The U.S. searches for war criminals.

This made me laugh out loud.

Apparently, the U.S. Government are aggressively trying to track down war criminals.

"I don't think there's any question that we're going to have a greater number of these cases and that these cases are going to reach (suspects from) more parts of the world," says Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, a child of Holocaust survivors who has pushed the more aggressive efforts to hold war criminals accountable. "It's something we have to do. We owe it to our citizens and we owe it to the world."

Congress passed the laws amid a broader international push after the Cold War to hold war criminals and human rights abusers accountable, says Eli Rosenbaum, who ran the Office of Special Investigations and now is director of strategy and policy in the new Human Rights and Special Prosecutions unit.

"Interest burgeoned all over the world in bringing these people to justice," Rosenbaum says. Among U.S. policymakers, "there was bipartisan support for doing this, and Congress gave us a lot of new tools."

Now, it's going full steam.

"We want to send a message to would-be human rights violators of the future," Rosenbaum says. "Their odds of getting away with it are shrinking rapidly."

As Greenwald points out, if the US wants to prove it's serious about this, it might want to start it's search here.

Tags: Bush, war criminals, war crimes

Blair Would take Out Iran.

Blair has given an exclusive interview to the Guardian, the paper whose readers he used to define as all that was wrong with the chattering classes, and has revealed that he would not "take the risk" of allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

He has, thankfully, decided not to endorse any candidate in the Labour leadership election, but in his only interview for his forthcoming autobiography he certainly drops hints which David Miliband may very well think proves that Blair favours him.

"What people should understand is that I adore the Labour party," he says – a sentiment that will surprise many inexperienced Blair-watchers. Later he says: "As I say in my introduction, I feel the most enormous debt of gratitude to the Labour party and huge loyalty to it. I just want it to win. I want to see it win because I think that a modern progressive Labour party is better for the country than a Tory party."

If that is code for an endorsement of David Miliband in the leadership race, then Blair is not admitting to it. "I decided at the outset that I wasn't going to start endorsing people," he says. He is expected to take the same line when he is interviewed by Andrew Marr on BBC2 tonight.

In the interview he faces up to the charge, which I think is an unfair one, that he donated the proceeds of the book to the troops out of guilt and he addresses the belief that he didn't feel any guilt about the deaths of troops, a charge brought about because he claimed in front of Chilcot to have "no regrets".

"How could you possibly not feel sadness at the lives that had been lost?" Blair said this week. "How could you possibly not? But … when I use the word responsibility, I mean it in a profound way. I say in the book the term responsibility has its future as well as past tense. And that's what I feel. It's not a coincidence I am devoting a large part of my time now to the Middle East or to religious interfaith."

It's somewhat irrelevant whether or not he feels regret. One can assume that as a human being he, of course, feels sad that others died because of decisions which he made. The real question is whether or not he would make those same decisions again; and Blair gives every indication that, not only would he make those decisions again, but that he would go further and take action against Iran.

Asked the classic judge's question — if he would have done anything differently in retrospect — he replies it is "very difficult to answer that". But he wishes he had seen earlier that 9/11 had "far deeper roots" than he thought at the time.

"The reason for that, let me explain it, is that in my view what was shocking about September 11 was that it was 3,000 people killed in one day but it would have been 300,000 if they could have done it. That's the point ... I decided at that point that you cannot take a risk on this. This is why I am afraid, in relation to Iran, that I would not take a risk of them getting nuclear weapons capability. I wouldn't take it.

"Now other people may say, come on, the consequences of taking them on are too great, you've got to be so very careful, you'll simply upset everybody, you'll destabilise it. I understand all of those arguments. But I wouldn't take the risk of Iran with a nuclear weapon."

This is the point about Blair which many miss. It is easy to dismiss Blair as "Bush's poodle", but I think this ignores the fact that, when it came to Saddam and Iraq, Bush was actually pushing against an open door. Blair wanted to take Saddam out.

Blair always believed in humanitarian intervention.

In a scarcely reported speech in his Sedgefield constituency, in the very earliest days of his premiership, Blair argued that we should renegotiate the Treaty Of Westphalia.

As I said at the time:

The Treaty of Westphalia was the first time that we recognised the sovereignty of other nations and our inability to interfere in their affairs.

Blair has long argued for intervention in other nation's affairs when they are said to be mistreating their populace, so when he flies to Bush's side in Washington to reiterate these points, he will be arguing a well versed Blair discourse.

However, when he attempts to fit Iraq into his own interventionist logic, he will circumnavigate why this intervention was unpopular as opposed to his similar ventures into Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

The interventionist arguments that both Bush and Blair presented for going into Iraq were all based on events that had taken place a full decade before their proposed war, events in which both respective countries - the US and Britain - had been very slow to condemn.

Kosovo had an ongoing humanitarian crisis, which is why the world supported something being done.

The argument that Saddam had "gassed his own people" had none of the same immediacy, as this was something he had done a decade earlier, and there was no indication that he was about to do so again.

Likewise, Blair's claims that the UN "shies away from rather than confronts problems" seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what the UN's function is. The UN will always view war as a last resort, that is one of the basic elements of it's Charter. So Blair will attempt, once again, to refashion his political legacy by seeking to portray the Iraq war as a continuation of more noble ventures.

He will fail. For he is comparing apples to oranges.

Blair never understood why many of us could agree with his arguments when it came to Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and yet oppose him when it came to Iraq.

