Orders to Torture - Violations of Federal Law and War Crimes

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040607&s=editors


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Orders to Torture

from the June 7, 2004 issue of The Nation

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal now implicates the highest levels of the Bush Administration in violating federal law and in war crimes. In barely two weeks, the story has shifted from horrific photographs of prisoners to intimations of homicide; from prison mismanagement blamed on the fog of war to the cool clarity of deliberate White House designs to protect torturers from prosecution; from "the six morons who lost the war" to the Defense Secretary, the White House Counsel and the President himself.

The sheer range of brutality and illegal acts defies brief summary. And more details emerge daily: On the Nation website, Jason Vest reveals possible perjury by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, while according to Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally approved a secret "special-access program" for incarceration, humiliation and violent interrogation, expanding the program from a narrow group of presumed Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan to the insurgency in Iraq.

One revelation in particular should be sounding a constitutional emergency siren: The President has known for more than two years that his Administration has been pursuing policies that could qualify as war crimes under federal and international law. In a January 25, 2002, memo, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised the President of "the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," a federal statute. He advised Bush to invent a legal technicality--declaring detainees in the "war on terror" to be outside the Geneva Conventions--which, he said, "substantially reduces" the chance of prosecution. Gonzales went further, telling the President that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners"; he pooh-poohed concerns that abandoning the Geneva standards might endanger US troops.

Let's be clear about what this means: Gonzales was urging--and the President adopted as policy--an end run around federal laws. The War Crimes Act, passed by Congress in 1996, allows criminal prosecution of Americans for actions that violate the rights granted prisoners and civilians by the Geneva Conventions and for "outrages upon personal dignity." It is backed by the full range of federal penalties, up to and including the death penalty. And all treaties, including the Geneva Conventions and the Torture Convention, are likewise the binding law of the land....Cont'd >

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040607&s=editors

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Also read: Implausible Denial II

by Jason Vest

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=vest2

...are indicative of arbitrary state power and a government moving into dictatorship.

The Nick Berg execution is intended as a not so subtle message to those who understand that it was our people running the Gulag who produced the film. For those perceptive enough to pick up the clumsy signals, the film is a royal, "so what!" to those who believe in the rule of law and, "What are you going to do about it?" Try suing this administration, this could happen to your family.

To the majority, those who remain in denial about the American Gulag, the Patriot Act and the prospect of electronically arranged election outcomes, it is mere conventional anti-Arab propaganda in justification of our regime's illegal torture policy.

This expressly apes the criminal arrogance of the WWII years. We have seen it before perhaps but this is indeed a self-affirming self confidence that lives by power and the gun as they were trained to believe was supreme. Reason and caution counsels them otherwise, but they are possessed and over the boundary where so many have exulted in plunging to their inner and physical doom.

Weren't most Jews killed for a variety of reasons after the war was reasonably lost? Did any of their reasons have anything but spite and blindness and rage behind them? What they have chosen they persist in, sealed in more and more blood sacrifices as if some dark god will continue to stave off defeat.

a parasite, an insideous virus that multi national corporations may not find profitable for long.
Aside from cars and war machines/mini nukes, our manufacturing base has cut itself off at the roots.
Our leaves will wither and die.
No shade will be afforded even the wealthiest in this country under the scrutiny of a fascist security force designed to control and eliminate millions of destitute Americans with nothing left to lose.
Pestilence will creep into even the most secure gated communities.
For the program of the new American century to win, America must lose.
We are visably losing the one thing that Bush says is a God given blessing, and that is freedom.

*But perhaps I should not be so polite and merely say what I really mean ;)