Gonzales, Yoo and 4 others may be indicted for War Crimes

According to the Associated Press a Spanish court has agreed to open a criminal case that could result in criminal indictments for six Bush Administration officals on charges of enabling torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Human rights lawyers brought the case before leading anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon, who agreed to send it on to prosecutors to decide whether it had merit, Gonzalo Boye, one of the lawyers who brought the charges, told The Associated Press.

The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

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Spanish law allows courts to reach beyond national borders in cases of torture or war crimes under a doctrine of universal justice, though the government has recently said it hopes to limit the scope of the legal process.

Garzon became famous for bringing charges against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998, and he and other Spanish judges have agreed to investigate alleged abuses everywhere from Tibet to Argentina's "dirty war," El Salvador and Rwanda.

Read entire article.

It will be very interesting to see how the American public reacts to this news. Hopefully this will open people's eyes to how the reset of the world views the actions of the Bush Administration.

Forced to Prosecute

In a very interesting article in today's New York Times, reporter Scott Shane reports that the Obama Administration, simply by acknowledging the obvious truth that waterboarding is torture, could be forced to prosecute those responsible for torture as war criminals, despite Barack Obama and Eric Holder's protestations that they are disinclined to do so.

In the view of many historians and legal authorities, Mr. Holder was merely admitting the obvious. He was agreeing with the clear position of his boss-to-be, President-elect Barack Obama, and he was giving an answer that almost certainly was necessary to win confirmation.

Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.

The article goes on to point out the difficulties in prosecuting the low level people who carried out the orders.

Two obvious obstacles stand in the way of a prosecution: legal opinions from the Justice Department that declared even the harshest interrogation methods to be legal, and a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that grants strong legal protections to government employees who relied on such legal advice in counterterrorism programs.

Although the article does not say so, it seems to me that this defense should not and would not work for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell although it should absolve everyone below them in the chain of command. Picture Bush and Cheney being prosecuted for war crimes, claiming that as a result of legal rulings they directed the Justice Department lawyers to draw up, their orders to torture people were legal. Would such a defense have worked for the Nazis and Japanese Generals in the war crime trials following World War II?

Do not allow Bush to slink quietly out of town

In his column in today's New York Times, Bob Herbert sums up the last 8 years.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

Read the entire article.

War Crimes were committed

I think it is now clear to the vast majority of Americans that over the last 7 years the CIA and the United States military, following orders coming down from the Bush Administration, have been torturing people, despite repeated statements from President Bush and his spokesmen that "we do not torture." The latest evidence is in a book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer. According to an article in the New York Times which received an advance copy of the book:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

Now that the International Red Cross has concluded that war crimes were committed, will top Bush Administration officials, such as Richard Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, live the rest of their lives in fear of being arrested and tried as war criminals, ala Pinochet? Although indicting and trying Pinochet was not politically possible in Chile that was not the case everywhere in the world. Spain indicted Pinochet for war crimes and Britain honored Spain's warrant when Pinochet came to Britain for medical treatment.

Back in 2001 a high-level government official bragged to a reporter that they in the Bush Administration were creating reality by their actions, unlike those, like the reporter, who were in the "reality-based community." We now see what the world they were creating looks like. Although the rest of the country may be able to move on after November the former Bush Administration officials will have to deal with the consequences of their actions for the rest of their lives. They have created a Hell here on earth for themselves in which they have condemned themselves to live. I wonder how that will be working out for them.

What has happened to the rule of law?

Supposedly the George W. Bush administration is conservative, but what exactly are they conserving? The way the world has worked up until now, at least the parts of the world that are civilized and operate under the rule of law, people are not kidnapped by agents of foreign governments. People facing criminal charges in the United States who reside in, say, the United Kingdom can only be brought without their consent to the United States if the United Kingdom agrees to arrest and extradite them.

Until 2001 the only time this procedure was circumvented were when Nazi war criminals were kidnapped by agents of Israel.

Since 2001 the United States has claimed the right to kidnap people suspected of being terrorists. This did not unduly alarm people who did not think they were likely to be suspected of being war criminals or terrorists. But now the Bush Administration is telling the world that the United States claims the right to kidnap anyone anywhere.

As reported by the TimesOnLine (London Sunday Times):

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States. A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

link

How could people called conservative claim this kind of power, a power that allows them to ignore international law? How do you feel about the world being told by the Bush Administration that this is what America stands for – that might make right? What are these conservatives conserving? What historic period are they returning us to?

