Obama's shameful campaign to criminalize officials in the Bush administration is reminiscent of Stalin's purges of his opponents in 1936-38.

Through the office of Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama actively supported a witch-hunt aimed at destroying the careers of Bush administration attorneys who provided legal advice about the limits upon interrogating captured Islamic terrorists. Hating President Bush wasn't enough. It was necessary figuratively to spill some blood.

Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin staged public trials of Soviet military and political leaders whom he regarded as rivals. All of the trials resulted in convictions and executions for alleged treason.

American liberal-progressives at the time applauded the show trials as necessary to stop opposition to socialistic progress toward perfection of human nature and political society. In fact, liberal-progressives continued to defend the trials until after the fall of the Soviet Union and revelation of KGB documents.

The common good, an abstraction called "humanity," as defined by Stalin or American intellectuals, always trumps individual rights.

Parenthetically, this appears to be Obama's attitude as he renews the effort to force passage of National Socialistic Healthcare, in the face of voters' revulsion. Liberal-progressives, it seems, still believe fervently in the superiority of their own minds and in their right to rule the rest of us, precisely the mindset of liberal-progressives during the 1930s.

What became widely known only after the fall of the Soviet Union was that the Moscow show trials were staged in the same way as the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility's attack against Bush administration lawyers. There wasn't even the pretense of objectivity. Defendants were first judged guilty, then evidence was rigged to portray guilt, and exculpatory evidence was suppressed.

Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility is a direct descendant of the Stalin regime.

In an op-ed article from the Wall Street Journal, John Yoo, one of Justice's targets, rebuts the Office of Professional Responsibility's Moscow-show-trial tactics:

Part of Mr. Obama's plan included hounding those who developed, approved or carried out Bush policies . . . Although career prosecutors had previously reviewed the evidence and determined that no charges are warranted, last year Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a new prosecutor to re-investigate the CIA's detention and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders.

In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco.

. . .

Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR's investigation. OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR's preferred outcome . . . They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patiently-and with no legal obligation to do so-sat through days of questioning.

OPR's investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department's own standards that last week the department's ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.

. . .  

Mr. Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip found so many errors in the report that they told OPR that the entire enterprise should be abandoned . . . [Eric Holder] let OPR's investigators run wild. Only Mr. Margolis's rejection of the OPR report last week forced the Obama administration to drop its ethics charges against Bush legal advisers.