Noting the war crimes now known and admitted to by George Bush and Dick Cheney, George Washington University's highly-respected constitutional law professor Jonathon Turley asked MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week: "If someone commits a crime and everyone's around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime?"

The discussion came in the wake of a new bipartisan US Senate report (pdf) that found that Bush was responsible for approving torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Cheney's admission during an ABC interview that he helped to approve torture and abuse in interrogations.

During the interview, Turley mentioned that it'll be up to the citizens whether or not any action is actually taken to prosecute those who committed these crimes. "It will ultimately depend on citizens, and whether they will remain silent in the face of a crime that's been committed in plain view," Turley suggested. "It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing, and that is what the citizens are doing."

But is there any real basis for his well-meaning argument that accountability could possibly be brought by popular demand? Unfortunately, as the media has been virtually silent about what may be the most offensive crimes ever committed by an executive branch in the US (just as silent as they were during the lead-up and follow-through of the Iraq war, when those same officials sent our nation into war on the basis of demonstrable lies), it's bloody unlikely that most citizens will even learn about these scandals, much less take action on them. And if they did, who would bother to report it? As Turley said: "There's this gigantic yawn as we hear about a war crime on national television being discussed matter-of-factly by the vice-president."

But how much can citizens actually do, particularly with the sparse amount of information they've been presented? They hit the streets to protest by the millions, prior to and during the Iraq war, and the bulk of the media didn't bother to even cover it.

I'm currently driving through Oklahoma (passenger seat) as I write this. Republicanist Sean Hannity is yammering away, misinforming listeners on the radio, and a station promo just announced he'll be followed by Michael Savage for three hours, then Laura Ingraham for three hours, then John Gibson for three hours. Rightwing nuts all. I'm guessing Rush Limbaugh was on before Hannity. So, in those 15 consecutive hours of rightwing talk – on our publicly owned airwaves – who exactly will be informing citizens of the documented evidence of war crimes committed by Bush and Cheney?

Yes, if the citizens began throwing shoes everywhere by the millions, someone in the corporate mainstream media might cover it somewhere. But without the daily barrage of a real media, covering the topics that actually matter, with the attention they deserve, the citizens are often clueless, and otherwise virtually powerless, in this wingnut-fed media world we've allowed to be created around us.

If you doubt any of that, just ask yourselves what we'd be listening to on talk radio, and thus watching on the cable news network, and thus see debated on the floor of Congress, had a bipartisan panel found that President Bill Clinton had approved war crimes that hastened the deaths of thousands of US troops, just before vice-president Al Gore went on ABC News to admit it, and even crow about it. You suppose that coverage might help inspire a citizen uprising in that case? You bet. But it is, for the moment, a wingnut world. We just live in it.

Do Americans simply not care about war crimes? Of course they do. But not unless they know about them, and not unless the argument that they occurred, and the evidence of it, is presented in the detail that such an issue merits. While a small number of outraged citizens who take action actually can make enormous differences on the local level, accountability for international war crimes requires an untiring, responsible, focused media to inspire the mobilisation of a nation.

Such as it is, these crimes were committed by Republicans, and didn't overtly involve sex, so they don't actually matter.

Arguably, as Turley noted, none of it even happened at all. "I think that's really the argument of this administration: 'It can't be a crime because no one's prosecuted us for it.'"

It's good to be king.