No more wiggle room for CIA on torture

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

No more wiggle room for CIA on torture

President-elect Barack Obama spoke forcefully on the campaign trail of the need to ban torture by U.S. interrogators. He criticized the Bush administration's reliance on secret interrogation programs and secret prisons and repeatedly embraced the notion that all U.S. personnel -- including CIA agents -- must use only those interrogation techniques outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which hews to the Geneva Conventions and domestic prohibitions against torture. Military officials also say that the field manual gives interrogators the necessary tools to extract reliable information from even seemingly intractable witnesses. Still, some national security experts within the Bush administration haven't given up the fight and are pushing for the CIA and other intelligence branches to be given greater leeway in interrogating subjects. Obama's national security advisers are said to be studying the matter. Those with knowledge of the discussions say that no decisions have been made and that any changes to the manual would abide by international and national laws.

Presidents need flexibility in handling national security matters and other emergencies. But the country and the world have become all too familiar with the use of such flexibility to evade long-established principles and law. President Bush, for example, long argued that the CIA needed more latitude than was available under the field manual to deal with the most heinous terrorists. For years, Bush insisted that all the methods used by U.S. agents were legal and necessary; he said he ordered these methods kept secret to avoid tipping off terrorists to U.S. strategies. Yet this year, administration officials confirmed that three al-Qaida suspects had been subjected to waterboarding -- a simulated drowning technique considered torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition. Detainees at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were subjected to a broad range of abusive and degrading techniques by military and government personnel. This must never happen again.

Any changes made by the Obama administration must be made public and must comport strictly with the rule of law.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the incoming chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, has promised to reintroduce legislation to make the Army Field Manual binding on all U.S. interrogators. She should proceed with her plans, even while evaluating the merits of proposed changes.

Look to Bush years for unethical conduct

Re: "Ethics turnaround begins with families." Clearly there is a problem with the low ethical standards exhibited by many of the students in the recent national survey on teenage ethics. Though there are no real surprises there, given the nature of today's culture (or lack thereof). And it is a wise sentiment given by the author that parents and role models must raise their own ethical standards in order to "imbue their children with a strong ethical background." But the author's choice to reach back into the past century in order to use former President Bill Clinton as an example of poor ethical conduct seems odd. While I agree the former president's dalliances were unethical, it appears to me that fresher material is readily available for analogy from the past eight years. Which, unsurprisingly, is also much more contemporaneous with the formative years of today's teenager.

GREGORY MASON

" In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ’surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003. Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths).

These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:-

Q How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.

None 78%

One death 16%

Two deaths 5%

Threedeaths 1%

Four+ deaths 0.002%

Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 20 "

" -Torture
-Firing U.S. Attorneys for refusing to prosecute political opponents or for prosecuting the likes of Renzi
-hiring private firms to do the military's job
-releasing $325 billion of TARP funds to Wall Street without conditions
- making a joke out of the show throwing incident instead of recognizing the underlying grievance
The list is endless -- hopefully, the war crimes tribunal will not be "

" Bush's true ethical legacy is front page news every day. Illegal spying and wire-tapping , 1 million dead in Iraq, at least 2 million dead in Afghanistan all because of a lie, financial ruin of America, hundreds of signing statements, referring to the Constitution as a G.. D.. piece of paper.


Bush et al for War Crimes
by Len Hart | OpEdNews. com | Submitted by Lance Ciepiela


Members of the Bush administration and George W. Bush personally conspired to violate the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Principles and US obligations to both. Bush and key members of his administration deliberately violated US criminal codes and tried to make their crimes legal after they had already committed them. Bush and his minions embarked upon this subversive action when it was made clear to them that they could be put to death for violations of US Codes which bind the US to Geneva and other treaties that were almost insisted upon by the United States.

These are not abstract principles, politics, spin or PR. These are legal principles upon which a distinguished American --Justice Robert Jackson --help codify at the Nuremberg trials of major Nazi war criminals.




