Progress-- June 2015

Charles Pierce:

Last week, Richard Clarke, the man to whom nobody in the administration of C-Plus Augustus listened because what did he know, anyway?, had a chat with Amy Goodman in which he minced no words regarding his former employers.

"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It's clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it's clear that some of the things they did were war crimes."

And, something that most of us missed, there was a court on the other side of the world that agreed.

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were... found guilty of war crimes. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia...At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

At the very least, this court parceled out the blame for the torture program in a fair manner and all the way up the chain of command. The testimony of the victims was as horrible as you might expect:

The court heard how Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers; Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall; Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement, Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter. The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.

The Face of Evil-- The Case of Richard Zuley:

This is way fucked up -- it is a perfect amalgamation of the brutality of police as an institution and the brutality and cruelty of the treatment of "terror" suspects. The end goal is the same -- eliciting false discussions. Cruel, sick, evil.

When the Chicago detective Richard Zuley arrived at Guantánamo Bay late in 2002, US military commanders touted him as the hero they had been looking for.  Here was a Navy reserve lieutenant who had spent the last 25 years as a distinguished detective on the mean streets of Chicago , closing case after case – often due to his knack for getting confessions. But while Zuley’s brutal interrogation techniques – prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others – would get supercharged at Guantánamo for the war on terrorism, a Guardian investigation has uncovered that Zuley used similar tactics for years, behind closed police-station doors, on Chicago’s poor and non-white citizens. Multiple people in prison in Illinois insist they have been wrongly convicted on the basis of coerced confessions extracted by Zuley and his colleagues.

The Guardian examined thousands of court documents from Chicago and interviewed two dozen people with experience at Guantánamo and in the Chicago criminal-justice system. The results of its investigation suggests a continuum between Guantánamo interrogation rooms and Chicago police precincts. Zuley’s detective work, particularly when visited on Chicago’s minority communities, contains a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture.

Allegations stemming from interviews and court documents, concerning Chicago suspects, suggest Zuley and his colleagues shackled suspects to walls for extended periods, threatened their family members, and perhaps even planted evidence on them. The point was to yield confessions, even while ignoring potentially exculpatory evidence.

Several of those techniques bear similarities to those used by Zuley when he took over the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi at Guantánamo, described in official government reports and a best-selling memoir as one of the most brutal ever conducted at the US wartime prison. serialised last month by the Guardian

A woman still in an Illinois prison who insists on her innocence, Benita Johnson, recalled Zuley and his team handcu"ng her to a wall for over 24 hours in 1995 until she would implicate herself and her ex-boyfriend in a murder, while Zuley threatened her with never seeing her children again. One of many awards in Zuley’s record  – bearing the name of Chicago mayor Richard Daley – praises his help in interrogating the two suspects who ultimately “admitted participating in the crime”.

Nearly a decade later, Zuley – whose interrogation plan for Slahi received personal sign-off from then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld but has gone almost entirely unreported – would tell the detainee that the US had his mother in custody, US government investigations have documented, even while they avoid Zuley’s name. If Slahi didn’t start talking, Zuley said he would have her brought into Guantánamo’s all-male prison environment, which his lawyers consider a rape threat. Slahi began confessing to anything he could. Though prosecutors refused to bring charges once they learned what Zuley and his team had done, Slahi – like the Illinois woman Zuley interrogated that night, and others back on the mainland – remains behind bars.

“I’ve never seen anyone stoop to those levels,” Stuart Couch, a former Marine lieutenant colonel and military commissions prosecutor, said of Zuley’s interrogation of Slahi. “It’s unconscionable, from a perspective of a criminal prosecution – or an interrogation, for that matter.” Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the now-shuttered Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo, said Zuley’s interrogation of Slahi “was illegal, it was immoral, it was ineffective and it was unconstitutional.” It is unknown if Zuley interrogated other Guantánamo detainees.

