Noting the war crimes now known and admitted to by George Bush and Dick Cheney, George Washington University’s highly-respected constitutional law professor Jonathon Turley asked MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week: “If someone commits a crime and everyone’s around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime?”
The discussion came in the wake of a new bipartisan US Senate report that found that Bush was responsible for approving torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Cheney’s admission during an ABC interview that he helped to approve torture and abuse in interrogations.
During the interview, Turley mentioned that it’d be up to the citizens whether or not any action is actually taken to prosecute those who committed these crimes. “It will ultimately depend on citizens, and whether they will remain silent in the face of a crime that’s been committed in plain view,” Turley suggested. “It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing, and that is what the citizens are doing.”
But is there any real basis for his well-meaning argument that accountability could possibly be brought by popular demand? Unfortunately, as the media has been virtually silent about what may be the most offensive crimes ever committed by an executive branch in the US (just as silent as they were during the lead-up and follow-through of the Iraq war, when those same officials sent our nation into war on the basis of demonstrable lies), it’s bloody unlikely that most citizens will even learn about these scandals, much less take action on them. And if they did, who would bother to report it? As Turley said: “There’s this gigantic yawn as we hear about a war crime on national television being discussed matter-of-factly by the vice president.”
But how much can citizens actually do, particularly with the sparse amount of information they’ve been presented? They hit the streets to protest by the millions, prior to and during the Iraq war, and the bulk of the media didn’t bother to even cover it.
Yes, if the citizens began throwing shoes everywhere by the millions, someone in the corporate mainstream media might cover it somewhere. But without the daily barrage of a real media, covering the topics that actually matter, with the attention they deserve, the citizens are often clueless, and otherwise virtually powerless, in this wing nut-fed media world we’ve allowed to be created around us.
Do Americans simply not care about war crimes? Of course they do. But not unless they know about them, and not unless the argument that they occurred, and the evidence of it, is presented in the detail that such an issue merits. While a small number of outraged citizens who take action actually can make enormous differences on the local level, accountability for international war crimes requires an untiring, responsible, focused media to inspire the mobilization of a nation.
