Jon Eisenberg is a very well-known California lawyer. Eisenberg literally wrote the book on California appellate practice.
In a new interview, Eisenberg says that Bush is a felon, and reveals the games played by the Department of Justice:
[Interviewer] You have written "effectively ... President George W. Bush is a felon." Why, and do you ever think he'll be brought to justice?
[Eisenberg] President Bush has freely admitted that his administration committed warrantless electronic surveillance, violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. That's a felony, according to title 50, section 1809 of the United States Code. So President Bush is a felon. It's that simple.
Will he ever be brought to justice? Evidently not by a criminal prosecution, in which the Obama administration seems to have little interest...
[Interviewer] During [a lawsuit against the Bush administration concerning illegal spying,] you wrote a response to a government brief that you were not allowed to see. How does one go about doing that?
[Eisenberg] It was quite a challenge. It wasn't just that we had to speculate as to what might be in the secret DOJ brief; the conditions under which we wrote our secret response were onerous, approaching the bizarre: We were required to write the brief under guard in the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco; we were forbidden from preparing any notes for the brief-writing session; the DOJ retained sole possession of the brief we produced; and the DOJ has refused to allow us to review the brief since we wrote it. Litigation doesn't get any weirder than that.
There is no justifiable reason why the Department of Justice would refuse to allow the opposing counsel to see DOJ's brief, force the attorney to write his response brief under armed guard and without being able to use any notes, and then bury that brief without even letting the attorney who wrote it have a copy.
Unfortunately, things aren't getting much better under Obama. See this, this and this.
As you so well explain, George, there is no political will for prosecution. This includes the crime of illegal Wars of Aggression, which is useful to clearly understand as having no basis under law.
ReplyDeleteThe current US wars are acts of terror; illegal because the nations of the world declared after two world wars that war cannot be used as a foreign policy. The US legally bound themselves to this agreement through the UN Charter and what is usually called the Nuremberg Charter. The limits of the law is that unless a nation is under attack or under imminent threat of attack, war is illegal. The only other legal option is for the UN Security Council to approve use of force. The authorization of Congress in October 2002 for use of force explicitly reminded the President that he was bound to the 1973 War Powers Act which includes the legal provision that use of force can only be used within the limitations of our international treaties. Therefore, these wars are illegal acts of terror because they do not meet the legal requirement of self-defense; our own government's documentation in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate had unanimous consent among all 16 US intelligence agencies that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the US. For a more detailed explanation and documentation, read my brief by clicking on my name.
I invite you to consider US acts in the present and your opportunity for taking action consistent with your unique, beautiful and powerful self-expression. You may have heard, Senator Lieberman again threatened war with Iran this week. This would also be an act of terror, a War of Aggression. Martin Luther King stated in his speech, "A time to break silence" during the Wars of Aggression that he witnessed:
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
Hence the reasoning for a Truth and Reconciliation strategy rather than prosecution, as you recently posted: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/why-we-need-truth-and-reconciliation.html
Interesting text. You have a nice blog. Keep it up!
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