Also:

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

-Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
-Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
-Shackling for prolonged periods.
-Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
-Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
-At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

NYT: "Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses"

Bravo:

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, whichdefines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

We may never get justice for 9/11, but prosecuting these criminals is a kind of surrogate justice, given how intimately they were associated with the crime of 9/11.

#warcrimes #torture #Bushadministrationwarcriminals

Senate Torture Report Released

Kudos to Diane Feinstein (for a change), for actually releasing the report (as far as it goes of course -- which is not far enough since it leaves intact the lies of 9/11).

Interesting how in the report-- it repeatedly refers to 119 suspects in the CIA "enhanced interrogation" program. 119 - 911.

Still, it is a small step of progress, and it's good to see how much news this report has generated.

War-crimes trials seem out of the question for now, and if they are not going to prosecute for torture, they sure aren't going to do anything about 9/11.

The main thing this report does is show clearly how sick, corrupt, evil and incredibly dishonest the CIA is.

And of course, Cheney lied his fucking pathetic evil ass off on Fox two days ago, about torture.



But this was no isolated incident either--  
torture and evil inhumane treatment is indeed who we are as Americans. 

The ideal, of course, is to work to be better -- and not shove bad news under the rug and apologize for wrong-doing.

Bush Administration War Criminals Still Making News

Heeheehee-- Dick Cheney denies war criminal allegations at KPU event.  What a lying, sick piece of shit.

Another lying piece of shit -- CIA lawyer John Rizzo:

Today we spend the hour looking at this debate. We’re joined by John Rizzo. He served as acting general counsel during much of the George W. Bush administration and was a key legal architect of the U.S. interrogation and detention program after the September 11th attacks. The Los Angeles Times described him as, quote, "the most influential career lawyer in CIA history." He has recently published a book headlined Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA.

Condi Rice-- Evil Torture Mastermind

Wow, I knew she was bad, but this is really sick:

The film follows her step-by step quest for power, starting at the age of ten, when, on a visit to the White House, she turned to her father and said, “Daddy, I'm barred out there because of the color of my skin, but one day I'll be in that house.”

Forty years later, having achieved her dream, Secretary of State Rice said, “I want to leave office without anyone knowing where I stand on any of the issues.” (snip)

 

Author Laura Flanders relates how she was such a devoted board member for Chevron (despite its violent repression of Ogoni tribes-people in Nigeria) that they named an oil tanker after her.

Rice’s record as National Security Advisor is devastatingly attacked by CIA Director George Tenet and Counter-Terrorism chief Richard Clarke. They reveal how she ignored scores of warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent. (snip)

With the winds blowing towards Baghdad, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, says she had no qualms about pumping up the case for waging war in Iraq (“we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”).

Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Florida, pinpoints 56 times that Rice misled the American public. Richard Ben-Veniste, a senior 9/11 Commissioner, points to the techniques that Rice used – wordplay, filibustering, amnesia – to avoid telling the truth. (snip)

“American Faust” documents how, while Provost of Stanford, she pulled up the ladder of affirmative action that had secured her tenure, and implemented budget cuts that led to dozens of lawsuits for unlawful dismissals of female professors.

Rice’s behavior while the levees were breaking during Hurricane Katrina infuriated black groups who felt that she had dishonored her position as the senior black member of the government. Spike Lee comments in the film: “She was buying Ferragamo shoes on Fifth Avenue and went to see ‘Spamalot’while people were drowning.” (snip)

Yet, I suspect that both Ms. Franklin and the concert organizers at the Mann Center are unaware of the film’s most explosive revelation: that it was Condoleezza Rice who is primarily responsible for the Bush Administration’s torture program.

It was Rice who ordered the CIA to use the torture techniques and dictated which procedures to use for how long. The CIA agents who carried out these brutal interrogations were acting under orders that came directly from the chairwoman of the Group of Principals: Condoleezza Rice.

The role of the Principals – a group that included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales – was to select and authorize “enhanced interrogation methods” proposed by the CIA.

According to Christopher Anders, attorney for the ACLU: “The CIA would come in and give a presentation of what they wanted to do, to the point where, where they were choreographing interrogations and the torture from the basement of the White House itself.”

Journalist Glenn Kessler said: “These ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ included water-boarding, fingernail extraction, and sleep deprivation. Condi signed off on the orders to the CIA with the words, ‘This is your Baby, go do it!’”

Richard Clarke, chief counter-terrorism adviser between 1992-2003 concurred: “Rice decided what torture to use on what person.”

“American Faust” reveals that the techniques that Rice approved went far beyond the mock executions and water-boarding already made public. Our film has first-hand accounts of torture techniques that make stress positions look like a slap on the wrist.

Binyam Mohamed had his penis cut, and acid poured into the wounds. Khalid el Masri was drugged, sodomized and imprisoned without charges. Abu Omar was tied to a wet mattress and subjected to jolts of electricity through the mattress coils. Mamdouh Habib had his fingernails torn out.

Even John Ashcroft, known for a nutty rendition of his song “Let the Eagle Soar” but not for his leniency toward Moslem prisoners, objected to the torture meetings that Rice chaired: "Why are we talking about this in the White House?” he asked. “History will not judge this kindly."

Ashcroft’s concern was well-placed. According to historian David Rothkopf, author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, “it was recognized by Condoleezza Rice, among others, that they did make a pact with the devil. They essentially said we will do whatever it takes, regardless of morality, regardless of law, in order to protect the American people.”

Rice did what she could to conceal the torture. She authorized the CIA to send detainees outside the U.S., to ‘black site’ countries, including Thailand, Italy, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Syria, Jordan, Macedonia, Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, as well as to the ‘torture ships’ USS Peleliu, USS Bataan, and USS Ashland.

When congressional and legal investigations began into the detention program, videotapes of CIA interrogations of terror suspects were destroyed. She avoided all questions about this felony, and stepped up her work as an international ambassador for the most blatant legal black hole of all, the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which she called “essential for the war on terror.” (snip)
 

Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, Dean of the Academic Board at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, agreed in last week’s New Yorker: “Torture is wrong under any circumstances,” he asserted. “The publicity surrounding Guantanamo, water-boarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ have created far more terrorists than most people understand. For a country that professes to stand for the rule of law and individual rights, we look like the worst kind of hypocrites.”

I have thought long and hard about how such a highly educated, cultured woman of faith as Dr. Rice could have fallen to the infernal point of ordering medieval acts of torture, fomenting a catastrophic war, and supporting the trampling of the rule of law and the Constitution.

This is a similar conundrum to the one posed by historians and philosophers after World War II. How could well-schooled Nazi officers spend their evenings weeping over Rilke poems, and playing Schubert in string quartets, and then wake up the next morning to gas thousands of men, women and children?

Education and culture did not bring more humanity to man, just more knowledge to create more sophisticated forms of violence and barbarity – just as it did with Dr Rice and the decisions she made on which “torture cocktails,” which combination of techniques, to be employed. (snip)

The same principle of command responsibility applies to the Bush Administration’s torture program. Its legacy will continue to poison U.S. military and civil society, and act as a rallying call to her enemies, until Rice and her accomplices are held accountable.

War Crimes

In “American Faust,” Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, whose position as Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff made him a first-hand witness to her actions, states: “I think Americans should be appalled that Dr. Rice was sitting giving the authority to water-board.”

Marjorie Cohn, former President of the Lawyers Guild, calls for her to be removed from her current research position at Stanford University: “We hope to continue this pressure until Rice and her fellow war criminals are punished for their crimes.”

Alan Gilbert, Rice’s former history professor at the University of Denver, identifies the specific laws she has broken under the U.S. Constitution, the UN Convention against Torture (of which the United States has been a signatory since 1988), and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Manfred Nowak, the UN’s chief Torture Commissioner, says: “There’s an obligation under the Convention against torture, to investigate every allegation against torture, and there is a responsibility to bring this person to justice.”

Christopher Anders of the ACLU states: “You can be sitting in the State Department and if you’re making decisions that are authorizing and facilitating a crime being committed, you’re responsible for that crime.” 

With such a “smoking gun” still in her hands, it is flabbergasting that Rice remains at large. We filmed her at Stanford University (where ABC news cheerily reported her new love of golf) claiming, Nixon-like, that “by definition, if the President authorized it, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention against Torture.”

This is as brazen a perversion of the law as the memos written by Bush administration attorneys claiming water-boarding was legal, which Rice used as further justification for her torture program.

Escaping punishment is one thing. Flaunting her infamy like a pop star is another. 

And that’s where the Fairmount Park concert becomes a real outrage. Her appearance is the equivalent of Sergeant Larry Shafer, the one National Guardsman who has admitted firing on the Kent State students, accepting an invitation, two years after the shootings, to sing an aria at the Metropolitan Opera; or Gov. Rhodes taking a cameo role on“Dynasty.”

There’s no artistic reason for Rice, a mediocre pianist by her own admission, to be on that stage with the incomparably more qualified Ms. Franklin, whom Rolling Stone magazine ranked No. 1 on its list of “The Greatest Singers of All Time.”

New Torture Report Will Be Ignored by Most Americans.

The Bush administration clearly committed war crimes of torture, and the Obama administration has covered it up.  Glenn Greenwald:

It's hardly news that the US instituted and for years maintained a systematic torture regime, but the success of the Obama administration in blocking all judicial proceedings has meant there has been no official decree that this is so. A comprehensive report just issued by a truly bipartisan group of former high-level Washington officials (including military officials) is as close as we are likely to get to such an official proclamation.
The Report explains that the impetus behind it was that "the Obama administration declined, as a matter of policy, to undertake or commission an official study of what happened, saying it was unproductive to 'look backwards' rather than forward." It concludes - in unblinking and definitive fashion - that "it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture"; this finding is "offered without reservation"; it is "not based on any impressionistic approach" but rather "grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture in many contexts, notably historical and legal"; and "the nation's highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture." It also debunks the popular claim that torture was confined to three cases of waterboarding, documenting that more than three people were subjected to that tactic and that the torture includes far more than just waterboarding.
This is not only a historical disgrace for the US and the responsible officials, but, as the New York Times article on this report inadvertently suggests, also shames two other institutions:

(1) the New York Times itself, which steadfastly refused to use the word "torture" to describe what was being done (unless it was done by other countries) and continues to justify that refusal through its then-Executive Editor Bill Keller (Andrew Sullivan ably demolishes Keller's reasoning, while the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote this week that this choice merits "some institutional soul-searching"); and,
(2) President Obama, who barred all criminal prosecutions for Bush officials and other torturers and thus brazenly violated at least the spirit and probably the letter of the Convention Against Torture. That treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 (exactly 25 years ago to the day: Happy Anniversary!), compels all signatories who discover credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Art. 7(1)). It also specifically states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture" (Art. 2 (2-3)).

The disgrace of the American torture regime falls on Bush officials and secondarily the media and political institutions that acquiesced to it, but the full-scale protection of those war crimes (and the denial of justice to their victims) falls squarely on the Obama administration.
Dan Froomkin has more on the significance of this report here. In sum, if you're the NYT or Obama, how do you reconcile your conduct with this establishment finding that it is "indisputable" that the US government, at its highest levels, instituted a worldwide regime of torture?

Pentagon investigating link between US military and torture centres in Iraq

The Pentagon is investigating allegations linking the US military to human rights abuses in Iraq by police commando units who operated a network of detention and torture centres.