This was because the Iraq war did not fit into the principle which he was espousing.

And, from his comments here, we can see that Blair has lost none of his zeal for military intervention. And, astonishingly, he is just as willing to assume that Iran's nuclear intentions are towards a nuclear bomb, as he was to assume that Saddam was building WMD.

But, with Blair's comments that he "wouldn't take the risk" over Iran's intentions, we can see that, deep down, he is a follower of Cheney's 1% doctrine. That's why Blair finds it so hard to apologise for Iraq; he really, really doesn't think he was wrong.

And, as we can see from his comments regarding Iran, Blair really would do it all over again.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Tony Blair, Iraq war, Iran

Study: Newspapers stopped describing waterboarding as 'torture' during Bush years.

I'm late to this:

Is waterboarding torture? If you picked up a major U.S. newspaper before 2004, the answer would likely be yes, according to a new Harvard University study.

But in the post-9/11 world, when the practice of immobilizing and virtually drowning detainees became a politically charged issue, that straightforward definition grew murky. The study, conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, examined coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and found a noticeable shift in language concerning waterboarding.

“From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture,” the study noted. But the study found that things changed in the years when “war on terror” became part of the American lexicon.

The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times “called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles." That’s 1.4 percent of the time.

But it's the reason given by editor of The New York Times for this change of stance which fascinates me.

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

The editor who wrote that is utterly missing the point here. If waterboarding was considered torture for over a hundred years, then there is no debate on the subject.

By pretending that there is a debate on the subject is to take sides. And, sadly, the side chosen is the side of the torturer.

Throughout history, torturers like Saddam would have loved to claim that there was "a debate" as to whether what they did constituted torture, but I am sure that the New York Times would not have accorded it to them.

Likewise, the Bush administration, of course, claimed that waterboarding was not torture for no better reason than the fact that they were the ones doing it.

To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, "Well, they would say that wouldn't they?

Everyone accepts that this is torture and the place for Saddam, Bush and the other torturers to have their "debate" is in front of a judge and jury.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Bush, Cheney, torture, New York Times

Andrew Napolitano: Bush and Cheney Should Have Been Indicted for Torturing, for Spying and Arresting Without Warrants.

It astounds me that these words are being spoken by a regular contributor to Fox News.

Napolitano: So what President Bush did with the suspension of habeas corpus, with the whole concept of Guantanamo Bay, with the whole idea that he could avoid and evade federal laws, treaties, federal judges and the Constitution was blatantly unconstitutional and is some cases criminal.

Nader: What's the sanction for President Bush and Vice President Cheney?

Napolitano: There's been no sanction except what history will say about them.

Nader: What should be the sanctions?

Napolitano: They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I'd like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you're under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It's a moral crime.

Nader: So you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should even though they've left office, they haven't escaped the criminal laws, they should be indicted and prosecuted?

Napolitano: The evidence in this book and in others, our colleague the great Vincent Bugliosi has amassed an incredible amount of evidence. The purpose of this book was not to amass that evidence but I do discuss it, is overwhelming when you compare it to the level of evidence required for a normal indictment that George W. Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Vice President participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law and the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands of human beings.

But I am in complete agreement with him that the evidence that Bush and Cheney committed crimes is simply overwhelming. Indeed, they are both on the record admitting that they authorised war crimes.

UPDATE:

It's well worth watching the whole thing. You can do that here.

Tags: Napolitano, Bush, Cheney, war crimes, torture

Cameron to launch inquiry into MI5 torture allegations.

It's so rare that Cameron and Clegg's coalition do anything which I agree with that it's nice to note that they are doing something with which I am in complete concurrence.

Victims of torture carried out with the knowledge of British agents could receive compensation, the Government has decided.

David Cameron is expected to announce a judge-led inquiry shortly into the long-running allegations that British intelligence officers were complicit in British residents being tortured by the security services of other countries.

Before the general election, both the Conservative and Liberal Democrats called for an investigation. Ministers from both parties hope the decision will clear the air after the repeated allegations and limit the spate of civil cases now being pursued in the courts. Compensation will be payable in cases where the inquiry finds someone was tortured and that British agents were aware of it.

It will be interesting to see how Labour react to this news. I am quite certain that they won't put forward the idiotic defence mounted by some Republicans in the United States that the Con-Dem coalition are attempting to "politicize policy differences" with the previous administration or voice the defence often used by Dick and Liz Cheney that "enhanced interrogation techniques" save lives.

Any Labour MP or minister who tried either of those tactics would face public condemnation, as it is widely understood here that torture is morally reprehensible and is justified under no circumstances.

I also wonder what effect it will have on Obama's "look forward, not backwards" policy if a British judge finds that the British government did facilitate torture of prisoners held in American custody. How long can you go on looking forward when another country's legal systems are saying that the techniques employed by the previous administration amounted to torture and were, therefore, war crimes?

This is the thing which I find most disappointing about the Obama administration. He came to power promising that he would restore the United States as a country of laws, and yet he seems reluctant to have any of those laws applied to the previous President and Vice President, when both are on public record admitting having authorised torture.

I don't see how he can say he is restoring the US as a country of laws whilst this anomaly exists.

Last night human rights groups welcomed the Government's move. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "Only this kind of inquiry can end the slow bleed of embarrassing revelation and expensive litigation and draw a line under this shameful business once and for all."

