did in a November, 2004 Op-Ed, deriding as ”unhinged” those who were arguing “that ‘the forces of darkness’ are taking over the country.”  Identically, here’s what Broder said in an October, 2006 chat when a reader asked him about a New York Times Editorial sounding the alarm about the radicalism of the Bush administration:

Kingston, Ontario: I’m rather surprised by your and your correspondents’ calm tone of voice this morning. Unless the New York Times editorial page is wildly off-track, the U.S. is in the grip of a major constitutional crisis, with the government trying to set aside long established guarantees of legal behavior, both internally and in relation to international law. Where’s the sense of urgency?

David S. Broder: Far be it from me to question the New York Times, but I’d like to assure you that Washington is calm and quiet this morning, and democracy still lives here. Editorial writers sometimes get carried away by their own rhetoric.

That was typical of Beltway media behavior even as revelations of war crimes and high-level lawlesness proliferated:  oh, calm down with your extremist, unhinged rhetoric.  Broder boasts that he called for Clinton’s resignation over a sex scandal and “had no problem with” Nixon’s impeachment over what was, by comparsion to Bush scandals, a relatively minor infraction.  As revelations of torture mounted, did he call for Bush’s impeachment or even resignation?  No.  Like most of his colleagues in the media, he did the opposite:  he dismissed objections to what was happening as hysterical and fringe and insisted that Serious and Good People were in charge.

This is a vital reason — I’d say the central reason — why people like David Broder and his media colleagues don’t want investigations and prosecutions:  because they were complicit in most of it, and such proceedings would implicate them as much as the criminals themselves.   Think about it:  what would happen if Dick Cheney were “in the dock,” if high-level American officials were adjudicated in formal proceedings as war criminals and felons?  The question would naturally arise:  how was that allowed to happen?  What did the American media do about it while it happened?  What was the Dean of the Washington Press Corps saying and doing to stop it and to alert the citizenry as to what was going on?  And the answer, of course, is:  nothing. They supported the war criminals and mocked and demonized those who objected.

That’s why so many media figures want to Look Forward and Not Backwards — not only because they want to protect high-level political officials who committed felonies and thus preserve America’s two-tiered justice system, but more so, because they know that “looking backwards” would reveal who and what they really are.  People who engage in heinous acts always want everyone to look forward and not backwards, for reasons that are as obvious as they are ignoble.

This makes sense: It’s not that difficult anymore to get Beltway types or erstwhile Bush supporters to agree that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” amounted to torture, that they were wrong and “probably” illegal, that they “did more harm than good.” But it’s still the rare person who supported or at best was indifferent to torture, secret prisons, and indefinite preventive detention while those policies were being actively implemented who will now say that criminal investigations and prosecutions at the highest levels are called for.

Here is a brief round-up of other commentary:

• Attaturk: “This just may be the most reprehensible column of a long and enabling career.”
• Adam Serwer:
  

  I’ve already said I don’t think those interrogators who stayed within the OLC’s guidelines should be prosecuted — I hold the policymakers ultimately responsible for the implementation of torture as policy. But for Broder, it doesn’t matter that what the Bush administration did was illegal — the powerful deserve immunity, because in holding them accountable, the “cost to the country would simply be too great.” What, I wonder, will be the cost for becoming a society in which torture, torture, is not a crime but simply a policy preference?

  Broder isn’t so much saying that the powerful deserve to ignore the law so much as he is saying that the statute of limitations is up once they leave office. He cops without reservation or qualification to the idea that Cheney did something illegal — he just doesn’t think it should matter. This idea is completely antithetical to Thomas Paine’s ideal that “in free countries the law ought to be king.” If this is to be the new standard, if the executive branch is to be king, then we should enshrine it in the law — because right now our laws say otherwise.

• Here is a really key point from Will at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen:
  

  Broder won’t say it out loud, but I think he recognizes that any torture investigation will yield some uncomfortable questions about the link between the Bush-era OLC memos that established guidelines for “enhanced interrogation” and subsequent instances of extreme prisoner abuse. You can’t declare certain abusive practices off-limits while justifying others. Mistreatment and abuse won’t be sanitized or cordoned off.

• Jennifer Rubin grabs on to the latest mantra that Liz Cheney has been repeating on the friendly news talk show circuit (emphasis mine):
  

  David Broder, Dick Cheney, and I all agree: Eric Holder’s naming of a special prosecutor to reinvestigate CIA agents was a very bad idea.

  Alberto Gonzales can’t figure out what’s wrong with Holder’s decision. Sigh. Gonzales didn’t let on that career prosecutors during his tenure investigated the allegations against CIA operatives and declined to prosecute. Did he forget? Well, details (and for that matter, legal analysis) were never his strong suit.

Sigh. Jennifer Rubin doesn’t give any sign of understanding that there was no distinction made under George W. Bush between “career prosecutors” and political appointees.