In Power, Obama May Seek War Crimes Tribunals

I've noted a couple of times (here and here) that the continued demonization of the Bush administration by extreme left zealots reflects a vengeful preparation for war crimes indictments against the outgoing "Bush/Cheney regime."

Now there's some evidence to that effect, from Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:

Barack Obama's plan for imposing unity on the nation after he takes office apparently entails a close look at war crimes trials for Bush administration officials. He has even said so in an interview with Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.

This kind of change -- putting your predecessors on trial for their conduct of policy -- may not be what most Americans really want or expect from someone with Obama's gauzy rhetoric of unity. But unity has a dark side in the hands of people who regard their opponents as criminals. America has two centuries-plus of history lacking the totalitarian practice of jailing the predecessors when a new president takes office.

This is the sort of proposal one might expect from a man steeped in Marxism at his church, from his friends like Ayers, and as a member of the Alinsky Left. But I am surprised he let this slip.
Few on the right noticed and became alarmed, as the interview in question appeared on a Philadelphia Daily News blog,

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to "immediately review the information that's already there" and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as "a partisan witch hunt." However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because "nobody is above the law."

At the time it was picked up only by the Huffington Post.

To me the terribly frightening phrase is the wish to avoid a "partisan witch hunt." When a Harvard-trained lawyer inserts a qualifier into a phrase, that is a signal of wiggle room being created. In this case, the obvious implication is that if you get Chuck Hagel or some other antiwar Republican on board, then you have cover for your "witch hunt."

Read the whole post. Lifson directs us to LGF's screen capture from Obama's official page:

Imagine this: Precisely at a time when analysts are suggesting a historic victory in Iraq, the vengeful partisans of the left are sharpening their knives in anticipation for their Jacobin reaction.

Things are already taking shape along these lines. See, for example, "Time for a Special Counsel to Investigate Bush Administration Use of Torture."