Clare Algar, executive director of the legal action charity Reprieve, said the inquiry should be as open and transparent as possible. "Torture, and complicity in torture, is morally repulsive, counterproductive, and illegal under both national and international law, and these allegations are, sadly, too numerous to ignore. We cannot learn from history and avoid repeating our mistakes if we do not know what that history is," she said.

Cameron and Clegg are doing what Obama appears afraid to do. They are going to shine a bright light into the shadows and ask what exactly Tony Blair and the Labour government did during the War on Terror.

And they are going to allow the victims of that torture to receive compensation.

That is the very least that the UK can do for these men. And that is the flip side of Obama's refusal to examine what Bush and Cheney did on a much larger scale.

I thought it shameful that Obama's government behaved the way it did in the recent case of Maher Arar. But, more importantly, Obama's refusal to ever examine the criminal behaviour of the Bush regime man that the victims of that criminality can never be compensated.

As The New York Times said at the time:

There is no excuse for the Obama administration’s conduct. It should demonstrate some moral authority by helping Canada’s investigation, apologizing to Mr. Arar and writing him a check.

Hopefully, Cameron and Clegg's inquiry will reveal enough to shame Obama into doing what he should have done long ago.

You can't turn the page without reading what is on that page. And yet that is what Obama is trying to do.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Cameron, Clegg, Obama, torture, war on terror, war crimes

Bush: I Am A War Criminal.

Bush has broken his silence to admit to a war crime.

In some of his most candid comments since leaving the White House, former President George W. Bush said Wednesday he has no regrets about authorizing the controversial waterboarding technique to interrogate terrorist suspects and wouldn't hesitate to do so again.

"Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," the former president said during an appearance at the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, according to the Grand Rapids Press.

"I'd do it again to save lives," he added.

But let's "look forward and not backwards"...

Of course, Dick Cheney has already admitted that he took part in these crimes.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..."

Jonathan Turley discussed this confession at the time:

It is an astonishing public admission since waterboarding is not just illegal but a war crime. It is akin to the vice president saying that he supported bank robbery or murder-for-hire as a public policy.

The ability of Cheney to openly brag about his taste for torture is the direct result of President Barack Obama blocking any investigation or prosecution of war crimes. For political reasons, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have refused to carry out our clear obligations under international law to prosecute for such waterboarding. Indeed, before taking office, various high-ranking officials stated that both Obama and Holder assured them that they would not allow such prosecutions. While they denied it at the time, those accounts are consistent with their actions following inauguration.

Bush can only make these statements because, like Cheney, he is utterly sure that the Obama administration will never have the balls to prosecute him.

What Obama is failing to realise is that, by failing to prosecute, he is allowing a narrative which states that Bush will do whatever it takes to protect the country and that Obama won't.

That's the old "the Democrats are soft on national security" gambit which has served the Republicans well for a very long time.

It's interesting. In the US, the true radicals are always on the right. It is they who are pushing the envelope of what is acceptable, never the left.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Bush, Cheney, Obama, war crimes

CIA’s top spy: U.S. intelligence hasn’t ‘suffered at all’ from banning waterboading.

This was the statement put out by the despicable Liz Cheney, insisting that the CIA must continue to have the right to torture people:

"Late last night, Democrats in the House of Representatives inserted a provision dubbed “The Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Interrogation Act of 2010” into the intelligence authorization bill. This new language targets the US intelligence community with criminal penalties for using methods they have deemed necessary for keeping America safe. These methods have further been found by the Department of Justice to be both legal and in keeping with our international obligations.

"American intelligence officers do not deserve this kind of treatment from the government they honorably serve. Day in and day out, they protect our country and make difficult decisions–at times in matters of life and death. In return for their service the government rewards them with little pay and no acknowledgement of their heroic actions. Democrats in Congress now want to threaten them with criminal prosecutions and deprive them of valuable tactics that protect America.

"We urge the Congress to vote against the intelligence authorization bill in its current form."

Liz Cheney
Chairman
Keep America Safe

Cheney has always claimed that the US will suffer should these methods be outlawed.



The woman is an utter abomination as far as I am concerned. And, much more importantly, Michael Sulick, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, recently stated that the U.S. hasn’t “suffered at all” because of the decision to ban waterboarding:

Sulick followed his lecture with a lengthy question-and-answer session, although he prefaced it by saying he would not comment on any issue that might influence policy. Questions were submitted by Fordham students in advance and read aloud by USG members. When asked if the Obama administration’s ban on waterboarding has had serious consequences on the war against terror, Sulick answered in general terms.

“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about [it from] a legal, moral or ethical standpoint.”

It's no surprise that Liz Cheney is found, as usual, to be talking utter nonsense. But then, she has to pretend that waterboarding was highly effective, as it's the only excuse she can come up with to explain her father's dreadful, illegal, behaviour.

One of the greatest disappointments I have with the Obama administration is that the sick buggers who authorised torture, like Liz Cheney's father, have never been prosecuted.

As far as I am concerned that remains a stain on America's conscience.

Tags: CIA, torture, Liz Cheney

'24', a diplomatic row and a spy chief's lecture on torture.

I ignored the former head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller's, statement the other day concerning the Brits being kept out of the loop when it came to the US torturing prisoners because, to be honest, I take the whole thing with a huge grain of salt. But I am fascinated by the American reaction to what she said.

In her speech, highly critical of the US's conduct during the war on terror, the former secret service chief implied that the leadership in Washington was inspired by watching the TV espionage thriller 24. She said: "Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly watched 24". Dame Eliza said: "The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing." She insisted that she had been unaware of what was going on until her retirement in 2007.

