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Obama Would Ask His AG to "Immediately Review" Potential
of Crimes in Bush White House
By Will Bunch
The Philadelphia Daily News
Monday 14 April 2008
Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the
minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus
of the 2008 presidential race - and that is whether an Obama administration
would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations
that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place
in the White House.
Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and
his deputies to "immediately review the information that's already there"
and determine if an inquiry is warranted - but he also tread carefully on the
issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide.
He worried that such a probe could be spun as "a partisan witch hunt."
However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because
"nobody is above the law."
The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the
Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney
and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld,
among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding
and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.
I mentioned the report in my question, and said "I know you've talked
about reconciliation and moving on, but there's also the issue of justice, and
a lot of people - certainly around the world and certainly within this country
- feel that crimes were possibly committed" regarding torture, rendition,
and illegal wiretapping. I wanted to know how whether his Justice Department
"would aggressively go after and investigate whether crimes have been committed."
Here's his answer, in its entirety:
What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department
and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there
and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge
that because we don't have access to all the material right now. I think that
you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You're
also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived
on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we've got
too many problems we've got to solve.
So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment - I would want
to find out directly from my Attorney General - having pursued, having looked
at what's out there right now - are there possibilities of genuine crimes as
opposed to really bad policies. And I think it's important- one of the things
we've got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing
between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal
activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings
and I've said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because
I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional
circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly,
consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge
forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above
the law - and I think that's roughly how I would look at it.
The bottom line is that: Obama sent a clear signal that - unlike impeachment,
which he's ruled out and which now seems a practical impossibility - he is
at the least open to the possibility of investigating potential high crimes
in the Bush White House. To many, the information that waterboarding - which
the United States has considered torture and a violation of law in the past
- was openly planned out in the seat of American government is evidence enough
to at least start asking some tough questions in January 2009.
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