Marc Rich Is SO 2000: Eric Holder as Obama’s Attorney General

While we're on the subject of pardons ...

Torture, warrantless spying, Guantanamo … The next attorney general has a lot to clean up when the Bush frat party vamooses next month. Obama recently named Eric Holder as his nominee for the job. One would think with the beating American civil liberties have sustained, mainstream media would be focused on Holder’s positions on same. Instead, much reporting has chosen to focus on Holder’s involvement in Bill Clinton’s on-his-way-out-the-door pardon of Marc Rich, billionaire fugitive.

Marc Rich?!

The Rich angle is a lot sexier, in a Miami-Vice-sockless-loafers kind of way: money, oil, flights to Switzerland, more money, more oil, tanned socialite wife, and … Bill Clinton … Who wants to read boring stories about a bunch of Muslims locked up in beautiful, sunny Guantanamo Bay?

Barring the occasional invasion by PUMAs, A Candid World’s readers aren’t afraid to tackle tough issues and want to know how Obama is going to repair our reputation as moral leader among nations and protect our rights as citizens (natural born or not).

Who is Eric Holder? Yes, he was involved in the Marc Rich pardon. The NYT Op-Ed page has alternately claimed the Holder/Rich connection is and is not a big deal. The editorial staff, thankfully, focuses on Holder’s positions on Guantanamo, FISA, and torture, offering a more reasoned view than the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen, who feels the Rich pardon wholly disqualifies Holder for the AG position. More important than the Rich pardon, Holder needs to account for his words in the first months following 9/11, when he suggested enemy combatants and other terror detainees might not be entitled to Geneva Convention protections.

Of course, much time has passed since January 2002, when Holder made these questionable remarks. In June 2008, Holder presented a speech at the National Convention of the American Consititution Society. Holder calls for closure of the “national embarrassment” that is Guantanamo and transfer of prisoners to U.S. soil. He also calls for an immediate end to extraordinary rendition and for an absolute rejection of torture. He condemns warrentless wiretapping. He further calls for adherence to the rules of FISA, and if there is broad agreement among military, intelligence, and legal communities that FISA needs updating, then fine: Improve FISA; don’t circumvent it.

There is no tension between an effective fight against those who have sworn to harm us and a respect for our most honored civil liberties tradition. We can never put the welfare of the American people at risk, but we can also never choose actions we know will weaken the legal and moral fiber of our nation.

Oft quoted, too, is this excerpt from a March 2006 National Journal article regarding the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as AG; Holder says:

The attorney general is the one Cabinet member who’s different from all the rest.  The attorney general serves first the people, but also serves the president. There has to be a closeness at the same time there needs to be distance.

Very different from Gonzales, Holder would be an attorney general who is interested in restoring rather than trashing constitutional protections. In the end, people (mostly) on the right will focus on the Marc Rich pardon; people on the left, on Holder’s early post-9/11 positions. Of course, these issues should be addressed in confirmation hearings.

BUT can we please focus on the latter rather than the former?! Believe me, Marc Rich is an amoeba on a flea on a rat relative to the real issues that matter for our country’s future.