EDIT: Downvotes with no comments. Shocker. Guess it’s hard to back up your opinions, huh? I guess some people are totes fine with war criminals walking free?
What it says on the tin:
Obama told the nation that we “needed to look forward, not backward” when it came to prosecuting war criminals George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
He would end up legalizing and codifying a lot of the worst excesses of the Bush administration.
His actions of letting war criminals walk without any consideration of what they had done literally set the stage for Donald Trump being treated with kid gloves. I don’t see how the two aren’t connected.
Both of them dealt with the question of “Can we successfully prosecute a former President?” Obama kicked the can down the road to ignore the question entirely, because it might appear “partisan” or something.
As evidenced by Trump’s national security documents case, they really wanted to kick the can down the road again. They gave Trump every opportunity to just return the documents with nothing but a slap on the wrist. They only started bringing criminal charges when it became clear that he never had any intent of returning anything.
Obama is viewed so favorably by so many, but it’s hard for me to do so when I think about this. Obama’s unwillingness to address this question in his administration is outright why we are facing the governments inability to reign in Trump at all. He’s done so many things that would have shown regular people the endless inside of a jail cell, but they just let him keep running around free.
When you allow criminals to walk free, other criminals see it as way to get away with whatever they want. That’s pretty much how Trump treated the Presidency, a “get out of jail for fucking everything for free” card. He still views it as such. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t get this idea by watching previous Presidents get away with tons of shit that would see the rest of us behind bars.
Anyway, long story short: Thanks, Obama.
This started long before Obama, and was way more serious in the case of Nixon.
You can say that Obama perpetuated a long standing tradition, but he certainly didn’t start the precedent.
Downvotes with no comments. Shocker. Guess it’s hard to back up your opinions, huh? I guess some people are totes fine with war criminals walking free?
I think you got downvoted for asking a very US focused politically charged question in a place not meant for those types of things. A lot of don’t live in the US and don’t care about your politics.
I downvoted because he complained about downvotes
I mean if their intent was to ask a community that was explicitly international, it might be in good faith. That being said, I don’t see any implication of that in their actual post, soo…
For what it’s worth, I personally find discussion about foreign politics interesting if it’s something that I can learn from, but there’s for sure an inundation (and normalization) of US politics on a lot of different social media platforms, and that gets old.
That’s definitely okay, and there’s communities for that. I don’t think this is one of them, though
Fair point!
Which US laws, specifically, would you see Cheney and Bush charged under?
You usually send war criminals to The Hague and then it’s outside the hands of the nation in question. Many nations like to do a lot of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.”
I guess US law trumps international law and laws governing war, huh? No wonder the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml
Oh look, shocker, torture is in there.
Pardon me, I thought this was a legitimate discussion.
So only the US can prosecute their President for war crimes, and it has to be based on US laws? That’s not a legitimate discussion, I’d say.
So the people who write the laws just write it so that they didn’t break the laws. That’s literally what Obama did for Bush, legalizing warrantless spying, ramping up the drone war, etc.
I mean, that’s literally the point of the ICC, is that governments can just be like “we didn’t do anything wrong” and then continue abusing the world. So you take them to a neutral third party… the ICC.
I mean yeah, it is all about scope. You don’t let your town sheriff deal with international arms trade, because it’s not what they do, nor is it in their charter.
If the international community wants to try a former president, then they need to go through their process. Anything that circumvents their process is going to be heavily scrutinized in a legitimate court.
Are you joking? There are US government documents that outline the fucking Hague invasion of they attempt to prosecute. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Protection_Act#:~:text=This authorization led to the,or rescue them from custody.
Did the international community come asking for Bush or Cheney? Why would the United States preemptively send anyone to an international court that didn’t ask to be involved?
So what’s your ideal scenario for what should have happened? US authorities apprehend the former President, charge him with no crimes, and ship him out of the country?
I am not versed in how the ICC works. Are /were there indictments or the equivalent? What grounds would a President have for detaining and removing a predecessor?
Taking the bait, with Trump’s national security documents case, I’d imagine they didn’t want to Trump to claim Biden’s Justice Department was vindictive (even though he still said it). They gave him several opportunities get out, but he kept doubling down and dug his own grave. As long as the Justice Department answers to the president, anything they do can be seen as politically motivated, especially when a former president of the opposite party is involved.
I agree with that take, but this is an example of an “Oops I won’t do it again I promise” attitude in Washington DC politics in general. The “having documents you’re not supposed to” has happened with a lot of ex-officials, including Democrats, but it’s usually hand-waved away as long as they destroy/return them. I don’t think that is Biden trying to not appear partisan as much as it is Standard Operating Procedure with politicians, and they just didn’t expect an actual all-out criminal to refuse to give them back, like Trump.
I think the many cases of regular officials having classified documents in private residences is a more a sign of a systemic issue of how documents are classified and handled within Washington. Things are classified when they shouldn’t need to be, and sometimes you receive thousands of pages of documents you’re expected to read. With Pence/Biden handling of the classified documents, once they realized they had the documents, they went through the proper channels to disclose this and get them to the National Archives.
Trump did the opposite and it’s clear he showed he knew he had the documents and withheld that information from his lawyers and the National Archives, even going so far as to moving records around to hide where they are. This isn’t a normal situation of accidently having documents, there was clear criminal intent, which Jack Smith’s statements have shown. Treating Trump’s behavior equal to that of Biden or Pence or whoever is disingenuous.
Dealing with a criminal ex-president who is running for reelection has never happened before to the country, so there’s not an operating procedure to follow.
Dealing with a criminal ex-president who is running for reelection has never happened before to the country, so there’s not an operating procedure to follow.
Bush didn’t run for re-election? Reagan didn’t run for re-election? The only criminal President you can say didn’t run for re-election was fucking Nixon.
Literally the point of this post is that we have, time and time again, chosen not to prosecute them, despite plenty of evidence.
Reagan making deals with terrorists in the Iran-Contra affair. Bush signing off on torture, which is a war crime. (We literally prosecuted low level soldiers for torture, but claimed it was just “bad apples” and not a painfully obvious systemic problem. Torture facilities don’t spring up from nothingness without anybody in the chain of command making a choice to torture people. The orders come down from somewhere and when you’re supposed to be the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, sorry, it kind of falls on you.)
It’s been a problem because we keep kicking the fucking can down the road to ignore the question of “can we prosecute a former President.”
So you’re saying the issue is the president’s precedence precedent?
Blaming the person for leaving their house unlocked instead of the thief that broke in……
Let’s see how this plays out.
Downvoted for asking an obvious bad faith question.
TBF, it’s highly likely that a military or government individual would be imprisoned by a country with unjust laws and it would be unfair for the US government to abandon its people, who are in that location because of US government orders, in favor of trusting said unjust country.
The US lives on war. They aren’t going to prosecute anyone.
Lol
