Pat Leahy's Truth Commission sure has some ex-Bushies' underwear all bunched up.
Bush allies are fighting hard to stymie Leahy's idea [for a Truth Commission.]
Just now, the committee heard from David Rivkin, a lawyer who served in the Justice Department and the White House under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Explaining why he opposed Leahy's proposal, Rivkin declared:
Yes, mistakes were made. Yes, some bad things happened. But compared with the historical baseline of past wars, the conduct of the United States in the past eight years ... has been exemplary.
Was he holding hands with John "torture" Yoo when he gave that interview? May they all burn in hell. Torture, military commissions, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay sprouted up like gigantic beanstalks from the magic beans Jack was carrying under President Bush's leadership and this man has the audacity to say they acted exemplary. I really do hope Leahy's commission uncovers some of the hidden truths buried deep in the recesses of Karl Rove's brain. They all disgraced this nation with their bed-wetting behavior in the face of a national crisis. So many of the lives of our troops were destroyed by these cretins, but also destroyed were the lives of innocent Iraqis.
Digby's post is exceptional as usual:
This event wasn't an invasion. It wasn't a World War. It wasn't an internal revolution or rebellion, none of which would have justified this outrageous behavior either, but at least would have made some logical sense. No, the Bush administration completely lost its sense and behaved as if the country was in imminent danger of being taken over by Al Qaeda, which was complete nonsense.
What they did to the country, by scaring people out of their wits with bogus claims of drone planes filled with biological agents and dire warnings about the oceans not protecting us anymore was a crime against Americans. Instead of being steady leadership in a crisis they went out of their way to try to panic the country. They used this crime to justify their long held theory of executive governance.
These early constitutional abominations by the Justice Department are all the more egregious in light of that. There was simply no reason for them on the facts. We know that now. (We knew that then -- they used box cutters!) That they went ahead an invaded an old nemesis which hadn't participated in any way in the catalyzing event, and then used many of these awful unconstitutional orders on the Iraqis takes them to an even higher level of immorality.
Rivkin is one of the biggest torture apologists out there. In fact, in a normal world, his blase support for waterboarding alone would make decent people everywhere shun him...
There is good reason to surmise that one of the main reasons why they are pushing for this legislation is so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can't be indicted for war crimes retroactively. (Kind of like their friends the Telcoms.) After all, that's the real reason Mukasey was instructed to say that he didn't know if waterboarding was illegal. If he had, he might have been required to arrest some very important people who we know approved it.
But Rivkin's bobbing and weaving serves another purpose. He's literally defining deviancy down...read on
