War crimes made easy-Asian times- a must read.

By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

How has the Bush administration gotten away with such apparently illegal acts as hiding intelligence reports from Congress, creating secret prisons, establishing death squads, kidnapping people and spiriting them across national borders, and planning unprovoked wars? Part of the answer lies in the administration's deliberate effort, initiated even before September 11, 2001, to tear down any existing legal and institutional means for preventing, exposing or punishing violations of national and international law by American officials.

In 2002, Adriel Bettleheim wrote in the Congressional Quarterly that Vice President Dick Cheney "considers it the responsibility of the current administration to reclaim those lost powers for the institution of the presidency". Indeed, the Bush administration has tried to remove all conceivable restrictions on the "imperial presidency", setting its sights in particular on dismantling the Freedom of Information Act, the Intelligence Oversight Act and the War Powers Resolution.

Restoring limits on the power of the executive branch to conceal information, tell (and hide) lies, make war at its own discretion, or kidnap, torture and kill without interference from Congress, the courts and the public, will be crucial tasks, if future Abu Ghraibs are to be prevented.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides a good example of the constraints Cheney aimed to remove. Essentially a sunshine law passed by Congress in 1966, the FOIA requires that government agencies disclose their records on written request. The act provides nine "exemptions" to the public's right of access, but in the Bill Clinton years attorney general Janet Reno advised agencies that information should be released as long as it did "no foreseeable harm". >>>>snip


A must read http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL08Ak02.html

book-marked for a more leisurely read.

Sacred Terror: The Global Death Squad of George W. Bush

The much-belated, poll-prompted outcry of a few American elected officials against the widespread use of torture by the Bush Administration – following years of silent acquiescence in the face of incontrovertible evidence of deliberate atrocity – is a welcome development, of course. But it has left an even more sinister aspect of Bushist policy untouched, one that likewise has been hidden in plain sight for years.

On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.

The existence of this universal death squad – and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents – has not provoked so much as a crumb, an atom, a quantum particle of controversy in the American Establishment, although it's no secret. The executive order was first bruited in the Washington Post in October 2001. I first wrote of it in my Moscow Times column in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the dread edict also applied to American citizens, as the Associated Press reported.

The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred in Pakistan this month, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.

But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by the New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to…enter countries surreptitiously."

The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on "extrajudicial killings" noted in December 2004: " Empowering governments to identify and kill 'known terrorists' places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists… While it is portrayed as a limited 'exception' to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others."

It's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler.

SNIP

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=331&Itemid=1

I think the problem did not start with Bush. Like a virus that developed undetected, it took a while for us to see it.

When Bush came in, the corruption was out in the open. Maybe that's a good thing. Now we can deal with it.

The water's getting hot.

K&R.

Hard to pick only 4 paragraphs to post, I am sure, as the entire article is so important.

Senator Byrd was right;


As Senator Robert Byrd pointed out in a speech to Congress on January 25, this doctrine of preventive war "takes the checks and balances established in the constitution that limit the president's ability to use our military at his pleasure, and throws them out the window ... This doctrine of preemptive strikes places the sole decision of war and peace in the hand of the president and undermines the constitutional power of Congress to declare war".