Misleading Headlines About Obama Granting Immunity For Bush War Crimes Are Not Accurate
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/08/29/president-obama-grants-george-bush-immunity-for-crimes-not-quite/
As the story goes, President Obama or the Department of Justice (depending on which source you are looking at) have filed court documents granting the Bush administration immunity for war crimes. Looking closely at the case in question and reading through the court documents which are cited as sources for these stories, it becomes clear that the headlines on this are, at best, misleading.
The Case
Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi mother and citizen, who was residing in the country at the time of the US invasion filed suit on March 13, 2012, in California District Court. Filed as a “Complaint For Conspiracy To Commit Aggression and The Crime Of Aggression” Saleh’s suit alleges that the Bush administration plotted against the country of Iraq and that top members of the administration used the September 11th attacks to justify an invasion which had been planned as early as 1998. She also claims that the administration falsified information to justify the war and further, that they illegally invaded the country, without UN approval, in violation of international law. The suit cites additional violations of the Rule of Nuremberg and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a Treaty signed by the US in 1928.
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President Obama Grants Immunity To Bush Administration?
No.
In response to the suit US attorneys filed a Motion to Dismiss. This motion to dismiss cites the Westfall Act, which actually has nothing to do with Obama granting George Bush or his administration immunity from anything, since it was first put in place in 1948 and updated in 1961, 1966 and 1988. This law provides that any government employee who was acting as an agent of the US at the time a crime is committed, is immune from suits of the nature. It also requires that the United States government be named in place of any individual employee of the government. In the Motion, attorneys for the US government clearly state that in order for the suit to be legal, the United States government must be named as the defendant.
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Other Reasons for the Motion to Dismiss
Aside from the fact that under long standing United States law, the individuals listed cannot be named in the suit, other legal issues mentioned in the Motion to Dismiss include the question of whether California District Court has jurisdiction in such a case and a question of whether the plaintiff’s attorney followed the correct procedure, exhausting all other remedies available, prior to filing the suit.
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(more at above link)
= new reply since forum marked as read
You split the hairs so finely, counsel, but there's no escaping this stink.
In 2001, a regime came to power after electoral fraud and by unconstitutional judicial fiat. Soon after seizing the executive branch, the responsible cabal launched a long-planned war of aggression, on a fabricated pretext. This resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Among many other constitutional violations, atrocities and war crimes, they imprisoned without charges and tortured an unspecified number of persons - dozens, hundreds, thousands - at illegal secret sites in many countries around the world.
While the successor administration was elected legitimately, its personnel chose to ignore the overwhelming prima facie evidence of criminal conduct by their predecessors.
The Obama team made a clear decision not to investigate, not to prosecute, and not even to reveal the full extent of the Bush Regime's criminal activity.
The new chief executive chose to morally exonerate the Bush-era perpetrators, even going so far as to suggest, in a folksy manner, that the torturers had acted as misguided patriots.
In the Obama administration's efforts to morally exonerate the Bush regime - and thus, effectively, to cover up its crimes before history - use was made of a legal device known as the Westfall exception.
Rather than bringing charges for legal misconduct against John Yoo - the DOJ counsel who wrote memos to justify torture - the Obama government instead provided Yoo with a government lawyer. The administration could have chosen instead to declare Yoo's Westfall certification null and void, because his actions had involved the witting commission of crimes - in fact, constitutional violations.
As I wrote here years ago:
The difficulty is in demonstrating any one individual’s witting intent, although as a group they obviously set out to break the law and then did so.
See, Yoo can issue an opinion that Cheney's got a right to shoot you in the face. Gonzalez (or Ashcroft) then officially certifies that Yoo issued the opinion as part of his official duties at OLC. (This may later entitle Yoo to government defense under a precedent known as Westfall). Cheney can face-shoot you, and everyone's in the clear. Except you. As the face-shot victim, when you sue for damages (like Padilla has sued Yoo), Yoo's hope is that all future executive branches must represent him in court, thanks to his Westfall certification. The Obama Justice Dept. has in fact so far provided representation for Yoo. Cheney theoretically will get representation also, if his turn comes, thanks to Yoo's finding. Is Gonzalez in the clear? I'm sure somebody in the round-robin of preemptive exoneration issued a memo that covered his ass, too.
The argument therefore that the Obama administration has "not granted Bush immunity" is completely irrelevant. Obama bestowed medals on the Bush gang, kept Bush's secretary of defense in office for several years, appointed the war criminal Petraeus to head the CIA, and finally trivialized torture as something "we" did to some "folks" out of understandable fear and patriotic over-reaction. Under these circumstances, what does it even mean to "grant immunity"? Clearly, the Obama position is that nothing the Bush organization did even rises to the level of an offense actionable enough to bring immunity up as an option. They're not granting immunity because they chose to heroize, valorize, and follow in the footsteps of their criminal predecessors.
Thus the hair-splitting and triviality evident in the OP should be out of place on a genuinely liberal site. It is presented with an accompaniment of intellectual bullying (including a big old graphic headline repeating the laughable thesis as a kind of Diktat). This sophistry does not surprise, however, given the author's past use of some astonishing double standards in the service of ludicrous arguments. For example, Steven Leser has praised himself on this site for upholding a high moral code in his refusal to appear on the RT propaganda network, while simultaneously defending his volunteer work for the FOXNEWS propaganda network (where he appears as a token liberal in a reprisal of Colmes).
