The Nation and Alternet recently featured articles on Congressman Jack Murtha’s plan to hold the president and the Defense Department accountable for “every cent” of war spending, and to close down the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, among other actions that have both popular support and international agreement.  What is sad in all this is that Murtha and others have evolved so little confidence in the willingness of this administration to be held accountable by the constitution, international and domestic law, and the most basic ethical boundaries in conducting it’s “war on terrorism” and the unpopular occupation of Iraq.   Murtha, with the support of Nancy Pelosi and apparently a majority of Congress, plans to bankrupt the president’s plans to escalate the war upon reception of the $100 billion supplemental spending request on February 5.

It is hard to see how anyone could possibly oppose this move to hold this administration accountable, even though most likely no one in this administration who openly approved illegal wiretapping, ordered torture and extraordinary rendition, ignored laws, and committed war crimes will ever see jail time or any sort of standard punishment for it.  This is standard procedure, the politics of international law: the ‘winners’ get off free and the ‘losers’ get justice.  The American leaders who, during WWII, ordered unnecessary fire-bombings of civilian populations in Germany and Japan, and committed the worst war-time terrorist attacks in human history (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) never saw any sort of justice.  They were hailed as heroes while the Nazis and others were (perhaps rightly) executed from their atrocities.

One doesn’t have to be for the death penalty in any circumstances (I myself tend not to be) to demand that international and domestic law be applied rationally.  In this situation, while one can laud Murtha and the Congressional democrats and others for their attempt to put the president and his administration in their constitutional place, it must be admitted that justice is often at the whim of politics instead of the other way around.

- Peter Broady