Robert H.
Jackson's Opening Statement, Nuremberg, November 21, 1945

It is encouraging that, of late, there is a growing chorus demanding that George W. Bush and members of his criminal regime be held to account for the crimes of aggressive war, mass murder, and torture.


Can there be a better reason for prosecuting George Bush and his administration for war crimes than those words from the chief prosecutor of the Nazis, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, with the full support of the U.S. government? Robert Jackson's words and the values this nation claims to stand for provide sufficient moral basis for putting Bush and Cheney, their underlings who implemented their policies and the perverted legal minds who justified them all in the dock. If those are not sufficient reasons, there is a long list of binding law and treaties – written in black and white in surprisingly plain English.


Bush imagined, and his attorneys advised, that he could simply wave aside these laws with "they don't apply.
" Imagine how a judge would treat even a simple traffic court defendant who brazenly stated the law was only a quaint notion, just "words on paper?"

--Mike Fermer, Why we must prosecute Bush and his administration for war crimes

The Bush administration itself is aware that it is in deep, deep trouble.


...there is one group of people that has always taken the war crimes charges seriously--the members of the Bush administration themselves. They have good reason for doing so, because they have exposed hundreds of Americans to possible prosecution for violating US law.


As long as George Bush is president and controls the Department of Justice, there will no prosecutions for war crimes, but after Bush is gone, anything could happen and hundreds of Americans could be charged with war crimes.


--David Wallechinsky, Is George Bush Guilty of War Crimes...and Who Cares?

Unless Bush plans to make his escape to Paraguay while still 'President', his exit from the Oval Office will make him vulnerable to process for violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996 passed by both houses of Congress without dissent. The act covers every crime that may be charged to Bush as of this moment and as of the time Bush will exit the 'cover' of the Oval Office. The act deals specifically with his deliberate "killing, torture or inhumane treatment" of 'detainees' at Abu Ghraib, GITMO and the gulag archipelago of 'detention centers' throughout Eastern Europe. Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in the death of a detainee carry the death penalty and there is no statute of limitations.


(a) Offense.- Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.


--TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441 § 2441.
War crimes

Bush had been planning to commit capital crimes long before 911 and, in fact, tried to make 'legal' the crimes that he had intended to commit.


Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a "war crime" as any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law.


The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales's infamous 2002 "torture memo." Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, "substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.
"

--The Nation, Bush Aims to Kill War Crimes Act

Bush did not succeed in putting himself above the laws that prescribed the death penalty for the very violations of laws that he had planned. Title 18 of the US Code as currently published by the US Government [as quoted above] reflects the laws passed by Congress as of Jan. 3, 2007, and it is this version that is published here.


It was because Bush knew he was guilty that he tried to ram through Congress amendments to the War Crimes Act that would exonerate him EX POST FACTO. Ex post facto laws are unconstitutional. Bush defenders will waste their time trying to convince me that ex post facto prohibition applies only to those laws making one prosecutable for acts that were legal at the time of commission. In other words, if it was legal to spit on the sidewalk at the time you did so, you are immune to prosecution under any law passed after you had so spit! Clearly --Bush can not commit murder now and expect to escape prosecution by making it legal after his crime of murder. That is nothing less than rule by decree and is utterly inconsistent with the very concepts of 'rule of law' or 'due process of law'. Don't confuse this with amnesty, which, to my knowledge, Bush has not sought nor does he deserve. Rather, Bush has tried to rewrite both laws and history. He tried to make legal those capital crimes that he had already committed, a notion that is absurd on its face.


Several yeas ago, I wrote an article that pointed out that any federal grand jury could indict Bush for capital crimes and, in fact, could begin an investigation of Bush upon its own volition. Any federal judge can, upon his/her own motion, convene a federal grand jury to consider any case deemed worthy of investigation.
I would suggest that any Federal Judge reading this, get off your bench and convene a jury! It is your patriotic duty to this nation and its laws!

Former LA Prosecutor Vince Bugliosi makes another case, that because Bush deliberately lied in order to send US soldiers to their deaths in an illegal war, Bush is prosecutable for murder.



In the first sentence, we're told:
The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history - - the president of the nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false presences, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 American soldiers, to horrific, violent deaths." (V. Bugliosi, p.
3)

The president "knowingly and deliberately" caused the deaths of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians and that's called murder, plain and simple. This is not a hypothetical case that could happen under special legal interpretations. When the president leaves office, he is subject to the same law as the rest of us. Bugliosi explains the ability to prosecute the case against George W. Bush by a district attorney or states attorney in any local jurisdiction where a life was lost in the Iraq war. Federal prosecutors also have that option. Bugliosi's detailed analysis of this phenomenon offers some of the best analysis in the book and the detailed end notes.


--E. Pluribus Media, Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W.
Bush for Murder

Because he has notoriety, Bugliosi has succeeded in attracting some attention to this issue. My fear is that in the post-election atmosphere of relief that Obama turned back the GOP wave the pressure to bring George W. Bush to justice will subside. That would be a grave mistake, a catastrophic precedent. If Bush is allowed to make good a get away, the signal will have been sent that US presidents are above the law and may perpetrate mass murder and war crimes at will.


Violations of US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441 are NOT to be confused with violations of international treaties which may have the effect of putting Bush in the dock at the Hague. Certainly, Bush had planned to commit acts that were known to be violations of US laws and our treaty commitments. Even before 911 provided Bush the pretext to attack and invade both Afghanistan and Iraq, Tom DeLay sponsored legislation that provided for a US military invasion of The Hague in those instances should Bush find himself in the dock for war crimes. The timing of the bill is material to the case against Bush and speaks to the fact that Bush had been planning to wage war and wished to immunize himself against prosecution for the acts that were known at the time to be violations of international laws to which the US was bound by treaty.


I know of no reason why Bush should be impeached before he is indicted. Impeachment is a political remedy, the purview of Congress. What is discussed here are specific acts that are against the law. Bush should fear the very real possibility of being hauled before a federal judge charged with capital crimes.


There are yet other legal ghosts that will haunt Bush. He may be charged with perpetrating the crime of genocide.



U.S. Code; Chapter 50A; Section § 1091. Genocide (a) Basic Offense. - Whoever, whether in time of peace or in time of war, in a circumstance described in subsection (d) and with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. (1) kills members of that group; (2) causes serious bodily injury to members of that group; (3) causes the permanent impairment of the mental faculties of members of the group through drugs, torture, or similar techniques; (4) subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part; (5) imposes measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (6) transfers by force children of the group to another group; or attempts to do so, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b0. --US Codes; Chapter 50A, Section § 1091.
Genocide
As this blog has pointed out for years, the crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg apply as well to Bush and those key members of his cabinet with whom he conspired.


At Nuremberg, the foremost crime identified was starting a "war of aggression," later codified by U.N. Resolution 3314, Art. 5, as "a crime against international peace." Launching a war of aggression, as Hitler did against Poland, is considered so monstrous that the nation responsible can then be charged with "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions. As Tom Paine said long before the U.N. formalized the definition of aggression, "He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of Hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
"

A small sampling of the contagion of Hell let loose by Bush includes illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing a million people and displacing four million more.


Following World War II, humanity resolved that wars do more than spark a series of loathsome, individual crimes. Leaders responsible for a war actually commit crimes against the entirety of humanity. They inflict harm on every human being, something that must be put right before humanity can be restored.


There is a final reason why we must prosecute Bush and Co. It is not what some argue, although they point to a serious danger: that Bush trashed the law and usurped powers, encouraging future presidents to expand where he left off. Such reasons are about George Bush and those who hold the office after him, but in the final analysis this is about us.


We are complicit in the horrors of this administration. We can claim neither ignorance nor innocence. We are complicit by the very fact that we are citizens of the United States, more so because we paid for the war, and even more so for this reason. Listen to a village sheik I met in Iraq describe it better than I ever could.


--Mike Fermer, Why we must prosecute Bush and his administration for war crimes

Hat tip to: Above Top Secret

The Congress did not have the stomach for impeachment and shirked it's duty. Impeachment might have saved this nation the nightmare that it has not yet survived. The Congressional leadership of both parties have much to answer for.


I would hope that a hard nosed federal judge will consider the crimes holistically, in accordance with the conspiracy laws that are currently on the books.
America's leaders betrayed the people in order to conduct war crimes for which Nazis were hanged! How we do justify to the world a double standard that says, in effect, if Nazis do it, we hang them! But if Americans perpetrate precisely the same crimes for the same purposes, we let them retire and bequeath a library!

I would urge that a federal grand jury be convened immediately to consider upon the probable cause and the evidence whether or not George W.
Bush is guilty of capital crimes and whether or not he should be put to death!

http://www. afterdowningstreet. org/node/38496
H.​D.​S.​ Green​way:​ Out with Bush

The image of shoes being thrown at George W. Bush during his tarnished legacy tour of Iraq has already entered legend. That a Saudi offered to pay $10 million for just one of the shoes attests to the power of symbolism. The Turkish cobbler who made the shoes is being inundated with new orders from around the world.


It was outrageous, and the Iraqi government may have been embarrassed, but you c More..an count on a substantial number of Arab boys born this month being named Muntader, after Muntader al Zaidi, the thrower. He is in deep trouble in Iraq, but for much of the world he is goody-two-shoes.


In Bush's last pathetic days, with the world going broke and his administration in a moral Chapter 11, he continues to misrepresent his culpability in the calamities that have befallen the country on his watch.


The most egregious was his statement, when asked if he had any regrets, that he wished the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction could have been better.


Bush blithely ignored the efforts his administration went to in order to twist the intelligence to his liking. The march to war was one of the greatest frauds of our time.


Bush's legacy includes an unnecessary war in Iraq and a mismanaged war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a congressional report warns that the United States is to be attacked by nuclear or biological weapons within the next few years.


Bush's legacy is one of great carelessness. Bush was careless about the way he went to war in Iraq, with no clear plan on what to do with the country once the troops reached Baghdad. There was a carelessness about Afghanistan, letting Osama bin Laden escape, and drawing away assets to fight in Iraq before Afghanistan was stabilized.


To this day there is no clear policy for Afghanistan, other than more troops and more war. "That's not a policy," said the former ambassador to India, Frank Wisner, "that's a delivery system.
"

There was carelessness about how Bush handled the Israeli-Palestine issue, uttering noble thoughts but with no follow-up, allowing his underlings to first undermine Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then Condoleezza Rice. There was carelessness in the delegation of power to Vice President Cheney, allowing Cheney to undermine negotiations with North Korea.


There was carelessness in the way the administration handled even natural disaster, the "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" quote being the lasting footnote on how Hurricane Katrina was met.


There was carelessness during the Bush years about the entire oversight of America's financial system, with regulators, as President-elect Barack Obama put it, "asleep at the switch" while the financial train went off the rails. The Security and Exchange Commission looked the other way while Bernard Madoff pulled off what may be the biggest Wall Street heist in history. There was "not a lot of adult supervision," said Obama.


"At least Bush kept us safe," I have heard it said, because no terrorist attack on U.S. soil has come since 2001. But there is no escaping that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch, and there was a great carelessness in the way Bush's people refused to consider the danger from Al Qaeda, while terrorism experts, such as Richard Clarke, with his "hair on fire" from anxiety, tried to warn them.


There was more than carelessness involved in the erosion of civil liberties and unlawful activities perpetuated by the Bush administration.


Nothing has so hurt America's standing in the world as the decision to allow torture. We now know that the worst of the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo can be traced up to the highest levels of Bush's administration.


A weary world would like to see the back of the Bush administration, not the least the Republican party to which Bush has done so much damage.


With a legacy of wars, water-boarding, and a cesspit of scandal and financial collapse, the Bush legacy has at least one defender. "Mr. Bush served some good purpose to the economy before he left," said the newly prosperous Turkish shoe maker.


As for al-Zaidi's pair, they've been destroyed - perhaps to prevent idolatry.



check out this picture....
http://cdnll-9. liveleak. com/s/18/media18/2008/Dec/24/LiveLeak-dot...