Holding Bush Officials Accountable

Let's pretend we have a minute to whisper in the ear of President-elect Obama to let him know what we believe the highest priorities should be in his first year.

We know it's the economy, and that the economy should be jump started with some urgent "green" incentives that will create a future for the planet while creating jobs now and rebuilding our disintegrating infrastructure.

We want our troops out of Iraq and not merely transferred to Afghanistan. Yet how should we deal with failed states like Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Iraq, thanks to Bush, (notice that today he finally acknowledged an error in his presidency during an interview with Charlie Gibson)?

What should our role be? Unilateralism certainly isn't the way, as we have seen in the Bush administration, yet does America have the maturity and patience to act multilaterally? Some say that Susan Rice, Obama's choice for US ambassador to the United Nations, is a perfect pick, because she is patient and hardworking, refuses to tolerate genocide, and believes in multilateralism. Obama also intends to make the UN ambassador a cabinet level position again after Bush denigrated the UN and demoted our ambassador.

What about holding the individual members of the Bush administration acountable for the use of torture, illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping, rendition, and kidnapping? In one fell swoop the US could restore its reputation abroad, and ensure that the incoming president would be bound by the rule of law, international treaties, and the balance of powers among the three branches--executive, judiciary, and legislature.

Having just returned from Terezin, the model concentration camp operated by the Nazis that was shown off to the International Red Cross--see we aren't treating our Jews badly--I truly believe that we must investigate and hold the actions taken by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Addington, Yoo, Bybee, Feith, the whole lot of them, to the light of justice so that this will never happen again.

Terezin was divided into two parts: the small fort where political prisoners were held and the town which was used as the model concentration camp for Jews. The small fort had been used as a prison for years, and the individual cells as well as the baracks were horrifying; their walls reeked of pain and cruelty silently. There was torture there and killing: hanging, firing squads, starvation, beheading. And there was a crematorium to get rid of the bodies of both the political prisoners as well as the Jews.

Then there was the town of Terezin, which didn't look at horrible, because today it is a functioning town, but hundreds of thousands of Jews were transported through Terezin throughout the "final solution." When the war began, the town was home to five thousand residents. At its height, over 55,000 Jews were stuffed into the buildings there in inhuman conditions. Almost 100,000 Jews died in Terezin, including some 15,000 children.

Is Guantanamo Bay any different? Cages, no privacy, isolation, torture, enhanced interrogation techniques. There is no excuse. There is no justification. We know about Guantanamo, we might not want to believe it, but there is plenty of testimony out there about what has happened to men incarcerated there. Read "The Green Light" by Philippe Sands in the May issue of Vanity Fair. We don't know about the others, the hundreds, perhaps thousands of men and women who have disappeared into the back rooms of other countries' secret prisons on orders from this administration.

President-elect Obama, restore America's devotion to the rule of law. Restore America's stature. And make sure that you don't have the power to abuse the office of the presidency by bringing those who did to justice. We need to write a truthful history of what happened in America post-911 so that it can never happen again.

Watch a debate between Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and Eric Posner from University of Chicago.