One of her retrospective discoveries was the interrogation method used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. When she asked her subordinates why the senior al-Qa'ida member was offering so much information, they told her he was "very proud of his achievements when questioned". She added: "It wasn't actually until after I retired that I read that he had been water-boarded 160 times."

The White House refused to comment on Dame Eliza's allegations yesterday. However, US security officials were said to feel particularly let down that the charges had come from someone in her senior position, and denied that American intelligence had used subterfuge with British colleagues.

Is that statement saying that the Brits were in the loop?

Amnesty International are also making their incredulity at Manningham-Buller's statement known:

Tim Hancock, UK campaigns director of Amnesty International, said: "Numerous allegations of US mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Bagram were emerging from the beginning of the war on terror. Did MI5 learn nothing of this, even when members of the security service interviewed nine British nationals at Guantanamo in 2003?

"We also know from the Binyam Mohamed case that the security service was told by US officials that Mr Mohamed was kept shackled, deprived of sleep and threatened with being 'disappeared' by his US interrogators."

I simply don't find it credible that the British secret service were as shocked as Manningham-Buller is now claiming that they were when they found out the tactics which the Americans were employing.

But I do love the senior Pentagon official's ridiculous way of fending off Buller's "24" analogy:

Asked whether President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld watched 24, the official said: "We are not aware of their television habits. It's quite an image though. These three busy guys sitting down together at a very busy time to get their lead from Jack Bauer."

Buller never implied that these three men sat down "together" to watch "24", she was implying that the same mindset which was on display in that programme was evident in the Bush White House.

And I think that it was. Where I find it hard to agree with Manningham-Buller, is when she expresses shock that a White House with that mindset behaved in the way which we now know that they behaved. That doesn't strike me as credible.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5, torture, Binyam Mohamed, war on terror, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld

Bush Says Jimmy Carter’s Criticisms Made His Life ‘Miserable’ .

President Bush has made a rare public appearance at the first official reunion of the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association, where he gave his reasons as to why, unlike his former Vice President, he has chosen to stay so quiet since leaving office.

I have no desire to see myself on television. I don’t want to be a panel of formers instructing the currents on what to do. … I’m trying to regain a sense of anonymity. I didn’t like it when a certain former president — and it wasn’t 41 or 42 — made my life miserable.

Think Progress have their take on this.

As USA Today notes, Bush is mostly likely talking about Jimmy Carter, since Ronald Reagan “was ill during Bush’s first term and passed away in 2004,” and Gerald Ford “stayed low-key until his death in 2006.” In 2006, Carter said that although he had been “very careful not to criticize President Bush personally,” he felt that his administration had “quite often deliberately misled the American people about the danger in Iraq to begin with, the causes for going to war in Iraq, and they have also misled the American people about what is happening in Iraq since we invaded.” After that time, he became increasingly vocal, especially when it came to Cheney, saying he had “been a disaster for our country.” He also said that the Bush administration had been “the worst in history,” but later tried to walk back those remarks.

It’s interesting that Bush admits to being so disturbed by Carter, since his administration tried to play down the former president’s influence. Bush said that such criticisms were “just part of what happens when you’re president.” Officials called Carter “increasingly irrelevant” and openly mocked him.

I have to give my rather grudging respect to the fact that Bush has, unlike Cheney, remained silent about the Obama presidency. Although I note that he applauds the stance which Cheney is currently taking:

For the first time, former President George W. Bush has said publicly that he approves of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s high-profile role in defending the past administration’s national security policies.

“I’m glad Cheney is out there,” Bush said Friday morning at a reunion breakfast.

But, it's very interesting to hear that an administration like Bush's, which came across as utterly unconcerned with how people viewed them - usually stating that their record was best left for history to judge - reveal that Carter's criticisms made them "miserable".

That's hard to believe. Certainly it puts them quite a distance from the arrogance which at the time seemed to define them, when they mocked the rest of us as being part of "the reality based community":

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."

[... ]

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It's hard to imagine a group of people with such a mindset being bothered in the slightest by what anyone else thinks of them, far less being made "miserable" by it.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Bush, Cheney, Obama, Carter

Yoo Delares His "Victory" A "Gift" For Obama.

Whenever neo-cons are found to be flat out wrong, they somehow manage to find a narrative which makes it look like they have been victorious. And there is surely no more brazen example of this than John Yoo's startling rewriting of history in The Wall Street Journal.

Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

Only in the mind of a neo-con could this be seen as "winning a fight". For, in truth, Yoo has only escaped disbarment from the legal profession because Margolis refused to implement the OPR's findings:

The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department's internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed "intentional professional misconduct" when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects.

The report by OPR concludes that Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and his boss at the time, Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, should be referred to their state bar associations for possible disciplinary proceedings.

Nor did Margolis in any way exonerate Yoo's behaviour or hand him any kind of victory. Indeed, he stated this:

For all of the above reasons, I am not prepared to conclude that the circumstantial evidence much of which is contradicted by the witness testimony regarding Yoo's efforts establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that Yoo intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client. It is a close question. I would be remiss in not observing, however, that these memoranda represent an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel. While I have declined to adopt OPR's finding of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo's loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to adopt opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power while speaking for an institutional client.

