A TALE OF TWO ACADEMICS

Perhaps the most disturbing ability of human beings is the ability to rationalize anything. And this ability tends to rise in conjunction with the level of irresponsibility or stupidity an individual is attempting to justify.

Evidence of this reality has been painfully clear in America since the start of the new millennium, which ominously began with the coup of 2000, and the illegal occupancy of the White House by George W. Bush and his inept, deceitful, corrupt cabal of warmongers.

Almost immediately after this coup, Bush apologists leapt into action, endeavoring to rationalize everything Bush did, from his election thefts and shredding of the United States Constitution to his use of torture, rendition, and illegal detention. According to these apologists, the failure to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks was not the Bush dictatorship’s fault (despite the fact that it was responsible for national security at the time). Instead these attacks were blamed on Bush’s predecessor Bill Clinton. And even during the twilight of the Bush dictatorship, after nearly eight years of arrogance, deceit and incompetence had culminated in two lingering wars and one of the worst recessions in decades, these apologists still attempted to blame Clinton for all the nation’s ills.

But with Barack Obama in the White House, suddenly the tune has changed. The rallying cry of the former Bush apologists has now become, “You can’t blame George W. anymore.”

If this isn’t the pinnacle of hypocrisy and speciousness, it would be impossible to explain what is. To now blame Obama for the mendaciousness, idiocy, hypocrisy, corruption and ineptness of the Bush dictatorship is like blaming a legitimate physician for failing to immediately cure an infection that a phony physician not only caused, but also neglected to treat.

The United States does not begin anew with each election. The Bush dictatorship’s “gifts” to Obama, besides the wars and the recession, were a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, an amoral judiciary dedicated to destroying the Constitution, a shredded Bill of Rights that no longer protects America’s freedoms, and a cadre of torturers and war criminals who believe they are above the law.

Sadly, the infection spawned by the legacy of the Bush dictatorship is now plaguing the world. In Iran protests have erupted over the results of a disputed presidential election, inspiring America’s politicians and corporate-controlled media to respond with “righteous indignation.”

Yet where were these politicians and media when George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, acting in concert with an unethical Supreme Court “justice” named Antonin Scalia and a smirking Katherine Harris, helped Bush steal America’s presidential election during the coup of 2000? Aside from a few whimpers, the media largely ignored this undermining of democracy, allegedly so “the country could move forward.”

After so conveniently ignoring electoral fraud in their own nation, it is the height of hypocrisy for American politicians and media to now spew sanctimonious outrage over allegations of electoral fraud in other nations. It is also the height of hypocrisy for the American people to jingoistically permit their government to constantly engage in wars in other lands, purportedly to promote the principles of “freedom and democracy,” while they mutely let those principles be decimated at home.

To their credit, the Iranian people are now risking life and limb to protest the results of their presidential election. Yet in America, aside from a few scattered protests along the “inaugural” route, the people obsequiously considered the coup of 2000, and later the lies that led to the illegal invasion of Iraq, to be “business as usual.”

Even after Bush proclaimed, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, that terrorists hate America because of its “freedoms,” the people slumbered as his cabal of thugs demolished these freedoms more ruthlessly than any terrorist could ever hope to accomplish.

The infectiousness of the Bush dictatorship’s policy of “unilateralism” and defiance of international law can also be seen in the actions of the government of North Korea, which is currently using many of the same rationalizations to ignore world opinion about its nuclear weapons program that Bush used to ignore world opinion about the illegal invasion of Iraq.

And how can any American politician now condemn another country’s human rights record when the Bush dictatorship repeatedly tortured alleged terrorists, denied them legal due process, and held them in secret prisons where human rights abuses could remain undetected? How can justice be demanded in other nations when the Obama administration, which was supposed to usher in an era of change and hope, has essentially refused to prosecute the officials in the Bush dictatorship who are responsible for these crimes?

One of the most repugnant of these thugs is John Yoo, a law professor who, while serving in the Bush-era “Justice” Department, authored controversial memoranda advocating the use of torture.

During this same era another professor named Ward Churchill composed an essay that explored the possible motivations for the September 11th attacks. This essay subsequently generated significant controversy because Churchill labeled some of the victims of these attacks “little Eichmanns.”

Initially the responses from the respective universities where Churchill and Yoo were employed appeared to be similar: Their opinions were protected by the “freedom of speech” clause contained in the first amendment to the Bill of Rights; therefore they could not be fired for expressing them.

But the reality was much different. While this clause seemed to protect Yoo, Churchill suddenly became the target of a university “investigation” that subsequently resulted in his firing for “plagiarism” and other “research misconduct.”

Why the disparity in the treatment of these two academics? The answer is simple. Universities, despite all their “ivory-tower” posturing, are profit-driven institutions. Fears of losing tuition, alumni donations or tax dollars will invariably trump any “higher” principles an academic institution may have. This often means that administrators live by two sets of “rules,” demanding dedication and integrity from their students and faculty while ignoring the obligation to practice such values themselves.

Many pundits have debated the viewpoints expressed by Churchill and Yoo, and most have rationalized that Churchill’s essay was more reprehensible because he was an academic when he wrote it.

But there are three reasons why such a rationalization defies logic.

First, Churchill’s status as an academic may indeed have caused his essay to attract a larger audience than the writings of the average person. But this status did not empower him to formulate governmental policy. Also, as with all essays, readers have the right to accept or reject the writer’s views, as well as the right to respond with opinions of their own.

Yoo, on the other hand, wrote his memoranda while in a policymaking position, which made his views more politically potent, and thus more threatening to the Constitution.

Second, Churchill expressed his viewpoints publicly, knowing they could subject him to exploitation by demagogues, scorn, and even threats of violence.

Yoo, however, cowered behind a wall of governmental secrecy and bureaucracy, denying the American people the opportunity to respond to his opinions or even to accept or reject them.

Thus far America’s criminal justice system has failed in its obligation to prosecute and punish Yoo and others of his ilk. So Churchill and Jose Padilla, a victim of Yoo’s advocacy of torture, have turned to America’s civil law system to find some semblance of justice.

Padilla’s plight, perhaps more than any other detainee’s, chillingly illustrates the scope of the Bush dictatorship’s torture policies, because Padilla is an American citizen who was tortured on American soil.

In April of this year, a jury determined that Churchill had been wrongfully terminated from his professorship position. More recently, a federal judge ruled that Padilla could sue Yoo for the tortures he endured during his detention. In making this ruling, Judge Jeffrey White cited the doctrine that the criminals in the Bush dictatorship believed they could ignore: Government officials are legally responsible for the “foreseeable consequences of their conduct.”

Of course anyone familiar with American jurisprudence knows that such victories are fleeting in a legal system that labors harder to rationalize injustice than it does to produce justice. In fact, American tax dollars were wasted, and will undoubtedly continue to be wasted, to ensure that Yoo will never have to answer, either criminally or civilly, for his crimes.

To justify its defense of Yoo, the Obama administration asserted that the role of government is to defend federal officials who have acted in an “official” capacity, regardless of how one personally feels about the harm those officials have done.

This is simply not true, and to subscribe to such a belief puts Obama in the same league as Roland Burris, his replacement in the United States Senate who, while serving as attorney general of Illinois, callously sought to uphold the death sentence given to a wrongfully convicted man. The egregiousness of Burris’s actions prompted his assistant Mary Kenney to resign in protest and subsequently inspired the governor to declare a moratorium on the use of the death penalty in Illinois.

Yet Burris endeavored to rationalize his actions by claiming it was his “job” to ensure that criminal convictions were upheld, regardless of what he personally thought about them.

But that is not what legal ethics demand of prosecutors or attorney generals. In fact they demand the opposite: that the ultimate goal of the legal system is to do justice, not to win cases at any cost. And most in the legal profession will undoubtedly agree—with perhaps the notable exceptions of Scalia and his sycophantic, self-loathing sidekick Clarence Thomas—that the execution of an innocent person is the apex of injustice.

Clearly there will be no justice if John Yoo and others of his ilk never have to answer for their crimes. And it is despicable that they now enjoy, and even prosper under, the very legal protections they so zealously sought to deny to others. In fact, Jay Bybee, who shared many of Yoo’s views while also serving in the Bush-era “Justice” Department, is now a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, thus proving, once again, this unwritten adage of the legal profession: “There is no amount of misconduct that the legal system will not reward if the misconduct serves the system and those who profit from it.”

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that freedom of speech not only protects “free thought for those who agree with us,” but also “freedom for the thought we hate.”

Which brings me, as I promised above, to my third and final reason. In this tale of two academics, Churchill exercised his right to freedom of speech, a right promised to all Americans, and paid a price for doing so, while Yoo, like a cowardly vandal in the night, attempted to not only destroy this right, but numerous others as well—yet he has paid nothing.

And there is nothing more reprehensible than that.

David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru