War Crimes

[Nbadan]

The Red Cross has just issued a scathing report accusing Dubya and members of his administration of international war crimes....what's really sad is that it has'nt been Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Reid who got the ball rolling on impeachment of Dubya and the indictment of Karl Rove and other members of the current administration, but other Congressional members like Kucininch and Conyers


M3PvIFx-WDE

As I predicted about 2 or 3 years ago, we could face a not so far off future where members of this administration can not travel beyond our borders, or like other international war criminals, face arrest and trial before a international court for torture and murder....incredible...

[Nbadan]

More on the upcoming book called 'the Dark Side' that details the sanctioning of torture by the current administration


Some of “The Dark Side” seems right out of “The Final Days,” minus Nixon’s operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become “so paranoid” that “they actually thought they might be in physical danger.” The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the “torture memos” and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won’t shut the door firmly on torture even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

....

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

SNIP

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.” But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”

...

That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin)

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.

[BradLohaus]

I read in Texas Monthly that W is going to live in Highland Park (the Beverly Hills of Dallas for the non-Texans out there). But didn't the Bushes also just buy a bunch of land in Paraguay? Always good to have a plan B, I guess.

[Nbadan]

But didn't the Bushes also just buy a bunch of land in Paraguay?

I'm not so sure that this is a feasible plan anymore, Paraguay hid many former Nazi members after WW2, including leaders of Jewish death camps, but, except for Columbia, South and Central America are turning left...

[Clandestino]

what does the red cross say about the beheadings the terrorists are doing?

[Nbadan]

what does the red cross say about the beheadings the terrorists are doing?

Are you saying that its being sanctioned by the Iraq Maliki government?

[DarrinS]

War crimes? Good luck with that.

[xrayzebra]

what does the red cross say about the beheadings the terrorists are doing?

No problem. It is a custom of their culture. And taught in the Religion.


War crimes. Which Swiss guy wrote the report. Or maybe he was with the Red Crescent in a ME country. Who knows and cares. Oh, dan does.

[Nbadan]

Ideas start with a whimper, but its how they end thats important....the chorus for trying Dubya for War Crimes is gaining momentum, despite what those who support dragging American values through the mud want us to believe....

Should Bush Be Tried for War Crimes?
The chorus demanding George Bush be prosecuted for torture and other constitutional abuses is getting louder
by Dan Kennedy


I had a good laugh when my friend Seth Gitell reported in the New York Sun on a campaign by the dean of the obscure Massachusetts School of Law to put George Bush and other top White House officials on trial for war crimes.

Lawrence Velvel, Gitell notes, wrote last month that his model was the Nuremberg trials held after second world war. Velvel went so far as to say that “we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top Germans and Japanese.” Oh, my.

Though I found Velvel’s apparently earnest quest as ridiculous as Gitell did, the idea of holding our leaders accountable for the crimes and constitutional violations of the past seven and a half years isn’t ridiculous in the least.

We are less than a decade removed from impeaching a president and nearly relieving him of office because of a lie in a civil deposition about blowjobs. Yet when congressman Dennis Kucinich recently attempted to impeach Bush over torture, extraordinary rendition and other grotesque constitutional abuses, Kucinich’s embarrassed fellow Democrats couldn’t kill the measure quickly enough.

Why? Top Democrats are so complicit in what has happened since 9/11 that my guess is they dare not travel down that road. From voting in favor of the war in Iraq to holding the telecommunications companies guiltless for their role in spying on Americans (Barack Obama infuriated much of his progressive base by voting for immunity), the Democrats have often acted more as enablers than as a true opposition party. From their point of view, no doubt it’s best to move on.

And yet we can’t move on. Everywhere you turn, there are reminders of the demons that have been unleashed in the name of fighting terrorism. We are less democratic and less free than we were before Bush and Dick Cheney entered office following an election that they demonstrably did not win. If we don’t come to terms with what happened, there’s little chance of reversing our slide into authoritarianism.

We shouldn’t be too optimistic. Even when the truth is proclaimed, few are willing to listen. Not long ago the McClatchy newspapers published a five-part series on what went wrong with American detention policies, mainly at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan.

The massively documented stories revealed horrifying tales of torture and abuse; of innocent Afghans imprisoned for years because they ran afoul of tribal rivalries the Americans didn’t understand; of ordinary people radicalised and transformed into violent jihadists inside US-run prisons. Yet because McClatchy is not part of the media elite, its journalism has barely been mentioned by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the television networks.

We find ourselves, nevertheless, at a certain transformational moment where things that had long gone unsaid are now being spoken aloud. Take, for instance, the ideologically promiscuous war supporter Christopher Hitchens, the British expat who recently underwent waterboarding - voluntarily - and pronounced it to be torture. Hitchens can’t help himself from inveighing against any “lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilisation and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out”. Still, he concludes by saying he wishes Americans didn’t practice torture.

Or consider Vincent Bugliosi’s new book, The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder, which has zoomed up the bestseller lists despite having received virtually no attention from the mainstream media. Bugliosi, a celebrity lawyer-author with a decent reputation, argues that because Bush misled the country into the war in Iraq, he should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of American soldiers.

Finally, consider that most mild-mannered of liberal pundits, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who on Sunday actually called for the formation of a truth commission in the manner of post-apartheid South Africa “to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing”.

The determinedly bipartisan Kristof, who did read the McClatchy series, writes that both Obama and John McCain should commit themselves to forming such a commission. For that to make sense, though, you’d have to ignore such inconvenient facts as McCain’s own ambiguous stands on torture and his demagoguery over the supreme court’s recent decision upholding the habeas corpus rights of those being held at Guantánamo.

Velvel is organising a weekend-long war crimes conference to be held in mid-September at his campus at the Massachusetts School of Law. The school is located in the beautiful New England town of Andover, home of Phillips Andover Academy, of which Bush is an alumnus. Shuttle buses will be running from the nearby Wyndham Hotel for those attending from elsewhere. It promises to be a fun-filled two days of righteous anger, leading to nothing.

But if Bush shouldn’t be hanged by the neck until dead, as the ancient pronouncement would have it, he - and we - nevertheless must be called to account for what we have allowed to happen to our country. If we don’t, then we are all responsible - if not for what happened, then for what is yet to come.

Common Dreams (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/10/10273/)

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

what's really sad is that it has'nt been Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Reid who got the ball rolling on impeachment of Dubya and the indictment of Karl Rove and other members of the current administration, but other Congressional members like Kucininch and Conyers

What's really sad is we have real problems on our hands like the mortgage banking colllapse, the energy crunch, an ever-growing problem with the financial support for SS and Medicare, and you want Congress to worry about stupid shit like this which they all lined up in support of originally when we said we were going into Iraq.

Typical dumbass liberal.

[DarrinS]

What's really sad is we have real problems on our hands like the mortgage banking colllapse, the energy crunch, an ever-growing problem with the financial support for SS and Medicare, and you want Congress to worry about stupid shit like this which they all lined up in support of originally when we said we were going into Iraq.

Typical dumbass liberal.

:clap :clap :clap

[George Gervin's Afro]

Bush, dick, and dummy dumsfeld.. Boy would I give my right arm to see those c*cksuckers frog marched.. War Crimes? YOU BET!

[xrayzebra]

What's really sad is we have real problems on our hands like the mortgage banking colllapse, the energy crunch, an ever-growing problem with the financial support for SS and Medicare, and you want Congress to worry about stupid shit like this which they all lined up in support of originally when we said we were going into Iraq.

Typical dumbass liberal.


And the self important Congress who caused all the above problems still looking for a scapegoat. Maybe one of these days they will look inward and see the wrath they have created.

[George Gervin's Afro]

And the self important Congress who caused all the above problems still looking for a scapegoat. Maybe one of these days they will look inward and see the wrath they have created.

Uh ray the Dems have had congress 1.5 yrs. did all these problems develope in that time?

[xrayzebra]

Uh ray the Dems have had congress 1.5 yrs. did all these problems develope in that time?

Did you forget about the 40 years that they controlled it. Or just a convenient memory. Might want to look at who got the bills passed that are causing the problems we are not experiencing.

[boutons_]

"Dems have had congress 1.5 yrs"

just wait until HUSSEIN is President, xz and the right-wing slimebots will blame all of dubya's disasters on HUSSEIN, like blaming Clinton for 9/11 when 9/11 was fully the responsibility of dubya, dickhead, Condi.

[xrayzebra]

"Dems have had congress 1.5 yrs"

just wait until HUSSEIN is President, xz and the right-wing slimebots will blame all of dubya's disasters on HUSSEIN, like blaming Clinton for 9/11 when 9/11 was fully the responsibility of dubya, dickhead, Condi.

Yeah, boutons, whatever.