Tag: war crimes

The latest demonstration of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s feckless leadership was the 53-40 kabuki vote late on November 8th to confirm Michael B. Mukasey as Attorney General. Mukasey had refused to regard the abusive technique called waterboarding to be torture and therefore a prosecutable criminal act. Mukasey understands whom he is supposed to shield.

Democrats quickly announced the intention to introduce legislation outlawing waterboarding. But why? As Evan Wallach pointed out in The Washington Post on November 4th, numerous legal precedents prove that waterboarding already is illegal and prosecutable.

Are Democrats, having caved on Mukasey’s confirmation, now about to make yet another strategic blunder by proceeeding with this legislation?

WARNING NOTICE: Reflecting on this question and exploring the links below may lead to severe loss of equanimity and cause political activism or emigration to a still-civilized country.

I just wrote a piece for ePluribus Media that I think you’d like to check out. It has embedded video, multiple links in “Wikipedia” style, a few footnotes and a couple great images.

It was a lot of work.

I’m not going to repost the whole thing, but I am going to provide the punch-line — the spoilers, the ending — but it won’t ruin anything for you.

Trust me on this: you won’t mind reading the full piece over there, ‘cuz you’ll still be cheering the spoilers from over here.

You can help save an innocent man’s life.

His Guantanamo detainee ID number is 654. His first Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) unanimously concluded there was no evidence he was ever an “enemy combatant”, and yet he has languished in isolation and sensory deprivation for 5 years in notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Prison in a steel windowless room, with no charges ever brought against him.

Forty-five year old Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was diagnosed with hepatitis B and tuberculosis over a year ago. Amnesty International has issued a worldwide alert, as his condition has deteriorated significantly, and the prison authorities refuse to allow treatment. Please read the following and consider contacting the authorities indicated. A man’s life is at stake… and a country’s soul. [Update at end of essay]

The story, out of England, is pretty straight-forward, but the implications are stunning; or, they would be stunning, if the repeated crimes and inhumanity of the Bush Administration had not fried whatever synapses allow us to feel stunned.

The Guardian reports:

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

Today, the NYTimes Editorial Board opines:

Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

And then asks:

For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?

Indeed America is not simply a Nation that tortures. It is a Nation that insists that an American flag lapel pin be worn while we torture.

Patriotism? No, jingoism. Fascism.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

He is a lying war criminal.

Has there ever been a more disgraceful Attorney General than Alberto Gonzales? Has there ever been a more disgraceful Administration than the Bush Administration? No:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

The nation may never recover from the damage done by these scoundrels.