Killing in the name of...

[Nbadan]

...and now you do what they told ya....

President Bush and his aides repeatedly ignored warnings that their torture plans were illegal from high State Department officials as well as the nation’s top uniformed legal officers, the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, a new published report states.

“These warnings of illegality and immorality given by knowledgeable and experienced (government) persons were ignored by the small group of high Executive officers who were determined that America would torture and abuse its prisoners and who had the decision-making power to secretly require this to be done,” said Lawrence Velvel, chairman of the “Steering Committee of the Justice Robert H. Jackson Conference On Planning For The Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals.” The Steering Committee’s Report was drafted for the entire committee by Chair Velvel, a noted legal education reformer.

The Report anticipates a more extensive, full scale complaint, currently being drafted, that will be presented to the Executive Branch after January 20th, urging prosecution of President Bush and those who aided him.

“Far from American officials and lawyers authorizing or engaging in torture because it was lawful, they authorized and engaged in it because they wanted to (and) kept their actions secret from interested officials for as long as they could lest there be strong opposition to the torture and abuse they were perpetrating,” Velvel said. “They deliberately ignored repeated warnings that the torture and abuse were illegal and could lead to prosecutions, and they ignored these warnings even when they came from high level civilian and military officers.”

A preliminary Report by the Steering Committee seeking Federal prosecution of American officials “who ordered, authorized, approved or committed war crimes,” released January 9th, 2009, says they are guilty of “wholesale” violations of statutes that include Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Federal War Crimes Act, the Convention Against Torture, plus numerous other violations of U.S. and international laws.

Link

[Nbadan]

Dream Daze....

President-elect Obama this week said his team was in the middle of “evaluating” Bush administration policies to see whether a criminal investigation would be worthwhile. NPR reports that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) says that he understands Obama’s reluctance to pursue investigations but that he may take matters into his own hands:

“I think that there’s a lot that remains to look at, and I appreciate that President Obama doesn’t want to make it his purpose as a new president, with America in real distress in many directions, to go back and look at all this, but I think we in Congress have an independent responsibility, and I fully intend to discharge that responsibility,” Whitehouse said.

In a 487-page report out today recapping Bush’s “imperial presidency,” House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) recommends that “the incoming Administration finally begin an independent criminal review of activities of the outgoing Administration.”

Think Progress