This is addressed to all my liberal friends who say Bush is "going to get away with it," that the abuses of this era will be swept under the rug while W and his buddies go off to Dallas and plot a counter-attack on the Constitution.
There is no statute of limitations here.
Exhibit A from the BBC. A Spanish judge has launched a criminal investigation into the abuses of the Franco era. Francisco Franco, as SNL fans of a certain age know well, died in 1975 and is still dead.
The point is, again, that there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. There is no statute of limitations on torture. And there is no way on Earth that a war criminal can immunize him against this reality.
You can’t write a "signing statement" that absolves you. You can’t just pardon everyone around you and avoid the International Criminal Court forever, especially as we enter an era where international law is becoming increasingly important.
Saddam tried that. Milosevic tried that. Fat lot of good it did either one of them.
Obviously patience is called for. But underneath everything these bozos
kept better records than Hitler, and thanks to the Internet they can’t
be burned. The Internet caches everything that touches it, and those
caches are buried in 10,000 places. Like this blog post, they will live
forever, or so long as people want to find them and keep them alive.
Once it becomes in the best interest of the American government to make
plain the abuses of this era, to bring them to light and bring the true
evil-doers of this time to justice, it will happen. So patience,
grasshopper. That time is coming.
That time is not now. We all have to hold our tongues a little for just a few more weeks. There will continue to be abuses, of all kinds, but most voters are now on to the game and they’re not buying any of it. The more the McCain people try such nonsense, the more firmly they tie themselves to George W. Bush.
Bush has managed to destroy everything he touched. But his most lasting
legacy may be the utter destruction of the modern Republican Party, if we can
just keep working hard for a few more weeks.
And then, some time after January, when the stars align, then we’ll
start investigating for real. What we find out will curl the world’s
hair.
Justice will come.