So, I am not sure quite how Yoo thinks that he has won "a drawn out fight" here. He appears to believe that he has been vindicated simply because he has not been disbarred. But the legal views which he expressed, and which he imagines might still be left open to the Obama administration, have been described as, "an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel".

Margolis further admits that it is "a close question" as to whether or not Yoo "intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client."

And yet Yoo now has the sheer gall to label this "victory" and to pronounce this as his gift to Obama.

This is why I despair at the Obama administrations unwillingness to investigate the war crimes of the Bush years. Yoo will take the fact that he has not been disbarred and sell this as a vindication for his utterly discredited legal advice.

And other right wing mouthpieces will echo his sentiments.

These people are simply shameless. Only a prosecution would have any chance of making them see that a crime had been committed here. Although, as the prosecution of "Scooter" Libby showed, there would still be many on the right who would refuse to accept that the law should apply to them.

But a prosecution might, just might, make the next president who wanted to stray into war crimes think twice before he wandered down that path.

Click here for Yoo's article.

Tags: John Yoo, war crimes, Obama

David Petraeus Refutes Cheney on Torture.

Damn it... Who forgot to send Gen. David Petraeus the memo?

Here, David Gregory seeks to get Petraeus to say that he wishes he still had the ability to torture prisoners, and Petraeus simply refuses to take the bait. Indeed, he appears to insist that people like Dick Cheney are wrong when they repeatedly call for enhanced interrogation techniques to be part of the US arsenal for tackling terrorists.

MR. GREGORY: Can I ask it a slightly different way, if you don't want to talk about what specifically is being learned? Presuming that both U.S. forces and Pakistani officials are doing the interrogation, do you wish you had the interrogation methods that were available to you during the Bush administration to get intelligence from a figure like this?

GEN. PETRAEUS: I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on in the 101st Airborne Division we're just going to--look, we just said we'd decide to obey the Geneva Convention, to, to move forward with that. That has, I think, stood elements in good stead. We have worked very hard over the years, indeed, to ensure that elements like the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who see the conduct of our detainee operations and so forth approve of them. Because in the cases where that is not true, we end up paying a price for it ultimately. Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables. They don't go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick in the Central Command area of responsibility. Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual that was given, the force of law by Congress, that that works. And...

MR. GREGORY: Well...

GEN. PETRAEUS: And that is our experience...

MR. GREGORY: In terms of recruitment threats...

GEN. PETRAEUS: ...in, in the years that we have implemented it.

MR. GREGORY: In terms of recruitment threats, do you consider the prison at Guantanamo Bay in the same way? Do you consider it to be related, or do you think, in other words, should it be closed, or do you believe it was short-sighted to set a deadline certain for its closure?

GEN. PETRAEUS: I've been on the record on that for well over a year as well, saying that it should be closed. But it should be done in a responsible manner. So I'm not seized with the issue that it won't be done by a certain date. In fact, I think it is--it's very prudent to ensure that, as we move forward with that, wherever the remaining detainees are relocated and so forth, whatever jurisdiction is used in legal cases and so forth, is really thought through and done in a very pragmatic and sensible manner.

How long before the same right wingers who idolised Petraeus during the surge, turn on him as someone who doesn't know what he is talking about?

Tags: Abdul Baradar, David Gregory, David Petraeus, Dick Cheney, Guantanamo Bay, Meet the Press, Taliban, Torture

Dick Cheney: "I Was a Big Supporter of Waterboarding"

Cheney is almost goading the Obama administration.

His daughter has long ran from TV station to TV station demanding that the US commit war crimes, but here Cheney walks right into a TV studio and admits that he personally favoured the war crime of waterboarding.

A crime which the US have already prosecuted people for.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war.

He's doing this because he knows that the Obama administration will never prosecute him. And, by being so blatant and so public about what he has done, he is making it more likely that future Republican administrations can do the same as he did. They will be able to point back to Cheney's boasting and say: "Dick Cheney made no secret of what he did and he was never prosecuted, so how can you say that this is illegal?"

In courts of law this is known as precedence, and Cheney is being very blunt about establishing his.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald makes the exact same point:

What would stop a future President (or even the current one) from re-authorizing waterboarding and the other Bush/Cheney torture techniques if he decided he wanted to? Given that both the Bush and Obama administrations have succeeded thus far in blocking all judicial adjudications of the legality of these "policies," and given that the torture architects are feted on TV and given major newspaper columns, what impediments exist to prevent their re-implementation?

They are allowed to make these points on national TV as if what we are witnessing are mere policy differences. War crimes are surely not going to be portrayed in such a fashion? And yet, routinely on American TV shows, people like O'Reilly insist that Obama is endangering America because he has said that he will not permit "enhanced interrogation", the present Republican euphemism for torture.

By not prosecuting, Obama is allowing this misperception- that waterboarding is not a crime, it's simply a policy which the Democrats choose not to practice - to take root.

It's a dangerous precedent which Obama is allowing. And it's one which the neo-cons will, in future, exploit.

Tags: Dick Cheney, waterboarding, war crimes, torture, war on terror

Meghan McCain disses the Tea Parties as a bunch of racist old people, Palin as a hypocrite.

Meghan McCain is about to be attacked by the lunatic right for her comments regarding the Tea Party Conference. She started by talking about Tom Tancredo's dreadful opening speech, when he stated that voters elected Obama because they couldn't spell "vote" in English and called for literacy tests before voters were allowed to vote.

It's innate racism, and I think it's why young people are turned off by this movement," McCain retorted on The View.

