Tuesday 16th of April 2024
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speaking evil, hearing evil & seeing evil .....

speaking evil, hearing evil & seeing evil .....

From dismissal only a few months ago by leading Democrats in Washington as unthinkable, it now seems possible that senior officials in the Bush administration - maybe even at least one of the top two - will be the target of public war crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions, here in the United States.

Overseas is already dangerous terrain. George W Bush's first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, fled Paris a couple of years ago to avoid honouring a subpoena from French investigators, replicating a similarly hasty exit from the French jurisdiction by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

For almost the entire four years of Bush's second term, one of the main campaigns of the left was to pressure the Democratic leadership to support impeachment proceedings against the Republican president and vice-president.

Top Democrats such as House majority leader Nancy Pelosi nixed the idea. But following regime change in Washington in January, prosecution of officials such as Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and attorney general Alberto Gonzales, for instituting, supervising or condoning specific war crimes, is now far more plausible with them out of power.

Last Wednesday, February 25, Pelosi was asked by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow what her reaction would be to any charges levelled at the Republicans who've now retreated to private life and are writing their memoirs.

Maddow: "If the US Justice Department's inspector general report that comes out this summer suggests that there has been criminal activity at the official level on issues like torture, or wireless wiretapping, or rendition, or any of these other issues..."

Pelosi: "No one is above the law. I think I have said that."

In active English, Pelosi's pious phraseology about no one being "above the law" translates into something like: "These guys are out of power and their popularity ratings are in the toilet so it's safe to turn the dogs on them."

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46636,opinion,payback-time-looms-for-george-bush-and-his-cronies-alexander-cockburn

UK too...

Britain may have broken international law on torture, ministers have been warned by the United Nations. Professor Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, has alerted ministers to a range of concerns, including claims that MI5 officers were complicit in the maltreatment of suspects.

The Austrian law professor warned that Britain has breached the UN convention on torture, and he revealed that he was organising a fact-finding mission to Pakistan, whose security services allegedly tortured terror suspects before the captives were questioned by British intelligence.

It is the first time the UN's senior torture investigator has directly criticised a British government. Human rights groups said it was highly significant. Clare Algar, executive director of legal charity Reprieve, said: "This is a further significant embarrassment for the British government and reinforces the fact that we really need an independent review into what has been going on."

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see hypocrisy at top

The CIA destroyed 92 tapes

The CIA destroyed 92 controversial interrogation videos, US Justice Department documents showed overnight, in a new twist in the tape scandal which may fuel more allegations of Bush-era abuses.

"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," Acting US Attorney Lev Dassin wrote in his letter dated March 2 to New York Judge Alvin Hellerstein.

"Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."

So far the Central Intelligence Agency has only admitted to destroying several tapes - which are said to show that "war on terror" suspects were tortured or water-boarded - to protect its employees from any Al Qaeda reprisals.

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Tapes would not be destroyed unless they were hotly compromising for the CIA. see toon and read comments about torture on this site...