Can we finally get a War Crimes Tribunal?

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation.  We knew this then, we know this now.  What is so awful is the inability to admit we went full-Dr. Mengele on the people in Gitmo.  We tortured.  Admit it.

And then send the people responsible for this horrible moral and ethical failure to jail.

May this strike fear into the Bush administration

War crimes are always prosecutable.

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old former Nazi camp guard, is due to stand trial on Monday on charges of helping to force 27,900 Jews into gas chambers in 1943.

But we knew this already...

Two years before the 9/11 attacks on America, George W. Bush told a Houston journalist if elected president, “I’m going to invade Iraq.”

Bush made the comments about starting an aggressive war to veteran Houston Chronicle reporter Mickey Herskowitz, then working with Bush on his book “A Charge To Keep,” later brought out by publisher William Morrow.

This disclosure was uncovered by Russ Baker, an award-winning investigative reporter when he interviewed Herskowitz for his own book, “Family of Secrets” (Bloomsbury Press) about the Bush dynasty. However, Baker says, when he approached The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times with the potentially devastating story to President Bush prior to the 2004 presidential election, they declined to publish it.

In a new book, “Media In Crisis”(Doukathsan), Baker quotes Herskowitz as telling him: “He (Bush) said he wanted to do it(invade Iraq), and the reason he wanted to do it is he had been led to understand that you could not really have a successful presidency unless you were seen as commander-in-chief, unless you were seen as waging a war.”

Bush told Herskowitz that his father (President George H.W. Bush) knew that from Panama and (President Ronald)Reagan knew that from Grenada and…(UK Prime Minister)Maggie Thatcher knew this from the Falklands.”

According to Baker, Bush told Herskowitz, “The ideal thing was a small war, and this is why Bush said nobody was going to be killed in Iraq because he thought it would be small war.”

Since we can't impeach him, can we at least have a war crimes tribunal?

What Digby said

About who was actually turning the thumbscrews on torture and on Spain investigating US war crimes by the Bush cabal.

The can of worms has been opened.

It's WTF Thursday!

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.

Most of us who were reading the news and searching the blogs knew this many years ago, that children and old men were involved, that innocents were swept up in the dragnets.... and that we did fuck all to get them out. We've tortured them, made many go insane, and all for 'intelligence'?

Bullshit.

Tell me again exactly why it was that we had to torture? Why?

As I've said before, the top administrators of the Bush cabal did it because they wanted to:

Let the wild rumpus begin

Rewriting history:

...In an article about the Obama administration's "effort to undo bonuses at A.I.G.," The New York Times reported, "The Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said they had known about the bonus program as far back as last fall." But at no point in the article did the Times note that the Treasury Department at the time was then-President Bush's Treasury Department. Indeed, the article did not mention Bush or his Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson at all, much less report that the Bush Treasury Department worked with the Federal Reserve in carrying out last year's bailouts and bought AIG stocks notwithstanding the existence of these bonus contracts.

The fake uproar about Gibb's joke about Dick Cheney:

Dick Cheney is one of the most divisive -- and disliked -- political officials in memory. Maybe Chip Reid and Rick Klein haven't heard, but he just presided over the virtual collapse of the American economy and is directly implicated in severe war crimes and other pervasive criminality. Yet they speak of him -- and demand that everyone else treat him -- as royalty: This is the former Vice President of the United States you're talking about; have you no decency?

Journalists love to depict themselves as hard-nosed, rambunctious, ornery adversaries of establishment orthodoxies and political power. The reality is the opposite: there simply is no class of people more reverent of the political establishment and more devoted to protecting and defending its prerogatives.

Good for you, Canada! Thank you!!:

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - More than 100 protesters chanted "war criminal" and flung shoes in Calgary on Tuesday, angry that former U.S. President George W. Bush was in the Canadian city to give his first speech since leaving the White House.

At least two demonstrators were hauled away by police after brief skirmishes, as 1,500 business people in the oil patch city waited outside a convention center for an hour to pass through tight security and enter the C$400-a-plate ($315) luncheon.

Media were barred from the invitation-only event, during which Bush had been expected to reflect on his eight years as president.

Define a fair trial.

Can we at least bring our pitchforks and torches?

Dear Attorney General Eric Holder,

We the undersigned citizens of the United States hereby formally petition you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in torture and other war crimes.

Where do we sign up for court cases?

We know some people who need to be on it...

PARIS — More than six years after opening its doors, the International Criminal Court in The Hague began its first trial on Monday, as Thomas Lubanga, a former Congolese warlord, took his seat in the dock facing a crowded court and public gallery.