The Bush Administration has been on course for war with Iran for years

Esquire magazine has published an article By John H. Richardson that every American needs to read:

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say.

Read the entire article

Although the chicken hawk neo-cons who are publicly calling for the United States to bomb Iran seem to be implying that the only consequence of that action would be the prevention of World War III everyone else who knows anything about the situation thinks that such a military attack would have very serious consequences indeed.
Bear in mind that Iran has not invaded another country for hundreds of years. No suicide bomber whose nationality has been determined has turned out to be Iranian. (Almost all of the non-Iraqis fighting us in Iraq are Sunnis, many of them Saudis.) Nuclear weapons experts all agree that Iran is years away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb and even if they had the bomb it is not at all clear that this would be more dangerous to world stability than, say, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

In war truth is the first casualty

On the October 6 edition of Fox News' The Beltway Boys, co-host and Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes claimed:

You know, I've thought for a long time that Obama's not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don't think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be. But that argument's not going to be used against him in the Democratic primaries. It would, however, by Republicans in a general election.

A lot has been said about this already in other blogs but I want to comment on how this quote illustrates perfectly how the debate over the war in Iraq is a battle in which we have truth on one side and lies and deceit on the other. In the quote above Fred Barnes is denying that in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq anyone believed what the Iraqis and the U.N. weapons inspectors and others were telling us, what we now know to be the truth, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Fred Barnes is claiming that Barack Obama believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (since that is what everyone believed) and yet still opposed the war. The possibility that Barack Obama opposed the war because he did not believe what the Bush Administration was saying, that he was right when so many others were wrong, does not seem to be a thought that Fred Barnes is capable of entertaining. Think about the implications of that.

These are people whose whole world view is so completely divorced from reality that they can not, as shown by this quote, recognize the truth when it is staring them in the face.

The Bush Administration plans to escalate the war

Polls show that an ever increasing majority of Americans believe that the War in Iraq is not winnable and that the United States needs to start disengaging its military from the internal Iraqi conflict. Senators continue to defect from President Bush’s Iraq policy. What is the response from the Bush Administration?

BAGHDAD (AP) - The U.S. military is weighing new directions in Iraq, including an even bigger troop buildup if President Bush thinks his "surge" strategy needs a further boost, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday.
read the entire article

Besides increasing the number of troops in Iraq the Bush Administration is also planning to expand the war into Iran.

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.
Read the entire article

These plans leave us no choice. We cannot simply wait for the Bush Administration to end. Too many lives are at stake. We need to start impeachment now before they start a war with Iran and send even more troops to Iraq.

Can our troops come home from Iraq now?

Can we pull our military out of Iraq now? President Bush has said that we would leave if the Iraqi government asks us to leave and that when the Iraqi stand up we will stand down.

BUSHRA JUHI of the Associated Press just filed the following report:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country when American troops leave "any time they want," though he acknowledged the forces need further weapons and training.

The embattled prime minister sought to show confidence at a time when congressional pressure is growing for a withdrawal and the Bush administration reported little progress had been made on the most vital of a series of political benchmarks it wants al-Maliki to carry out.

Al-Maliki said difficulty in enacting the measures was "natural" given Iraq's turmoil.

But one of his top aides, Hassan al-Suneid, rankled at the assessment, saying the U.S. was treating Iraq like "an experiment in an American laboratory." He sharply criticised the U.S. military, saying it was committing human rights violations, embarassing the Iraqi government with its tactics and cooperating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.

link the the entire article

The American people want us out of Iraq, the Iraqi people want us out and now the government of Iraq says that could get along just fine without us. It is time for us to go.

Intelligence and military officiers reveal aborted raid against Al Qaeda

In a front page story in today's New York Times "a dozen current and former military and intelligence officials" leak classified details of an aborted raid.

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.
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About a dozen current and former military and intelligence officials were interviewed for this article, all of whom requested anonymity because the planned 2005 mission remained classified.

At first glance this leak appears to be intelligence and military officials, no longer in fear of their civilian bosses, exacting revenge for thwarted opportunities. But as I read the story more closely it appears that perhaps the Bush Administration may have orchestrated this leak in order to put pressure on Pakistan. Among the clues pointing in that direction is how all the blame is given to "Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary," with Bush and Cheney portrayed as totally in the dark about the whole affair. How likely does that seem to you? One thing we have learned about this Administration is how likely they are to throw former colleagues under the bus and that it is difficult to overestimate their ability to be duplicitous and deceitful.