"I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not 65 year old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English," McCain added.

McCain, a self-described "progressive Republican," criticized Palin's assertion that President Obama could get himself re-elected to a second term if he launched a war against Iran.

"You should never go to war unless its the absolute last circumstance," McCain said.

As for Palin's defense of Rush Limbaugh for using the word "retard" after calling for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's resignation over the same word last week, McCain said it was a symbol of "exactly what is wrong with politics today.

"We can't placate and say Democrats can say one thing and Republicans can say another thing," she said.

McCain added that the rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement and from Republicans like Palin "will continue to turn off young voters, and anybody who says different is smoking something."

She is bang on the money, but they will turn on her just as they turned on her dad.

The Tea Party movement is now no longer an independent protest group, Sarah Palin saw to that. Her speech to their convention aligned this supposed protest group with the far right wing of the Republican party and, most importantly, herself.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

There was nothing in Palin's speech which would have appeared out of sorts in any speech by George W. Bush; indeed, in many ways, her speech was a call for the same kind of policies which the US explicitly rejected at the last election.

There's nothing new here. If anything, it represents a demand for even greater allegiance to the Bush/Cheney mindset, for a more purist and even less restrained version of the national security insanity, civil liberties assaults, massive increases in the rich-poor gap, control of Americans' lives through "social issues," and endless wars which the Republican Party has long rhetorically claimed to embody. Other than a Medicare prescription plan here and an immigration reform plan there, from what Bush/Cheney orthodoxies do they dissent? None.

This movement is nothing more than the Republican Party masquerading as a grass-roots phenomenon. In 2000, the GOP found a cowboy-hat-wearing, swaggering, "likable" Regular Guy spouting "compassion" in domestic policy and "humility" in foreign policy to re-brand itself in the wake of the Gingrich-led branding disaster. Sarah Palin and the "tea party movement" are just the updated versions of that, the re-branding in the wake of the Bush/Cheney-led image disaster. They're every bit as extremist, radical and dangerous as the last decade revealed standard right-wing Republicans to be, but the one thing they're not is new or innovative.

Palin has hijacked the Tea Party movement and exposed it as nothing other than a bunch of very sore losers who are greatly annoyed that Obama is in the White House.

They are, as Meghan McCain states, engaging in "innate racism" as Tancredo's comments inarguably proved.

Fox News can fall over themselves supporting this movement, but then, they supported the Bush regime, which is why they find the Tea Party movement so appealing.

It's the same old thing in brand new drag.

Tags: Meghan McCain, Tea party convention, Palin, Fox News

The Arguments FOR Torture Continue To Be Made.

The justifications of the Cheney/Bush torture regime continue, with Marc Thiessen arguing that it would be prudent to torture Abdulmutallab:

It likely would not be necessary to use the waterboard to get Abdulmutallab to talk — only three terrorists underwent it and only 30 had any enhanced techniques used at all. But the vast majority of Americans have it right: You don’t put an enemy combatant who just committed an act of war into the criminal-justice system — and you certainly don’t give him a lawyer and tell him, “You have the right to remain silent.” You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.

Let's leave aside the fact that the Bush regime put Richard Reid "into the criminal justice system" and achieved a successful prosecution, and let's question whether or not torturing a suspect would result in him telling you "what he knows so you can prevent new attacks".

The chances are that anyone tortured will tell you what he thinks you want to hear to make the torture stop. There is no guarantee that he will tell you the truth.

And, indeed, you can "make him tell you" almost anything. Which I would argue renders the entire practice worse than useless from an intelligence perspective.

And that's before one gets into the obvious immorality of arguing for torture.

But, as I touched upon here, this rewriting of the legacy of the Bush years is now becoming almost a cottage industry.

I find it simply appalling that there are certain right wingers who are unashamedly arguing for war crimes to be committed. And yet, in order to defend that actions of the Bush administration, that is what they are left doing.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Marc Thiessen, Torture, Bush, Cheney, war crimes

Extraordinary Rendition: The CIA's Worst-Kept Secret.

What has been done in our name really is shocking:

Kidnap subject. Strip off his clothes and dress him in a tracksuit. Blindfold and shackle him. Force headphones over his ears. Fly him to an unknown location to be interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned. Repeat.

This is the practice of "extraordinary rendition," and the experience of 35-year-old U.K. resident Binyam Mohamed on his journey home to London from Pakistan in July 2002. He was kidnapped to Morocco, where he was held for 18 months and tortured repeatedly. "They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel," he wrote in his diary. "I was totally naked…One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make a cut…He did it once, then stood still for maybe a minute, watch my reaction. It was an agony, [I was] crying, trying desperately to suppress my feelings, but I was screaming. There was blood all over."

This was just one of 20 to 30 incidents in which Mohamed was cut on his genitals while detained in Morocco. Interrogators routinely beat him, breaking bones and sometimes knocking him unconscious. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death, drugged repeatedly, and forced to listen to loud music day and night.

In January 2004, he was handcuffed and blindfolded again, placed in a van and driven to an airfield, then stripped, photographed extensively and put on a plane to a "Dark Prison" in Kabul, Afghanistan. Mohamed endured similar torture and daily interrogations in Kabul. In May, he was sent to Bagram. In September, he was sent to Guantánamo Bay. Mohamed was in Guantánamo for more than four years, and was released in February 2009. His military commission charges were dropped in October 2008.

This was the reality of Bush's war on terror and these were the kind of actions which some Republicans, to this day, continue to argue are needed to win that battle.