We have a little list. Won't take long, really. Just go the PNAC site and copy the names.

Is George Bush a war criminal?

Yes.

Impeachment?

Not while Bush can pardon everybody including himself.

We just need to wait for Seymour Hersh to start talking to all the eager Bush administration flunkies who are waiting for January 20th to spew. Let all of the information become public. The astonishment and anger will build. Demands will be made to punish those who demanded torture be used, that the Constitution be shredded, that treaties be ignored. As more and more people rat out the Bush cabal, investigations will have to be held. Indictments will have to be given, jail time insisted upon.

If we can't do it ourselves, other countries will try to arrest these war criminals. Bush and Cheney will not be able to travel without fear of arrest. Even though they will probably escape prosecution, they will experience scorn and shaming from their countrymen and colleagues.

Impeachment won't happen. But justice can.

I wanna hold your hand...

Lets me use this pic again...



But if convicted felon Ted Stevens got an ovation, I wonder what Congress will give Georgie?

A war crimes tribunal would be nice...

Update 11/22: To be fair, he had already had a photo op hand shake with everyone before this event. But still, everybody is looking past Bush's shoulder and waiting to talk to President-elect Obama:

Bush is hoping that the APEC countries, which include a number of nations that benefit significantly from trade, will promise, as the G-20 nations did, not to raise new economic barriers to trade over the next year, hoping to avoid the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that helped turn the 1930s downturn into the Great Depression.

The APEC leaders were also expected to endorse a new commitment to wrap up the broad outlines of an agreement on the current round of global trade talks, known as the Doha Round, by the end of December.

However, analysts said it was highly unlikely that goal would be met since many nations will be holding back on their negotiating offers, waiting for Obama to take office. Obama will not have representatives at the APEC meetings.

crossposted at SteveAudio

War crimes tribunals

So we don't get a repeat of the Bush administration again. Ever.

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos:

Should George Bush and others in his administration be prosecuted for various actions is answered with a resounding yes! if you’re Vincent Bugliosi, author of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. And, while most other critics who favor prosecution argue that lesser charges should be brought than Bugliosi would like to see, they believe it would be mistaken to let the actions of Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and crew fade into oblivion. For one thing, the main thing perhaps, allowing these leaders to escape unscathed for their actions means we can pretty much count on a repeat – only worse – a few years or decades down the road.

It's hard to imagine anybody who's watched Torturing Democracy could suggest that nothing should happen to the characters who promoted, encouraged and even set rules for torture.

But Obama advisor and Bush enabler Cass Sunstein sees things just that way. And, apparently, so does Clinton era Department of Justice official Robert Litt.

I'm sure we will want to bring these people to trial as soon as Seymour Hersh starts writing about what actually went on behind the White House walls:

'You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],' he says, with relish. '[They say:] "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out to sabotage the system... It wasn't that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.'

Oh yes, pleeeeeeeaaasseeeeee....

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t we start off by you just laying out your case and how you arrived at this, at this argument, decided to write this book?

VINCENT BUGLIOSI: Well, in my book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, I set forth an airtight legal case against George Bush that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that George Bush took this nation to war under false pretenses, on a lie, in Iraq, and therefore, under the law, he is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4,000 young American soldiers in Iraq fighting his war, not your war or my war or America’s war, but his war.

Interestingly enough, there have been billions of very harsh critical words written and said about George Bush, none of which he could possibly care less about. So the words are absolutely meaningless. But up until now, other than words, no one has done anything at all to George Bush. No impeachment, no investigation of him.

But this book here, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, in it, I put together a case against George Bush that could result—it absolutely could result in his being prosecuted for first-degree murder in an American courtroom. I set forth the legal architecture against him, the overwhelming evidence of his guilt and the jurisdiction to prosecute him. And I say that if justice means anything at all in America, and if we’re not going to forget about these 4,000 young American soldiers who are in their cold graves right now as I am talking to you and who came back from George Bush’s war in a box or a jar of ashes, I say we have no choice but to bring murder charges against the son of privilege from Crawford, Texas.

I may be sounding presumptuous to you right now, Amy and Juan, but I’m telling you this: I am going after George Bush. I may not succeed, but I’m not going to be satisfied until I see him in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first-degree murder.

