PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

EGYPT’S EX-PREZ COULD FACE THE DEATH PENALTY. WHY DO WE ALLOW PRESIDENTS TO GET AWAY WITH CRIMES HERE?

In this country we have a long tradition of covering over the crimes of presidents and those who aided their misdeeds. Partly as a result, nothing is ever fully resolved and people are free to reinterpret history, again and again, as they see fit. These changes in historical views help to formulate the next political and social fight, which in turn calls for more revision for the next series of battles.

All of our presidents since WW II, except Jimmy Carter, have taken us into war or war like situations, or presided over wars started by their predecessors. Think about it. Every president: Truman (Korea), Eisenhower (Korea, Vietnam), Kennedy (Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Laos, others), Johnson (Vietnam, Dominican Republic), Nixon (Vietnam), Ford (Vietnam), Reagan (Lebanon, Grenada, Central America), Bush the first (Panama, Somalia, Haiti), Clinton (Bosnia, Somalia, Croatia, Haiti) , Bush the II (Afghanistan, Iraq) and Obama (the same, plus Libya).

The far right is fixated on Constitutional principles and some even argue that building the Interstate Highway System violated the Constitution, but few on the right seems to care about the ultimate power of life and death taken by presidents to put us into multiple wars around the world. The Constitution means the most when it can be interpreted in one's favor, right?  (Note: I have not listed all of the war type events above, but only the primary ones.)

Our presidents are never held accountable when they attack our most basic rights as citizens. Nixon escaped some of the judgment of history by resigning. Bush II by redefining torture and claiming that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The "defeat" of Vietnam was passed along to a good guy, Ford, to absorb on his watch. Reagan excepted no responsibility for the deaths of more than 200 Marines on a mission without a purpose in Lebanon.

This is not to equate all of these events with illegal, unconstitutional actions. Some of them were, all of them went unpunished as if they came about by the "divine" right of kings rather than stretching the limits of constitutional democracy. While it might be satisfying to see a president taken off to jail, that might not be possible because of the implications for the future.

So, if we cannot hold individual presidents responsible, we must at least allow the judgment of history by coming to terms with misdeeds to some sort of national truth commission, perhaps modeled on what happened in South Africa after minority, white rule collapsed. As it is, we fight wars, treat the wounds, ignore the psychologically damaged, pay the fantastic financial cost and move on. This is wrong.

In addition to Vietnam, Nixon also presided over the arrest of 13,000 people on the streets of Washington, DC, over a two day period in May, 1971. This was one of the grossest violations of rights in the last 100 years of American history, but nothing was done. No word of condemnation has ever come from the supposed protectors of citizens and their rights, the far right of America. One can reasonably conclude that they approve such violations when it aids the causes in which they believe.

Doug Terry. 5.24.11

Reagan’s speech in the aftermath of the Lebanon bombing contained the following paragraph. Shortly afterward, he ordered the US Marines withdrawn.

“Well, we'll do everything we can to ensure that our men are as safe as possible. We ordered the battleship New Jersey to join our naval forces offshore. Without even firing them, the threat of its 16-inch guns silenced those who once fired down on our Marines from the hills, and they're a good part of the reason we suddenly had a cease fire. We're doing our best to make our forces less vulnerable to those who want to snipe at them or send in future suicide missions.”

The general tone of Reagan’s speech at the time was to put the blame entirely on suicide bombers (they did the deed, of course) and to pledge better efforts at protecting Marines in the future. He ended with these remarks:

...”I will not ask you to pray for the dead, because they're safe in God's loving arms and beyond need of our prayers. I would like to ask you all - wherever you may be in this blessed land - to pray for these wounded young men and to pray for the bereaved families of those who gave their lives for our freedom.

God bless you, and God bless America."

For those not old enough to remember, or who haven’t studied history or viewed video, Reagan had a wonderful way of presiding over the national government without taking responsibility for what it did. It was as if he was there, but not paying attention. When something bad happened (and those events of ‘83 were among the most stunningly bad moments of his presidency), he seemed to have the ability to distance himself from the consequences, even while he pledged that we “all” will do better in the future. Some presidents have gone out of their way to accept the ultimate blame for failure. Reagan did nothing of the kind. The public generally bought into his ruse of his involvement without blame.

In retrospect, sending Marines into Lebanon in the middle of their long civil war (it began in 1975) was the beginning of our modern disastrous involvement with the Arab world that continues to this day. Bush the first later sent troops into Somalia and Clinton left them there, until the attack on American soldiers that became known as Blackhawk Down brought home the potential horrors of being half way involved in other people’s business. Later, Osama bin Laden would cite the American withdrawal after both events as evidence that the U.S. could not take human  losses. On this basis, he planned 9-11, 2001 to be a fatal, crushing blow against American power that would cause the US to “withdraw from the world stage”. He could not, of course, have been more wrong.

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