Some people need to go to jail for what was done here, if only to wake the rest of them up to the utter illegality of what they are supporting. And I would start prosecutions at the top rather than at the bottom of the food chain.

Tags: CIA, extraordinary rendition, war on terror

Rumsfeld let Bin Laden escape in 2001, says Senate report.

A new Senate report has found that Donald Rumsfeld failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when he was trapped at Tora Bora and that this failure has left the US more vulnerable to terrorism.

The report by the Senate foreign relations committee is damning of the way George Bush's administration conducted the aftermath of its bombing campaign in Afghanistan, saying it amounted to a "lost opportunity". It states that as a result of allowing the al-Qaida leader to flee from his Tora Bora stronghold into Pakistan, Americans were left more vulnerable to terrorism, and the foundations were laid for today's protracted Afghan insurgency. It also lays blame for the July 2005 London bombings on a failure to kill the al-Qaida leaders at Tora Bora.

Republican critics are likely to dismiss the report as a partisan work designed to deflect the current military troubles in Afghanistan away from President Barack Obama and on to his predecessor. The committee is Democratic-controlled.

But the report contains a mass of evidence that points towards the near certainty that Bin Laden was in the Tora Bora district of the White Mountains in eastern Afghanistan, along with up to 1,500 of his most loyal al-Qaida fighters and bodyguards, in late November 2001, shortly before the fall of Kabul.

Further evidence came from al-Qaida suspects detained at Guantánamo and, most authoritatively, from the official history of the US special operations command, which confirms bin Laden's presence at Tora Bora.

"Osama bin Laden's demise would not have erased the worldwide threat from extremists," it concludes. "But the failure to kill or capture him has allowed Bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the region."

The Republicans make much of the fact that the US was not attacked (again) during the presidency of George W Bush, often ignoring the fact that Bush was warned that al Qaeda intended to attack inside the United States and that he took no steps of any kind to prevent or even inquire into how one could work to prevent 9-11.

Warnings about al Qaeda began to pour in. The Bush Administration was repeatedly warned by both the U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies that al Qaeda was planning an attack. In his testimony before the independent 9-11 commission, Richard Clarke asserted that both he and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet "tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the Al Qaida threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials." Clarke further stated that "President Bush was regularly told by the director of Central Intelligence that there was an urgent threat...He was told this dozens of times in the morning briefings that George Tenet gave him." The White House has confirmed that, on August 6, 2001, President Bush's Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) specifically focused on al Qaeda's intent to attack the United States, and specifically warned that airplane hijackings could be involved. According to press reports, the PDB included a fresh report from British intelligence warning that al Qaeda was planning multiple hijackings.

The Associated Press reported that "President Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions, officials say..

And now we find that bin Laden was at Tora Bora, surrounded by US troops, and yet, somehow, he managed to get away.

When it comes to the subject of terrorism, it has always seemed to me that it matters more to the Republicans (and their supporters) that they talk tough, rather than that their actions actually be effective.

That's why they advocate torture, even though most people say it is highly ineffective. It's why they always advocate sending other people's children to war rather than attempting any kind of diplomacy, because at all times it matters more to them that they are seen to be making "tough" choices than actually being effective.

Click here for full article.

Tags: bin Laden Tora Bora, al Qaeda, Rumsfeld, Bush

We broke the law, admits CIA agent convicted of rendition.

One of the CIA operatives, found guilty in absentia by an Italian court for the abduction in 2003 of a Muslim cleric, has admitted that she "broke the law".

Sabrina deSousa, employed in the US consulate offices in Milan at the time of the abduction, made clear in an interview with ABC News that she was disgruntled that she and the other 22 Americans who were convicted by a Milan court on Wednesday had been left to fend for themselves by their country.

Ms deSousa, who has not explicitly said she was working for the CIA, was sentenced to five years by the judge in the case. Indeed on the day that the cleric, known as Abu Omar, was taken from the street and whisked first to Germany and thereafter to Egypt, she was out of the city on a skiing break.

The longest sentence, of eight years, was given to the former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Seldon Lady. There seems little likelihood that the convicted Americans will serve their terms, not least because Italy has declined to seek their extradition from the US, partly in the interest of US-Italian relations. It is probably true, however, that the 22 will always run the risk of arrest if they leave the US territory.

Saying she felt "abandoned and betrayed" as the trial unfolded over three years, Ms deSousa said "everything I did was approved by Washington... and we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorised this."

I happen to agree with her. She was told that what she was doing was approved at the very highest levels of her government, so she would have acted believing that what she was doing was legal.

It is ludicrous that people like her should be facing prosecution, whilst the people much further up the food chain, the ones who ordered rendition and torture, should be facing no charges of any kind. Even Republicans are admitting that this is ludicrous:

"I think these people have been hung out to dry," complained Republican congressman Pete Hoekstra of the House Intelligence Committee. "They're taking the fall for a decision that was made by their superiors."

It makes a mockery of justice that the people following the orders should be prosecuted whilst the people who gave the orders are not.

But, as appears so often to be true, we appear to have a political class who are above the law.

Grunts on the ground are fair game for prosecution, but to prosecute the people who gave the orders is somehow "playing politics" or prosecuting "policy differences".

And we have only arrived at this clearly immoral place because the Bush regime engaged in such rampant illegality and there appears to be no-one in the United States with the balls to hold them accountable.

