by Mike Lofgren
There
was a time when it was permissible to think that the chief purpose of
the judicial branch of government was to protect our constitutional
rights as a check on runaway legislative majorities or executive
overreach. To fulfill that duty, a judge is insulated from partisan
maneuvering by a grant of lifetime tenure and a constitutionally
guaranteed salary. In return, the federal judge must show discretion,
decorum and above all, an unwillingness to be drawn into partisan
quarrels. This behavior is known as having a judicial temperament.
The tradition of apolitical judges has come under strain recently,
given the habit of even Supreme Court justices to pop off like
opinionated customers in a saloon (I'm thinking of you,
Tony Scalia).
But new ground has been broken in partisan mudslinging by Justice
Laurence H. Silberman, an appellate judge appointed by ronny raygun. He
has
taken to the pages of
Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to attack as dangerously
irresponsible the millions of Americans who believe George W. Bush lied
about the presence of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for
invading Iraq.
How does Silberman know this? He writes on the authority of having
been cochairman of The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of
the United States Regarding
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
This commission, appointed by Bush, found no intent by the president to
mislead Congress or the public about the presence of WMD; after all,
the
2002 National Intelligence Estimate made the claim about Iraqi WMD, not Bush.
That conclusion is hardly surprising, because the commission's scope
was so narrowly defined as to preclude examining whether the president
and his advisers put pressure on the intelligence community to produce
the worst NIE (national intelligence estimate) in history. The failings
of the commission and Silberman's misrepresentation of its findings have
been
covered more than adequately
elsewhere.
It is worth mentioning though, that the commission was stacked with
partisan Republicans (can one imagine Senator John McCain, who was on
the panel, performing a dispassionate analysis of anything?). Among the
token Democratic panel members was the cochairman, former Sen. Charles
Robb, a walking vacuum.
Whatever his other cognitive weaknesses, Bush certainly knew what he
was doing when he appointed Silberman to run the commission. In 1980,
Silberman was a cochair of presidential candidate Reagan's foreign
policy team. Later, when on the federal bench, he overturned Colonel
Oliver North's conviction on three felony counts in the Iran-Contra
case. He
upheld key portions of the Patriot Act, an unconstitutional statute that had been stampeded through a panicked and fearful Congress. As a judge who served on the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, he is a member in good standing of the
Deep State. No wonder Bush awarded Silberman the
Medal of Freedom;
that little spangle was the customary gold watch for George Tenet, L.
Paul Bremer and all the other hired help who cleaned up after the
president's messes.
Distasteful as it may be for someone to flaunt his judicial
credentials while claiming to adjudicate the historical truth of a
subject on which he has a partisan conflict of interest, that is hardly
the limit of his transgression. What is truly insulting is for Silberman
to compare critics of the war who believed Bush lied to Nazis. He
writes: "I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped
the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really
lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been 'stabbed in the
back' by politicians."
One hardly knows where to begin with this historical falsification. The "stab-in-the-back" myth, the "
Dolchstosslegende,"
was concocted by far-right Germans, including Nazis, in an attempt to
justify rather than discredit the war. They claimed the German army
could have continued fighting, but was stabbed in the back by pacifist
politicians. Critics of the Iraq war, by contrast, always believed the
war should never have been fought in the first place. German critics of
their country's participation in World War I, like
Karl Liebknecht or
Rosa Luxemburg,
ended up being murdered for their views. One shudders to think that a
federal judge has so much difficulty sorting out facts and evidence.
The stab-in-the-back myth has been a standard right-wing refrain
throughout my lifetime. The slippery politician Harry S. Truman stabbed
General MacArthur in the back over Korea by refusing to let him win.
Dirty hippies and the media stabbed our boys in the back as they fought
in Vietnam. And now, of course, ISIS is Obama's fault because he
withdrew troops from Iraq. Never mind that Obama withdrew them precisely
according to
Bush's already-negotiated timetable
and that ISIS was the bastard child of our invasion. Yet Silberman
smears critics of war, rather than chickenhawk proponents of war,
because it fits so neatly into his worldview.
Judicial corruption does not require a cash nexus. The justices of
the federal judiciary, who have lifetime tenure and fixed salaries,
receive no bribes to rule the way they do. What Laurence Silberman has
shown us is the fact that intellectual corruption can be as corrosive to
the integrity of the bench as a cash bribe.
by Bianna Golodryga
