Flap over firings distracts from bigger crimes

What’s the ruling class’s latest, biggest crime? From the furious sputtering of Democratic politicians you’d think it was the Bush administration’s firing of seven federal prosecutors. They’ve denounced the dismissals in congressional hearings and called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign.

But all the outrage on Capital Hill distracts from the bigger crime that’s just been committed: the votes in Congress to provide an extra $124 billion to fund the war on Iraq. The Democrats are calling this a victory because they included a provision to withdraw troops by Aug. 31, 2008. But that’s a deception. The vote continues the war, and one minute more of the occupation is a crime.

By focusing on the firings the Democrats are trying to show they are going after corrupt Republicans. It’s really just internal squabbling between the two parties. You won’t see a picket line with people demanding the ousted prosecutors be brought back. While they may not be “loyal Bushies,” as Gonzales’ former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson puts it, these prosecutors do the bidding of the state.

The federal prosecutors were dismissed in December without being given any reason. When Congress began a probe of the purge, Gonzales deputy Paul McNulty testified at a March hearing that the firings were “performance-related.” Another Justice Department official elaborated, saying that Carol Lam, the fired U.S. attorney from San Diego, hadn’t handled enough immigration prosecutions. Lam testified that the number of immigration cases had fallen because she was following Justice Department orders to try to get longer sentences, and thus was taking fewer cases to trial.

USA Today reported on March 21 that Lam actually ranked seventh among the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys in successful prosecutions last year, and that she handled more immigration prosecutions than any other type of case.

So why was this zealous persecutor of immigrants fired?

The real reason she was targeted for removal was because she successfully prosecuted former Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham for taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Lam had also begun investigating the CIA’s No. 3 official, Dusty Foggo.

David Iglesias, a former New Mexico U.S. attorney, testified that two Republican members of Congress—Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson—had leaned on him to unseal indictments in a probe involving a Democratic state legislator before the November elections. And another prosecutor—this one in Little Rock, Ark.—was removed to make way for Tim Griffin, a former aide of White House adviser Karl Rove.

Gonzales is under attack for backing the firings. He initially said he wasn’t involved in deciding whom to dismiss, but at a March 29 congressional hearing Sampson, his former chief of staff, said Gonzales’s claims of ignorance were “not accurate.”

Democrats may now sound concerned about justice, but they shrugged off Gonzales’s real crimes. As White House counsel, he advocated torturing prisoners from Iraq and Afghanistan. In a January 2005 memo to President George W. Bush he said the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He said restricting the methods of interrogation was “obsolete” and some of the convention’s provisions “quaint.” None of that stood in the way of the Senate confirming his appointment to attorney general.

Gonzales would also do away with parts of the Constitution. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January he was asked about the Supreme Court’s ruling that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to habeas corpus—the ability to challenge unlawful imprisonment—in U.S. courts. Gonzales declared that there is no express right of habeas corpus in the United States, even though the Constitution states that the privilege of habeas corpus “shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion of public safety.

Gonzales isn’t the first to dismiss habeas corpus. Death row prisoners lost their right to habeas corpus under the 1996 anti-terrorism law passed during the Clinton administration.

The firing of the federal prosecutors has little impact on workers, but the war funding allows the killing of Iraqi people and the diversion of money desperately needed to meet the needs of the people at home.

Millions have been laid off and forced into low-paying jobs. Health-care coverage and pensions have been cut or eliminated. Rents and mortgages have skyrocketed. Education is out of reach for millions. And undocumented workers are facing raids, deportation and abuse.

It will take more than a Democratic Congress to stop the war on Iraq and the attacks on the workers and oppressed at home.