Trying Times?

The hot issue--besides the various plans for administering electroshock to our flat lined economy--is whether to try former members of the Bush administration for war crimes and violations of the Constitution. The loud left wants JUSTICE. Bush and Cheney should be tried for illegal wiretaps, intrusions on our privacy, authorizing torture and lying to the American people. Not to bring them to trial, they argue, would send a message both to foreign governments and to future domestic politicians that we are not seriously committed to law and that the president is above the law.

While, I'm both a liberal and not a fan of the Bush Cheney regime, and while I like the idea of justice (okay, revenge) abstractly, the cost to our nation is too great. I do not want to criminalize policy differences. I do not like the tradition in much of the Third World of immediately indicting the previous government for all kinds of crime--real and trumped up.

One of the truly wonderful things about our nation is the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another. This would, I fear, be put in jeopardy if we began prosecuting former officials over official duties. I am fine prosecuting economic crimes and corruption. If you can prove the Cheney and Halliburton relationship went beyond suspect to corrupt, fine--put him on trial and put him away. But war crimes are a more difficult issue.

In WWII our soldiers were ordered, on the highest authority, not to take prisoners on D-Day. They couldn't get on with invasion if they had to round up and take care of POWS. Should the soldiers have been prosecuted or Eisenhower or the President? The bombing of civilian areas is a war crime. Firebombing Dresden and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were potentially war crimes.

Presidents and Prime ministers lie and deceive all the time. Churchill covered up having broken the German Enigma Code and let Coventry be bombed without giving warning. Eisenhower lied about not knowing about our U-2 spy missions over the USSR. If asked the day before the abortive invasion of Cuba, I'm confident that JFK would have lied to the American people.

Courts are not the place to redress these "crimes." This is the job of the ballot box.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org