Because the government is of the people, by the people, for the people

Dmark of Flyover Country:

As long as Nancy Pelosi hold the office of Speaker of the House, every time she appears in public someone needs to stand before her and say:

Madame Speaker, The President of the United States and the Vice-President of the United States have, by their own admission, broken the laws of the United States to a level which may be construed as Treason. They have admitted to actions which the world has deemed War Crimes. Why have you not followed the oath of office to which you swore, and brought these crimes before the body of which you are leader? Why have you shirked your duty and ignored your oath and not sought the impeachment of these officials as is required by the Constitution? Why have you stated that you will not even consider impeachment even though the oath you swore requires you to? How can you stand before the people of the United States and the world and refuse to do that to which you swore?

You can't ignore the people, Nancy. We want answers. We want justice. We want impeachment.

The Bush administration is guilty of war crimes

At today’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights hearing on torture, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, told Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody, with up to 27 of these declared homicides

Which is why we need impeachment put back on the table, Nancy!

War Crimes

War criminals, war profiteers, warmongers. We need accountability, confessions, trials, convictions, sentencing, jail time.

If you disagree, read this.

And then think this:

Sitting in the Dock of the Hague

With groveling apologies to Otis Redding and a shaking fist at Steve Bates who got the song and the idea stuck in my head....



Sittin' in the mornin' sun
I'll be sittin' when the evenin' come
Watching the lawyers roll in
And then I watch 'em roll away again, yeah

I'm sittin' in the dock of the Hague
Watching my poll numbers slide away
Ooo, I'm just sittin' in the dock of the Hague
Wastin' time

I left my home in Texas
Headed for the Capitol Hill
'Cause I've had preznitshal elections
And everything wuz gonna come my way

But I'm just gonna sit in the dock of the Hague
Watching evidence pile day by day
Ooo, I'm sittin' in the dock of the Hague
Wastin' time

Look like nothing's gonna change
Everything still remains the same
I can't do what ten people tell me to do
So I guess I'll remain the same, yes

Sittin' here resting my bones
And this loneliness won't leave me alone
It's three or four countries I bombed
Just to make this dock my home

Now, I'm just gonna sit in the dock of the Hague
Watching my life roll away
Oooo-wee, sittin' in the dock of the Hague
Wastin' time



crossposted at SteveAudio

Update: It needs this picture:

A man of integrity

Does not fit in the Bush administration:

The Pentagon was successful in preventing Col. Morris Davis from testifying before Congress. But he's taking a step that could be even more damaging: agreeing to testify as a defense witness in a Guantanamo Bay tribunal.

From the AP:

Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October over alleged political interference in the U.S. military tribunals, told The Associated Press he will appear at a hearing for Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

"I expect to be called as a witness ... I'm more than happy to testify," Davis said in a telephone interview from Washington. He called it "an opportunity to tell the truth."

At the April pretrial hearing inside the U.S. military base in southeast Cuba, Hamdan's defense team plans to argue that alleged political interference cited by Davis violates the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Brian Mizer, told the AP.

The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.) that Morris' testimony could potentially impact all of the tribunals.

Message from Vermont to Bush and Cheney

Happy New Year and up yours:

Montpelier, VT (AHN) - A group of activists in Vermont want President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney subject to arrest for war crimes. A group in Brattleboro is petitioning to have an item put on a March town meeting agenda that would make the two subject to arrest and indictment if they were to ever visit the community.

The item would require about 1,000 signatures to put it on the agenda, where it would be voted on. The item asks for indictments against the president and vice president for crimes against the Constitution.

The Vermont State Senate voted earlier this year to support impeaching the president. Vermont is the only state in the U.S. President Bush has not visited during his presidency.

Can California sign up for this, too? This includes the airspace over the state, right? I want all the neocons to have to have a really zigzaggy flight pattern when they travel.

Ahhhh, merde.

PARIS (Reuters) - The Paris prosecutors' office has dismissed a suit against Donald Rumsfeld accusing the former U.S. defense secretary of torture, human rights groups who brought the case said on Friday.

The plaintiffs, who included the French-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said Rumsfeld had authorized interrogation techniques that led to rights abuses.

The FIDH said it had received a letter from the prosecutors' office ruling that Rumsfeld benefited from a "customary" immunity from prosecution granted to heads of state and government and foreign ministers, even after they left office.

It said in a statement it was "astonished at such a mistaken argument" and said customary immunity from prosecution did not exist under international law.

The suit was filed in October during a visit to France by Rumsfeld.

The Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq hit the headlines in April 2004 when details of physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers were made public, badly damaging the reputation of the U.S. military.

Former prisoners at the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay are suing Rumsfeld and 10 military commanders, alleging torture and violations of their religious rights during their detention there.

The CCR and FIDH filed suits in Germany in 2004 and 2006 in an attempt to have Rumsfeld tried for rights abuses.