A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic, published on Wednesday, disclosed that the US sent a veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee Iraqi commando units involved in some of the worst acts of torture during the American-led occupation.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses, implicate US advisers for the first time in these human rights abuses. It is also the first time that the then US commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, has been linked through an adviser to the abuses.

Colonel Jack Wesley, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Guardian on Thursday: "Obviously we have seen the reports and we are currently looking into the situation."

In an email, he added: "As you know the issue surrounding accusation of abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees is a complex one that is full of history and emotion. It will take time to work a thorough response."

The Pentagon argument is that it needs time because of the legal implications and also because those named in the documentary no longer serve in the military.

The relatively muted response in the US contrasted with that in Iraq. In Samarra, one of the centres of the Sunni insurgency against US-led forces and where Iraqis are alleged to have been tortured in a library, residents greeted a showing of the documentary on Wednesday evening.

Waleed Khalid said thousands of people gathered in the city for anti-government protests were excited to watch part of the documentary and there was a plan to set up big screens to show the whole film on Friday.

Gee, so hard to figure out what will happen to this investigation....

Federal Judiciary-- Accomplices to War Crimes and the Bogus War on Terror

Quite disgusting, especially considering how the judiciary is supposed to serve as a check to power and act independently:

(1) not a single War on Terror victim — not one — has been permitted to sue for damages in an American court over what was done to them, even when everyone admits they were completely innocent, even when they were subjected to the most brutal torture, and even when the judiciary of other countries permitted their lawsuits to proceed; and,

(2) not a single government official — not one — has been held legally accountable, either criminally or even civilly, for any War on Terror crimes or abuses; perversely, the only government officials to pay any price were the ones who blew the whistle on those crimes.

That is how history will record the behavior of American federal judges in the face of the post-9/11 onslaught of anti-Muslim persecution and relentless erosions of core rights.

Even worse, if you’re a Muslim accused of any Terror-related crime, your conviction in a federal court is virtually guaranteed, as federal judges will bend the law and issue pro-government rulings that they would never make with a non-Muslim defendant; conversely, if you’re a government official who abused or otherwise violated the rights of Muslims, your full-scale immunity is virtually guaranteed. Those are the indisputable rules of American justice. So slavish and subservient are federal judges when it comes to Muslim defendants that if you’re a Muslim accused of any Terror-related crime, you’re probably more likely at this point to get something approximating a fair trial before a Guantanamo military tribunal than in a federal court; that is how supine federal judges have been when the U.S. Government utters the word “terrorism” in the direction of a Muslim or any claims of “national security” relating to 9/11.

Also filed under Bush Administration War Criminals.

This article on the recent Guantanamo hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and other 9/11 defendants is worth a read-- a very weird, chaotic scene.

They Knew It

They KNEW they were committing war crimes... and LOVED it.

WASHINGTON -- A six-year-old memo from within the George W. Bush administration that came to light this week acknowledges that White House-approved interrogation techniques amounted to "war crimes." The memo's release has called attention to what has changed since President Barack Obama took office, but it also raises questions about what hasn't.

The Bush White House tried to destroy every copy of the memo, written by then-State Department counselor Philip Zelikow. Zelikow examined tactics like waterboarding -- which simulates drowning -- and concluded that there was no way they were legal, domestically or internationally.

“We are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here," Zelikow wrote. The memo has been obtained by George Washington University's National Security Archive and Wired's Spencer Ackerman.

Bring the 9/11 Perps to Justice!

We are the 99.999%!!!!

Good News

Bush and Blair found guilty of war crimes for Iraq attack

A tribunal in Malaysia, spearheaded by that nation’s former Prime Minister, yesterday found George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of “crimes against peace” and other war crimes for their 2003 aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts used to justify the attack. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal — which featured an American law professor as one of its chief prosecutors — has no formal enforcement power, but was modeled after a 1967 tribunal in Sweden and Denmark that found the U.S. guilty of a war of aggression in Vietnam, and, even more so, after the U.S.-led Nuremberg Tribunal held after World War II. Just as the U.S. steadfastly ignored the 1967 tribunal on Vietnam, Bush and Blair both ignored the summons sent to them and thus were tried in absentia.

