Dave Lindorff: Gonzo's Gone. Now Let's Go After Cheney

[marmar]

Monday, August 27, 2007

Gonzo's Gone. Now Let's Go After Cheney


Let’s be clear. Alberto Gonzales is resigning as attorney general not because he’s become an embarrassment to the Bush administration—which has repeatedly shown itself to be beyond embarrassment—but because he is no longer useful. Exposed as a serial liar and an administration hack, he can no longer be relied upon by the Bush administration to carry forward its criminal agenda of subverting the Constitution, the electoral process and the Bill of Rights, because his every step is being watched by the public and the Congress.

But this is no victory unless the Congress follows up by pursuing those who put Gonzales up to his crimes.

The whole reason felons and hacks like Gonzales resign from office is to bury their misdeeds by leaving town.

If Congress then obliges by moving on to other things, the resignation will have succeeded.

It lookes at first as though we would have Michael Chertoff as AG after Gonzo. Now on one level that might have been an improvement. Gonzales was a both a house servant to Bush through his years as governor and president, doing whatever was necessary to tidy up after Bush’s messes, like hiding evidence of his drunk driving record and his dereliction of duty during the Vietnam War, and a kind of mob attorney, developing legal loopholes to protect the president from prosecution (or impeachment) for various crimes as president, like violating the Geneva Conventions or unleashing the nation’s spy apparatus against Americans. Chertoff, who is not a part of the Texas Mafia, might not have been quite so ready to cross the line into rank sycophancy and to play the role of co-conspirator, particularly given that it would only be for another 16 months.

Then again, Chertoff, in his short stint at what is still referred to as the “Justice” Department, headed up the anti-terrorism unit under Gonzales’ predecessor, John Ashcroft, and willingly played along with the sham prosecution of John Walker Lindh, the kid who was captured in Afghanistan and inflated by Ashcroft and Chertoff into “the American Taliban.” It was Chertoff who successfully deep-sixed evidence of Lindh’s weeks of torture at the hands of American forces, by threatening Lindh with a treason prosecution, while holding out the offer of a deal--“just” 15 years in the can if he agreed to sign a fraudulent statement saying he had “never been mistreated” in US captivity, and to accept a gag order barring him from talking about what had happened to him for the entire length of his sentence--an unprecedented gag order. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/