UPDATE:

Andy Worthington on just what this verdict says about the Bush regime's tactics in the war on terror.

The sentences for the Americans were delivered in absentia, as the US refused to extradite any of the men and women involved, but, as the first legal ruling anywhere in the world on the program of “extraordinary rendition” at the heart of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the verdict is enormously significant. In the words of Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor who led the five-year investigation that culminated in the trial and the ruling, “It’s clear that the kidnapping of Abu Omar was a great mistake. It did serious damage in fighting terrorists because we don’t need torture, we don’t need renditions, we don’t need secret prisons.”

In a revealing interview after the ruling was delivered, former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa, one of those convicted, told ABC News that the United States “broke the law” in kidnapping Abu Omar and that “we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this.” She said the US “abandoned and betrayed” her and her colleagues, and pointed out that those who should have been held to account were the senior Bush administration officials who approved the program in the first place. As she explained, “Everything I did was approved back in Washington.”

Will the Obama administration ever get around to doing this? We were originally told that, if he went ahead with prosecutions, the Republicans would go bananas and bipartisan politics would come to an end.

Am I living in some parallel universe where the Republicans have never done anything else but play partisan politics? When I look at their behaviour over the health care bill I really wonder what it is that Obama and the Democrats fear that they will do. They simply couldn't be more obstructionist if they tried.

Click here for full article.

Tags: CIA, rendition, Italy

Tortured Law.

Alliance for Justice have produced a short film questioning the role of Bush's lawyers and the advice which they gave; which led, essentially, to torture being deemed "legal" by Yoo, Bradbury, Bybee, Addington and others.

The Obama administration must investigate what these men did. The damage which has been done to the United States' image abroad was only possible because these men fashioned their reading of the law to suit Cheney's demands.

Alliance for Justice:

President Barack Obama has ended six years of American torture of suspected terrorists arising from the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. The torture was originally outlined and sanctioned in 2002 by a series of memos drafted by lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Were these lawyers simply giving the President their best legal advice? Or was their work part of a larger criminal conspiracy to distort the law and authorize torture?

Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced an investigation of low-level CIA operatives who exceeded the grisly authority provided by the “torture memos.”

But the superiors who ordered these actions, and the lawyers who provided the legal cover have not been held accountable. Will there be a full investigation that follows the evidence up the chain of command?

Tortured Law, a new 10-minute documentary by Alliance for Justice, examines the role lawyers played in authorizing torture, and calls upon Attorney General Holder to conduct a full investigation of not only the CIA operatives, but of the torture memo authors.

Click title for Alliance For Justice website.

Tags: Torture, Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury, Addington, Bush, Cheney, war crimes, waterboarding

Italy Shows US The Way Forward.

It's a sad day for the United States when Italy appear to be showing them the way to guarantee that no-one is above the law, but that's what's happened.

A controversial law granting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi legal immunity has been dramatically thrown out by the country's top court, raising the likelihood that the media mogul will again face prosecution on corruption charges.

As the political pressure mounted last night, the 73-year-old premier lambasted the Constitutional Court judges as "red toga-wearing tools of the left" and vowed not to quit, despite predictions by opponents that the ruling could force him to resign and hold a snap election. "We must govern for five years, with or without the law," Mr Berlusconi told reporters outside his residence in Rome.

"I'll take time out from taking care of state business to go and make liars of them all. These things fire me up, they fire Italians up. Long live Italy, long live Berlusconi!"

The notion that any person or group of people should be immune from the law is a travesty of the notion that we are all equal under the law. And yet, in the US, we recently witnessed the FISA Amendment Act, which granted retroactive immunity to Telecoms who had illegally taken part in Bush's surveillance programmes.

And that's before we get to the fact that both the previous US president and vice president are on public record as having authorised torture and no-one seems to want to do anything about it. The United States under the Obama administration are ignoring clear admissions of war crimes.

Two US senators, Russ Feingold (WI) and Dick Durbin (IL), have proposed the JUSTICE Act which would reform the most abusive characteristics of the PATRIOT Act and would also roll back a controversial provision of the FISA Amendment Act that granted Telecoms retroactive immunity for their participation in the Bush administration's extralegal warrantless surveillance program.

Both Fiengold and Durbin are only trying to make the point which was clearly emphasised yesterday in Italy. It is wrong for any government to pass a law which exempts itself or people who acted on it's command from the rule of law.

Berlusconi and his cohorts may rage and fume...

But in a provocative warning before the court's ruling was made public, Umberto Bossi, Mr Berlusconi's coalition partner and rabble-rousing leader of the Northern League, said: "If the court throws out the law we could go into action, mobilising the people."

...but the principle which has been established is so basic that I doubt many would take to the streets to object to it.

"All are equal under the law." After all no private citizen can expect immunity from the law so why should such a thing be granted to Telecoms, or Berlusconi, or any other elected official?

It's hardly a controversial notion.

And yet, in the US, this would be described by the Republicans as criminalising "policy differences", as if the law - on issues as serious as war crimes and the warrantless wiretapping of individuals - can really be looked at as "policy differences" or as Cheney put it, "criminalising policy disagreements."

The Italian courts have rejected the notion of immunity for Berlusconi. In doing so they have re-established one of the most basic principles of law; that we are all equal under it and that none of us should have immunity from it.

The US would do well to follow Italy's example.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Berlusconi, immunity, Italy, Bush, Cheney, Telecoms, FISA, war crimes, torture, waterboarding