The tribunal ruled that Bush and Blair’s name should be entered in a register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as such under the Rome Statute, and will also petition the International Criminal Court to proceed with binding charges. Such efforts are likely to be futile, but one Malaysian lawyer explained the motives of the tribunal to The Associated Press: “For these people who have been immune from prosecution, we want to put them on trial in this forum to prove that they committed war crimes.” In other words, because their own nations refuse to hold them accountable and can use their power to prevent international bodies from doing so, the tribunal wanted at least formal legal recognition of these war crimes to be recorded and the evidence of their guilt assembled. That’s the same reason a separate panel of this tribunal will hold hearings later this year on charges of torture against Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others.

Bush the Torturer

This picture does an amazing job of bringing home just how nasty what the Bush administration did, just by showing Bush doing the dirty work. It's one thing to see a nameless CIA thug waterboarding someone, but to see Bush do it, shows how clearly the USA did it-- in our fucking name.

The only problem with this picture is that Cheney is missing, since he clearly was a major force behind the torture.

Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head in 2006

This cell phone photo was shot by a resident of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006, of bodies Iraqi police said were of children executed by U.S. troops after a night raid there. Here, the bodies of the five children are wrapped in blankets and laid in a pickup bed to be taken for burial. A State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks quotes the U.N. investigator of extrajudicial killings as saying an autopsy showed the residents of the house had been handcuffed and shot in the head, including children under the age of 5. McClatchy obtained the photo from a resident when the incident occurred.

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Reached by email Wednesday, Alston said that as of 2010 — the most recent data he had — U.S. officials hadn't responded to his request for information and that Iraq's government also hadn't been forthcoming. He said the lack of response from the United States "was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period," when fighting in Iraq peaked.

Alston said he could provide no further information on the incident. "The tragedy," he said, "is that this elaborate system of communications is in place but the (U.N.) Human Rights Council does nothing to follow up when states ignore issues raised with them."

The Pentagon didn't respond to a request for comment. At the time, American military officials in Iraq said the accounts of townspeople who witnessed the events were highly unlikely to be true, and they later said the incident didn't warrant further investigation. Military officials also refused to reveal which units might have been involved in the incident.

Iraq was fast descending into chaos in early 2006. An explosion that ripped through the Golden Dome Mosque that February had set off an orgy of violence between rival Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Sunni insurgents, many aligned with al Qaida in Iraq, controlled large tracts of the countryside.

Ishaqi, about 80 miles northwest of Baghdad, not far from Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, was considered so dangerous at the time that U.S. military officials had classified all roads in the area as "black," meaning they were likely to be booby-trapped with roadside bombs.

The Ishaqi incident was unusual because it was brought to the world's attention by the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with American military assistance and staffed by U.S.-trained Iraqi police officers.

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination center, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an al Qaida in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople's claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

Alston initially posed his questions to the U.S. Embassy in Geneva, which passed them to Washington in the cable.

According to Alston's version of events, American troops approached a house in Ishaqi, which Alston refers to as "Al-Iss Haqi," that belonged to Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee, whom Alston identified as a farmer. The U.S. troops were met with gunfire, Alston said, that lasted about 25 minutes.

After the firefight ended, Alston wrote, the "troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a U.S. air raid ensued that destroyed the house." The initials refer to the official name of the military coalition, the Multi-National Force.

Alston said "Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (i.e. five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit. Autopsies carries (sic) out at the Tikrit Hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed."

The cable makes no mention any of the alleged shooting suspects being found or arrested at or near the house.

The cable closely tracks what neighbors told reporters for Knight Ridder at the time. (McClatchy purchased Knight Ridder in spring 2006.) Those neighbors said the U.S. troops had approached the house at 2:30 a.m. and a firefight ensued. In addition to exchanging gunfire with someone in the house, the American troops were supported by helicopter gunships, which fired on the house.

