In my 11/24/07 inaugural post on this blog, I wrote the following:

I have seen state bureaucrats possessed of as much ineptitude and malice as anyone in the Bush administration, and what I’ve seen has convinced me that we’ve wound up with something as bad as our present corrupt government because of our acceptance of malice and incompetence at local and state levels.

A few days later, I mentioned in another post what two lawyers had told me about cases in the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office of Professional Regulation (OPR), which investigates allegations of misconduct against licensed professionals:

“Once they file charges against you, they will convict you. …[T]hey would be embarrassed not to return a conviction in a case in which charges were filed. [Emphasis added.]

There’s a very strong and far more serious echo of that in a story by Russ Tuttle in The Nation. Tuttle quotes Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions who resigned last October for ethical reasons, recounting a conversation he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes:

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.‘” [My emphasis.]

So there’s a case in point, of the micro and the macro mirroring each other. I persist in thinking that our tolerance of such abuses at lower levels of government are what channeled us right into accepting a president who’s so contemptuous of the rule of law that we have the situation we have in Guantanamo.

I imagine there are those who would suggest it might be a chicken and egg situation—perhaps lower level bureaucrats are copying their more powerful counterparts. I think not, but regardless, these things are true:

• No lawyer or law enforcement person who has participated in such abuses in local and state bureaucracies has a right to shake their head and decry Bush’s trampling of the Constitution.
• The same goes for every state legislator, county commissioner or city council person who has failed to take action to institute transparency and accountability measures for reasons of (an assumed) high cost, or because “not that many people are affected,” or for any other “reason.”
• The same goes for those in insurance companies and law offices who push innocent people to accept a “settlement” that’s short of justice, in any case in which justice isn’t absolutely precluded.
• The same goes for anyone and everyone who puts winning ahead of justice.

In short, anyone who participates in the problem in local and state realms is part of the problem at the national level. It’s our consciousness about the business of justice that has to change—to accomplish a separation of business and justice that is, in practical terms, as important as the separation of church and state.

Transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability. How, in this day and age and place, can anyone claim to be on the side of principled government without doing everything possible to institute transparency and accountability?

Peace.

Deborah Alicen