Countdown: War Crimes Prosecutions Possible

Many of us have been saying this for a long time, but now the International Committee of the Red Cross have reported to the CIA that what the US have been up to at Guantanamo Bay is "categorically torture, violating both American law and international law". The report also "warned that that the abuse constituted war crimes".

The Bush administration have been practicing plausible deniability, pretending that the legality of what they have been doing is subject to debate. It's not. What they are doing is clearly illegal.

Jonathan Turley laments that it is now time for the international community to hold the US to account for what it has done, as Nancy Pelosi clearly has no intention of seeing that the Bush administration are made to pay for their crimes. As he says, "We have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law."

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

There just aren't two sides to those matters. That's what the International Red Cross means when it says that what we did to Guantanamo detainees was "categorically torture." It's what the only federal judges to adjudicate the question -- all three -- have concluded when they found that the President clearly broke our laws with no valid excuses by spying on our communications for years with no warrants. It's why the Bush administration has sought -- and repeatedly received -- immunity and amnesty for the people who have implemented these policies. It's because these actions are clearly illegal -- criminal -- and we all know that.

And that's true no matter how many Bush-loyal DOJ lawyers justify the behavior, no matter how many right-wing lawyers go on TV to defend the Government's conduct, no matter how many Brookings "scholars" go to The New Republic in order flamboyantly to boast how deeply complex these matters are and how only Super-Experts (like themselves) can grapple with the fascinating intellectual puzzles they pose. Displaying cognitive angst and/or above-it-all indifference in the face of unambiguously illegal and morally reprehensible government conduct isn't a sign of intellectual sophistication or political Seriousness. It's exactly the opposite. It's the hallmark of complicity with it.

I've argued that point many times here. That commenters who engaged in the discussion of whether or not waterboarding constituted torture were not actually taking part in a serious legal debate with themselves, they were enablers, apologists for what was being done in their name by an administration who could not behave in the way that they were behaving without people willing to pretend that there was any debate over whether or not waterboarding and the like was or was not torture. There was never any serious debate to be had on that subject.

The International Committee of the Red Cross have been so categorical because the illegality of the Bush regime's actions has never been in doubt. Those who pretended there was a debate to be had were simply enabling these terrible war crimes to be committed.

Tags: Countdown, Rachel Maddow, International, War Crimes, Red Cross, Jonathan Turley