The cable also backs the original report from the Joint Coordination Center, which said U.S. forces entered the house while it was still standing. That first report noted: "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals."

The report was signed by Col. Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, who was described in the document as the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center.

The cable also backs up the claims of the doctor who performed the autopsies, who told Knight Ridder "that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed."

The cable notes that "at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra'a (aged 5) Aisha (aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz's mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces Asma'a Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid."

(Schofield, an editorial writer at The Kansas City Star, was Berlin bureau chief and was on temporary assignment in Iraq at the time of the Ishaqi incident.)

READ THE CABLE:

Cable: massacre of Iraqi family by U.S. troops in 2006

Bush Administration War Criminals Permanently Protected Thanks to the Obama Administration

Well, so much for all that then.

American war criminals, responsible for some of the most shameful and inexcusable crimes in the nation's history -- the systematic, deliberate legalization of a worldwide torture regime -- will be fully immunized for those crimes. And, of course, the Obama administration has spent years just as aggressively shielding those war criminals from all other forms of accountability beyond the criminal realm: invoking secrecy and immunity doctrines to prevent their victims from imposing civil liability, exploiting their party's control of Congress to suppress formal inquiries, and pressuring and coercing other nations not to investigate their own citizens' torture at American hands.

All of those efforts, culminating in yesterday's entirely unsurprising announcement, means that the U.S. Government has effectively shielded itself from even minimal accountability for its vast torture crimes of the last decade. Without a doubt, that will be one of the most significant, enduring and consequential legacies of the Obama presidency.

Grotesque--

Lest there be any doubt about what a profound victory this is for those responsible for the torture regime, consider the reaction of the CIA:

"On this, my last day as director, I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us," said a statement from CIA Director Leon Panetta, who will take over as defense secretary on Friday. "We are now finally about to close this chapter of our agency's history" . . . . At CIA headquarters on Thursday, Holder’s announcement was greeted with relief. . . .

Consider what's being permanently shielded from legal accountability. The Bush torture regime extended to numerous prisons around the world, in which tens of thousands of mostly Muslim men were indefinitely imprisoned without a whiff of due process, and included a network of secret prisons -- "black sites" -- purposely placed beyond the monitoring reach of even international human rights groups, such as the International Red Cross.

Looks like an international court is the only way justice will ever be served in the near future.

Bush Getting Some Pressure from Abroad

GENEVA (Reuters) - Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday.

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.

Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned.

AND

An American human rights organization says it plans to take action around former President George W. Bush’s plans to speak at an economic conference near Vancouver, Canada, in October.

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is claiming credit for the cancellation of Bush’s visit to Switzerland last week where he was to speak at a dinner in Geneva.

However, event organizers said they canceled the visit because of security concerns and the risk of violence after left-wing groups called for mass protests against the former president.

CCR and Amnesty International had planned to file a criminal complaint in Geneva against Bush for personally authorizing waterboarding—where water is poured over an immobilized person’s face to simulate drowning—of terrorism suspects.

“Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he canceled his trip to avoid our case,” CCR said in a statement.

CCR alleges waterboarding is a form of torture, and says former presidents do not enjoy special immunity under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which both Canada and the United States are signatories.

“The reach of the Convention Against Torture is wide—this case is prepared and will be waiting for him wherever he travels next,” the statement said.

Obama White House Pressured Spain to Drop Bush Torture Prosecution

So this explains explains why the Spanish prosecutions never materialized.

...Mel Martinez, an ex-Republican Party chairman, along with a US embassy charge d'affaires, met with Spanish Foreign Minister Angel Lossada to discuss the prosecution. They reportedly told the foreign minister that the case "would have an enormous impact" on US-Spanish relations.

