Yesterday Rep. Jerrold Nadler called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate George W. Bush over his admission that he ordered waterboarding:
That statement "absolutely indicts the president," Nadler said.
"It is a smoking gun, I'm dubious that [Holder] will do it because this administration unfortunately has taken the opinion, taken the attitude that they're not going to look at any criminal actions by, within the prior administration," Nadler said. "They say 'let's look forward, not backward.' By that standard no one would be prosecuted for any crime."
Amnesty International has called for an investigation as well, and today the ACLU joined in, with Director Anthony Romero writing a letter to Holder stating:
The ACLU acknowledges the significance of this request, but it bears emphasis that the former President's acknowledgement that he authorized torture is absolutely without parallel in American history. The admission cannot be ignored. In our system, no one is above the law or beyond its reach, not even a former president. That founding principle of our democracy would mean little if it were ignored with respect to those in whom the public most invests its trust. It would also be profoundly unfair for Mr. Durham to focus his inquiry on low-level officials charged with implementing official policy but to ignore the role of those who authorized or ordered the use of torture.
It's one thing to argue that, based on the legal advice he received, Bush didn't commit a crime. It's nonsense, but it's an argument. It's an entirely different thing to say that he broke the law and that's OK because America is at war. The latter is a demand for authoritarian lawlessness. The notion that he simply should not be investigated because he was the president of the United States and therefore inherently immune to prosecution is contrary to the idea of a nation where, as Thomas Paine put it, the law is king.
The immediate consequence of refusing to hold anyone accountable for torture is that we have become a torture-accepting nation. As Dahlia Lithwick writes today, "Doing nothing about torture is, at this point, pretty much the same as voting for it. We are all water-boarders now."
I've posted the ACLU's full letter after the jump.
