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Now, Get Cheney: Gonzo's Gone
DAVE LINDORFF
Counterpunch
Tuesday Aug 28, 2007
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.
Next, it looks like we will have Michael Chertoff as AG. Now
on one level that might seem to be 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, may not be so ready to cross the line into rank
sycophancy and to play the role of co-conspirator, particularly
given that it's only for another 16 months.
(Article continues below)
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.
That prosecution and silencing of Lindh, which prevented the
public from exploring the deliberate campaign of torture that
had been developed in Afghanistan, later to "migrate"
to Guantanamo and thence to Abu Ghraib and Iraq, was in its way
as damaging to the nation as was Chertoff's other signal disaster-his
inept and callous mishandling of the catastrophe of the Katrina
flooding of New Orleans.
If Chertoff-a demonstrable failure both as an administrator and
as a defender of justice-is the best this administration can come
up with as a replacement for Gonzales, we should be worried about
the future of the nation's "justice" system. (Okay,
I concede that the Justice Department has as much to do with justice
as the Defense Department has to do with defense or the Education
Department has to do with education.)
The one good thing that can be said about the Gonzales resignation
is that it eliminates the Democratic leadership's latest gambit
for attempting to derail the impeachment movement. As support
for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney has grown, both
among the public at large and in Congress, where there are now
at least 20 co-sponsors for Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Cheney impeachment
bill, the Democratic leadership in the House scrambled to get
behind a purely inside-the-beltway "campaign" to impeach
Gonzales-a move that did succeed in dividing the real, authentic
impeachment movement.
The interesting thing is that in backing the impeachment of Gonzales,
those leaders and senior House Democrats who have been brushing
off the broader impeachment movement gave the lie to two of their
main arguments against impeachment-that it would be "too
divisive" and that there "isn't time" for impeachment.
Clearly if it wasn't too late to impeach Gonzales, and if impeaching
Gonzales would not be too divisive, neither is it too late to
impeach Cheney and neither would impeaching Cheney be "too
divisive."
So let's hail the departure of Gonzo, let's demand a thorough
vetting of the demonstrably incompetent and unprincipled Chertoff,
and most importantly, let's move forward with the campaign to
impeach Cheney, starting with a full-court campaign to get all
those who so readily signed on to Washington Rep. Jay Inslee's
Gonzales impeachment bill to now sign on to Rep. Kucinich's H.Res.
333, a resolution to impeach the vice president.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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