"Here was a former head of the GOP and a representative of a new Democratic administration (headed by a president who had decried the Bush-Cheney administration's use of torture) jointly applying pressure on Spain to kill the investigation of the former Bush officials," writes Corn. "[A]s this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes."

Not this is surprising in the least, but at least it's good to see this sleazy, disgusting behavior brought out (thanks to wikileaks).

Absolute Immunity for Ashcroft?

Turley: Obama administration attempt to set new precedent is 'disgusting'

A Supreme Court ruling could grant "absolute immunity" to former US Attorney General John Ashcroft and set a dangerous precedent in a 9/11-related lawsuit, according to George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley.

The high court agreed Tuesday to hear a case where Ashcroft can be sued for misusing federal laws to hold a US citizen without charging him.

In an aggressive response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ashcroft promised that he would use material witness warrants to hold suspects without necessarily charging them with a crime. In 2003, Abdullah al-Kidd, a US citizen, was detained while boarding a plane for Saudi Arabia.

To obtain the warrant, the Justice Department incorrectly told judges that al-Kidd had purchased a one-way first class ticket.

Al-Kidd says he was treated as a terrorist during his time in detention. He maintains that he was strip-searched and interrogated without a lawyer.

The Ninth Circuit has said the suit can go forward while the Obama administration argues that officials like Ashcroft are immune from such lawsuits.

Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann Monday that the government wants to set a precedent of absolute immunity for government officials.

"They are going to have to pitch this to the hard right of the court to support one of the most abusive Attorney Generals in history and what will be left is truly frightening," said Turley, a liberal professor who has been a frequent critic of Republicans. "This is a case as you've mentioned where false statements were given to a court to obtain a warrant, a person was held without access to a lawyer, held in highly abusive conditions and you also have an Attorney General who was virtually gleeful during that period about his ability to round up people."

"This was a time as you know that the material witness rationale was being used widely and rather transparently to simply hold people."

Turley notes that Ninth Circuit Judge Milan Smith wrote in his opinion (.pdf) that "this is what the framers fought against."

"This is what the framers were talking about. Arbitrary detention. And, my God, you now have the Obama administration arguing that you can't possibly hold the Attorney General libel for such an egregious and horrible act," explained Turley.

....And when you pile it up, it truly is frightening. The administration has already said it will not investigate torture. It will not prosecute torture. It has already dismissed dozens of cases including cases for victims of torture."

"Now it is saying that even people that order abuses, that clearly should have know that there are abuses cannot be held liable," Turley continued.

"I've got to tell you I find it a disgusting act to try to create this type of precedent and I promise you this precedent will bare a horrible fruit and this will be repeated because what president Obama and his administration are going to do for this court," he concluded.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Bush Should Have Been Indicted

Fox News' senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.

In a interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN's Book TV to promote his book Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been indicted for "torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant."

The judge believes that it is a fallacy to say that the US treats suspects as innocent until proven guilty. "The government acts as if a defendant is guilty merely on the basis of an accusation," said Napolitano.

Nader was curious about how this applied to the Bush administration. "What about the more serious violations of habeas corpus," wondered Nader. "You know after 9/11 Bush rounded up thousands of them, Americans, many of them Muslim Americans or Arabic Americans and they were thrown in jail without charges. They didn't have lawyers. Some of them were pretty mistreated in New York City. You know they were all released eventually."

"Well that is so obviously a violation of the natural law, the natural right to be brought before a neutral arbiter within moments of the government taking your freedom away from you," answered Napolitano.

"Doctors group says Bush Administration conducted medical experiments on detainees"

A new report by the watchdog group Physicians for Human Rights alleges Monday that the Bush Administration experimented on terrorism suspects during their enhanced interrogation program put in force starting in 2002.

The group's review, which examined Bush-era documentation, asserts that the administration violated laws set up in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent medical testing on prisoners of war. (Nazi doctors sometimes experimented on their prisoners.)

The report states that, "Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures."