Center for Constitutional Rights Supports National Lawyers Guild Call for Dismissal and Prosecution of John Yoo

On April 1, a secret 81-page memo written by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in March 2003 was made public. In that memo, Yoo advised the Bush administration that the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel would not enforce U.S. criminal laws, including federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. The week after the publication of Yoo's memo, the National Lawyers Guild issued a press release calling for the Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California to dismiss Yoo, who is now a professor of law there. The NLG also called for the prosecution of Yoo for war crimes and for his disbarment.

Two days later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a letter supporting the NLG's call for Yoo’s dismissal and prosecution. CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren wrote, "The 'Torture Memo' was not an abstract, academic foray. Rather, it was crafted to sidestep U.S. and international laws that make coercive interrogation and torture a crime. It was written with the knowledge that its legal conclusions were to be applied to the interrogations of hundreds of individual detainees... And it worked. It became the basis for the CIA’s use of extreme interrogation methods as well the basis for DOD interrogation policy... Yoo’s legal opinions as well as the others issued by the Office of Legal Counsel were the keystone of the torture program, and were the necessary precondition for the torture program’s creation and implementation."

The day after the NLG issued its press release, Boalt Hall Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. posted a statement on the Boalt Hall website, responding to "the New York Times (editorial April 4), the National Lawyers' Guild, and hundreds of individuals from around the world" who had criticized or questioned Yoo's continuing employment at Boalt Hall.

Dean Edley cited the University of California's Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015, which lists under "Types of unacceptable conduct: ... Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty." Edley said he was not convinced Yoo had engaged in "clear professional misconduct - that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney - material to Professor Yoo's academic position." Edley was likewise not convinced "the writing of the memoranda, and [Yoo's] related conduct, violate[d] a criminal or comparable statute."

Edley felt Yoo's conduct was not "morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank, and place." Edley wrote, "Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders."

Indeed, ABC News reported last week that Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft met in the White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding. George W. Bush, the decider-in-chief, admitted, "yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

These top U.S. officials are liable for war crimes under the U.S. War Crimes Act, and for violation of the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, which are all part of U.S. law. They ordered the torture which was carried out by the interrogators.

But John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers, including David Addington, Jay Bybee, William Haynes and Alberto Gonzales, are also liable for the same offenses. They were an integral part of a criminal conspiracy to violate U.S. laws. In U.S. v. Altstoetter, Nazi lawyers were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for advising Hitler on how to "legally" disappear political suspects to special detention camps. The United States charged that since they were lawyers, "not farmers or factory workers," they should have known their technical justifications for circumventing the Hague and Geneva Conventions were illegal.

The cases of Altstoetter and those of the Bush lawyers share common aspects. Both dealt with people detained during wartime who were not POWs; in both, it was reasonably foreseeable that the advice they gave would result in great physical or mental harm or death to many detainees; and in both, the advice was legally erroneous. More than 108 people have died in U.S. detention since 9/11, many from torture. And the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel later withdrew the memoranda, an admission that the advice in them was defective.

Furthermore, the Bush lawyers have engaged in ethical violations which should result in their disbarment. As New York University School of Law Professor Stephen Gillers wrote in The Nation, H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, who is examining the legal advice these lawyers provided, "should find that this work is not 'consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.'"

Even Dean Edley appears to recognize that the case of John Yoo is not a simple issue of academic freedom, such as "merely some professor vigorously expounding controversial and even extreme views."

As CCR President Michael Ratner wrote in the forthcoming book, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld, "Had these various opinions been written as a law school or academic exercise, they could be merely condemned and their authors would fail their class, but they would not be held criminally accountable. But they were not an academic exercise. They were written by high-level attorneys [such as John Yoo] in a context where the opinions represented the governing law and were to be employed by the President in setting detainee policy. This was more than bad lawyering; this was aiding and abetting their clients’ violation of the law by justifying the commission of a crime using false legal rhetoric."

It is inconceivable that Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has served as a rubber stamp for Bush's illegal policies, will bring any of these leaders or lawyers to justice. There is a chance that a future Attorney General will do so. Barack Obama has pledged to have his Justice Department and Attorney General "immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued . . . if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated . . . Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law." Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give these deciders and lawyers immunity from prosecution for torture and other mistreatment committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005.

In addition to criminal prosecutions, disbarments, and the dismissal of John Yoo from the Boalt Hall faculty, Jay Bybee, who was rewarded for his illegal advice with a federal judgeship, should be removed from the bench by impeachment.

It is time for the impunity enjoyed by the Bush administration to come to an end.

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Unrepentant, Bush Denies Torture

The April 2004 publication of grotesque photographs of naked Iraqis piled on top of each other, forced to masturbate, and led around on leashes like dogs, sent shock waves around the world. George W. Bush declared, “I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Yet less than a year later, his Justice Department issued a secret opinion endorsing the harshest interrogation techniques the CIA has ever used, according to an October 4, 2007 report in the New York Times. These include head slapping, frigid temperatures, and water boarding, in which the subject is made to feel he is drowning. Water boarding is widely considered a torture technique. Once again, Bush is compelled to issue a denial. He insists, “This government does not torture people."

This was not the first time the Bush administration had officially endorsed torture, however. John Yoo, writing for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, penned an August 2002 memorandum that rewrote the legal definition of torture to require the equivalent of organ failure. This memo violated the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States ratified, and therefore part of U.S. law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

In December 2002, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved interrogation methods that included the use of dogs, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, deprivation of light and sound, and water boarding. U.S. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora told William Haynes, the Pentagon’s general counsel, that Rumsfeld’s “authorized interrogation techniques could rise to the level of torture.” As a result, Rumsfeld rescinded some methods but reserved the right to approve others, including water boarding, on a case-by-case basis.

When Bush maintained earlier this week that his government doesn’t torture prisoners, he stressed the need for interrogation to “protect the American people.” Notwithstanding the myth perpetuated by shows like “24,” however, torture doesn’t work. Experts agree that people who are tortured will say anything to make the torture stop.

One of the first victims of the Bush administration’s 2002 torture policy was Abu Zubaydah, whom they called “chief of operations” for al Qaeda and bin Laden’s “number three man.” He was repeatedly tortured at the secret CIA “black sites.” They water boarded him, withheld his medication, threatened him with impending death, and bombarded him with continuous deafening noise and harsh lights.

But Zubaydah wasn’t a top al Qaeda leader. Dan Coleman, one of the FBI's leading experts on al Qaeda, said of Zubaydah, "He knew very little about real operations, or strategy … He was expendable, you know, the greeter . . . Joe Louis in the lobby of Caeser's Palace, shaking hands." Moreover, Zubaydah was schizophrenic; according to Coleman, “This guy is insane, certifiable split personality.” Coleman's views were echoed at the top levels of the CIA and were communicated to Bush and Cheney. But Bush scolded CIA director George Tenet, saying, "I said [Zubaydah] was important. You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" Zubaydah's minor role in al Qaeda and his apparent insanity were kept secret.

In response to the torture, Zubaydah told his interrogators about myriad terrorist targets al Qaeda had in its sights: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statute of Liberty, shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, and apartment buildings. Al Qaeda was close to building a crude nuclear bomb, Zubaydah reported. None of this was corroborated but the Bush gang reacted to each report zealously.

Likewise, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was tortured so severely – including by water boarding – that the information he provided is virtually worthless. A potentially rich source of intelligence was lost as a result of the torture.

Bush’s insistence that his administration doesn't torture rings hollow. He lied about weapons of mass destruction and a Saddam-al Qaeda connection in Iraq. He lied when he assured us his officials would not wiretap without warrants. As evidence of secret memos detailing harsh interrogation policies continues to emerge, we can't believe Bush's denials about torture.

Democrats in Congress have demanded they be allowed to see the memos, but Bush said the interrogation methods have been "fully disclosed to appropriate members of Congress." Senator John D. Rockefeller IV was unmoved. "I'm tired of these games," he said. "They can't say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program."

It is incumbent upon the Senate Judiciary Committee to vigorously interrogate Michael Mukasey during his attorney general confirmation hearing. As AG, Mukasey would oversee the department that writes interrogation policy. Mukasey should know the Convention Against Torture prohibits torture in all circumstances, even in times of war.

Torture is a war crime. Those who commit or order torture can be convicted under the U.S. War Crimes Statute. Techniques that don't rise to the level of torture but constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment also violate U.S. law. Congress should provide for the appointment of a special independent counsel to fully investigate and prosecute all who are complicit in the torture and mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.

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Alberto Gonzales: Tip of the Iceberg

As Democratic and Republican leaders alike pile on to demand Alberto Gonzales' resignation, only George W. Bush is singing his praises. Deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Bush was happy with Gonzales' testimony. "The attorney general continues to have the president's full confidence," she said.

It's not surprising that Bush would be pleased. Like a good soldier, Gonzales, who claimed a faulty memory 70 times, was careful not to incriminate his bosses.

Bush and Cheney hired Gonzales as attorney general to carry out their plan to amass governmental power in the hands of the Executive. They knew they could count on him.

Gonzales' bona fides were well-known to his bosses. When he was counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush from 1995 to 1997, Gonzales provided his boss with "scant summaries" on capital punishment cases that "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," according to the Atlantic Monthly.

Gonzales prepared 57 such summaries, including one regarding the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man executed for murdering a restaurant manager. The jury was never told about his mental condition. Gonzales's three-page summary of the case for Bush mentioned only that Washington's defense counsel's 30-page plea for clemency (which covered the mental competency issue) was rejected by the Texas parole board. Bush refused to stay executions in 56 of the 57 cases in which Gonzales wrote abbreviated memos.

The attorney general was central to the Bush-Cheney-Yoo illegal domestic surveillance program. When he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee after the New York Times uncovered the secret spying program, attorney general Gonzales walked in lockstep with his bosses. Gonzales would not tell the senators whether Bush had authorized other secret programs. He refused to say whether the government could wiretap purely domestic calls without a warrant, or whether he had the authority to search the first class mail of American citizens or to examine people's medical records. When Republican Senator John Cornyn asked him whether law enforcement could shoot down a plane with drugs, Gonzales said, "I'd have to think about that."

At Gonzales' confirmation hearing for attorney general, he said he wasn't sure whether torturing prisoners could be lawful. The former Texas Supreme Court justice surely knew the terms of the Convention Against Torture, a treaty ratified by the United States and therefore part of the supreme law of the land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The convention says, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."

Yet, as White House counsel, Gonzales had advised Bush that the Geneva Conventions, which mandate humane treatment for all captives, were "quant" and "obsolete." Gonzales' advice facilitated the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo and secret CIA prisons around the world. Gonzales had evidently done his homework. The Nazi lawyers at Nuremberg also advised their clients that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete."

Gonzales' confirmation testimony led the New York Times to opine, "Mr. Bush had made the wrong choice when he rewarded Mr. Gonzales for his loyalty," and the Washington Post to say, "The message Mr. Gonzales left with senators was unmistakable: As attorney general, he will seek no change in practices that have led to the torture and killing of scores of detainees and to the blackening of U.S. moral authority around the world." The Post concluded, "Those senators who are able to reach clear conclusions about torture and whether the United States should engage in it have reason for grave reservations about Mr. Gonzales."

In 2005, Bush said, "Al Gonzales is a great friend of mine. I'm the kind of person, when a friend gets attacked, I don't like it." Eventually, however, Bush will have to unload Gonzales the way he unloaded his friend Donald Rumsfeld. Loyal Republican senators trying to paint Gonzales as incompetent don't want the finger to point higher to the real culprits - Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

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Mistrial at Court Martial: Watada Beats the Government

When the Army judge declared a mistrial over defense objection in 1st Lt. Ehren Watada's court martial, he probably didn't realize jeopardy attached. That means that under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Constitution, the government cannot retry Lt. Watada on the same charges of missing movement and conduct unbecoming an officer.

Lt. Watada is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse orders to deploy to Iraq. He claimed those orders were unlawful because the war is illegal and he would be an accomplice to war crimes if he followed them.

The judge refused to allow me and others to testify as expert defense witnesses on the illegality of the Iraq war and the war crimes the Bush administration is committing there.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice sets forth the duty of military personnel to obey only lawful commands. Article 92 says: "A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the law of the United States "

Lt. Watada said at a June 6, 2006 press conference in Tacoma, Washington, "The war in Iraq is in fact illegal. It is my obligation and my duty to refuse any orders to participate in this war." He stated, "An order to take part in an illegal war is unlawful in itself. So my obligation is not to follow the order to go to Iraq."

Citing "deception and manipulation and willful misconduct by the highest levels of my chain of command," Lt. Watada declared there is "no greater betrayal to the American people" than the Iraq war.

The "turning point" for Lt. Watada came when he "saw the pain and suffering of so many soldiers and their families, and innocent Iraqis." He said, "I best serve my soldiers by speaking out against unlawful orders of the highest levels of my chain of command, and making sure our leaders are held accountable." Lt. Watada felt he "had the obligation to step up and do whatever it takes," even if that means facing court martial and imprisonment.

Lt. Watada did face court martial, and four years in prison, until the judge declared a mistrial.

This is what I would have said had I been allowed to testify at Lt. Watada's court martial:

The United States is committing a crime against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Iraq.

A war of aggression, prosecuted in violation of international treaties, is a crime against the peace. The war in Iraq violates the Charter of the United Nations, which prohibits the use of force. There are only two exceptions to that prohibition: self-defense and approval by the Security Council. A pre-emptive or preventive war is not allowed under the Charter.

Bush's war in Iraq was not undertaken in self-defense. Iraq had not attacked the US or any other country for 12 years. And Saddam Hussein's military capability had been effectively neutered by the Gulf War, 12 years of punishing sanctions, and nearly daily bombing by the US and UK over the "no-fly-zones."

Bush tried mightily to get the Security Council to sanction his war on Iraq. But the Council refused. Bush then cobbled together prior Council resolutions, none of which, individually or collectively, authorized the use of force in Iraq. Although Bush claimed to be enforcing Security Council resolutions, the Charter empowers only the Council to enforce its resolutions.

Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions constitute war crimes, for which individuals can be punished under the US War Crimes Act. Willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment are grave breaches.

The torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq are grave breaches of Geneva, and therefore, war crimes. The execution of unarmed civilians in Haditha and other Iraqi cities are also war crimes.

Commanders in the chain of command, all the way up to the commander in chief, can be prosecuted for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates were committing war crimes and failed to stop or prevent them. The torture policies and rules of engagement were set at the top. It is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell who should be on trial - for the commission of war crimes.

Inhumane acts against a civilian population are crimes against humanity and violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. The targeting of civilians and failure to protect civilians and civilian objects are crimes against humanity.

The dropping of 2,000-pound bombs in residential areas of Baghdad during "Shock and Awe" were crimes against humanity. The indiscriminate US attack on Fallujah, which was collective punishment in retaliation for the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries, was a crime against humanity. The destruction of hospitals in Fallujah by the US military, its refusal to let doctors treat patients, and shooting into ambulances were crimes against humanity. Declaring Fallujah a "weapons-free" zone, with orders to shoot anything that moved, was a crime against humanity.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal. He wrote:

"No political or economic situation can justify the crime of aggression. If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

Lt. Ehren Watada was correct when he said the war is illegal and he would be party to war crimes if he deployed to Iraq. The orders to deploy were unlawful and Lt. Watada had a duty to disobey them. Although he faces the possibility of a dishonorable discharge, the judge's grant of a mistrial precludes retrial on the same criminal charges.

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Donald Rumsfeld: The War Crimes Case

As the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and were on the verge of taking over the Senate, George W. Bush announced that Donald Rumsfeld was out and Robert Gates was in as Secretary of Defense. When Bush is being run out of town, he knows how to get out in the front of the crowd and make it look like he's leading the parade. The Rumsfeld-Gates swap is a classic example.

The election was a referendum on the war. The dramatic results prove that the overwhelming majority of people in this country don't like the disaster Bush has created in Iraq. So rather than let the airwaves fill up with beaming Democrats and talk of the horrors of Iraq, Bush changed the subject and fired Rumsfeld. Now, when the Democrats begin to investigate what went wrong, Rumsfeld will no longer be the controversial public face of the war.

Rumsfeld had come under fire from many quarters, not the least of which was a gaggle of military officers who had been clamoring for his resignation. Bush said he decided to oust Rumsfeld before Tuesday's voting but lied to reporters so it wouldn't affect the election. Putting aside the incredulity of that claim, Bush likely waited to see if there would be a changing of the legislative guard before giving Rumsfeld his walking papers. If the GOP had retained control of Congress, Bush would probably have retained Rumsfeld. But in hindsight, Bush has to wish he had ejected Rumsfeld before the election to demonstrate a new direction in the Iraq war to angry voters.

Rumsfeld's sin was not in failing to develop a winning strategy for Iraq. There is no winning in Iraq, because we never belonged there in the first place. The war in Iraq is a war of aggression. It violates the United Nations Charter which only permits one country to invade another in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council.

Donald Rumsfeld was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war. On September 15, 2001, in a meeting at Camp David, Rumsfeld suggested an attack on Iraq because he was deeply worried about the availability of "good targets in Afghanistan." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Rumsfeld articulated his hope to "dissuade" other nations from "asymmetrical challenges" to U.S. power. Rumsfeld's support for a preemptive attack on Iraq "matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination," Ron Suskind wrote after interviewing O'Neill.

Rumsfeld defensively sought to decouple oil access from regime change in Iraq when he appeared on CBS News on November 15, 2002. In a Hamlet moment, Rumsfeld proclaimed the United States' beef with Iraq has "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." The Secretary doth protest too much.

Prosecuting a war of aggression isn't Rumsfeld's only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial execution of several people. Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, which constitutes a war crime. In his book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh described the "unacknowledged" special-access program (SAP) established by a top-secret order Bush signed in late 2001 or early 2002. It authorized the Defense Department to set up a clandestine team of Special Forces operatives to defy international law and snatch, or assassinate, anyone considered a "high-value" Al Qaeda operative, anywhere in the world. Rumsfeld expanded SAP into Iraq in August 2003.

But Rumsfeld's crimes don't end there. He sanctioned the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and thus constitute war crimes. Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, removal of clothing, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. According to Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld sanctioned the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners. Rumsfeld also authorized waterboarding, where the interrogator induces the sensation of imminent death by drowning. Waterboarding is widely considered a form of torture.

Rumsfeld was intimately involved with the interrogation of a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Qahtani, at Guantánamo in late 2002. General Geoffrey Miller, who later transferred many of his harsh interrogation techniques to Abu Ghaib, supervised the interrogation and gave Rumsfeld weekly updates on his progress. During a six-week period, al-Qahtani was stripped naked, forced to wear women's underwear on his head, denied bathroom access, threatened with dogs, forced to perform tricks while tethered to a dog leash, and subjected to sleep deprivation. Al-Qahtani was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. For 48 days out of 54, he was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day.

Even though Rumsfeld didn't personally carry out the torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he authorized it. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be liable for war crimes committed by his inferiors if he knew or should have known they would be committed and did nothing to stop of prevent them. The U.S. War Crimes Act provides for prosecution of a person who commits war crimes and prescribes life imprisonment, or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

Although intending to signal a new direction in Iraq with his nomination of Gates to replace Rumsfeld, Bush has no intention of leaving Iraq. He is building huge permanent U.S. military bases there. Gates at the helm of the Defense Department, Bush said, "can help make the necessary adjustments in our approach." Bush hopes he can bring congressional Democrats on board by convincing them he will simply fight a smarter war.

But this war can never get smarter. Nearly 3,000 American soldiers and more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died and tens of thousands have been wounded. Our national debt has skyrocketed with the billions Bush has pumped into the war. Now that there is a new day in Congress, there must be a new push to end the war. That means a demand that Congress cut off its funds.

And the war criminals must be brought to justice - beginning with Donald Rumsfeld. On November 14, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and other organizations will ask the German federal prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation into the war crimes of Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. Although Bush has immunized his team from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, they could be tried in any country under the well-established principle of universal jurisdiction.

Donald Rumsfeld may be out of sight, but he will not be out of mind. The chickens have come home to roost.

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Stop the Beast

To date, the Iraq War represents the fullest and most relentless application of the Bush Agenda. The 'freer and safer world' envisioned by Bush and his administration is ultimately one of an ever-expanding American empire driven forward by the growing powers of the nation's largest multinational corporations and unrivaled military.
-Antonia Juhasz, The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

In an annual security conference on Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld assured the audience, "We don't intend to occupy [Iraq] for any period of time. Our troops would like to go home and they will go home."

Why, then, would the United States be building an enormous embassy in Baghdad and a base so large, it eclipses Kosovo's Camp Bondsteel which had been the largest foreign US military base built since Vietnam?
The new embassy, which occupies a space two-thirds the area of the national mall in Washington DC, comprises 21 buildings which will house over 8,000 government officials. It has a huge pool, gym, theater, beauty salon, school, and six apartment buildings.

The gargantuan military base, Camp Anaconda, occupies 15 square-miles of Iraqi soil near Balad. The base is home to 20,000 soldiers and thousands of "contractors," or mercenaries. The aircraft runway at Anaconda is the second busiest in the world, behind only Chicago's O'Hare airport. And, depending on which report you read, between six and fourteen more U.S. military bases are under construction in Iraq. It doesn't appear we'll be leaving any time soon -- or any time, really.

Bush's trumped-up war on Iraq has claimed nearly 2,500 US military lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Thousands of US soldiers suffer in military hospitals, most with head injuries, many missing limbs. Thousands more have PTSD. Our economy is in shambles from the war and Bush's tax-cuts-for-the-rich. And America's moral standing in the world continues to plummet.

So, with all the construction activity in Iraq, and with an overextended military and an under funded budget, how could the Bush Administration possibly consider expanding the fight and attacking Iran? Logic and reason say it couldn't happen and shouldn't happen. But this administration has rarely paid much heed to logic and reason.

The plan to attack Iran has long been in the works. Bush gave us a preview in January 2002 when he inaugurated it into his "axis of evil." His 2006 National Military Strategy says, "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran." On Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld called Iran the world's leading terrorist nation. Does any of this have a familiar ring to it?

To understand why the US may attack Iran, one must consider the underlying motive of US militarism. The recent US strategy is calculated to maintain economic, political and military hegemony over oil-rich areas of the world. A 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on post Cold War Strategy that was leaked to the New York Times said, "Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia to] preserve US and Western access to the region's oil."

Truthout writer Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who spent eight months in occupied Iraq, told a gathering at Thomas Jefferson School of Law on Friday that the US has been conducting ongoing special operations inside Iran. He cited unmanned surveillance drones flying over Iran. Jamail predicts Bush will invade Iran before the November election.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern agrees with Jamail's prediction, but thinks it will happen in June or July. "There is already one carrier task force there in the Gulf, two are steaming toward it at the last report I have at least - they will be there in another week or so," McGovern said on The Alex Jones Show.

Team Bush is following the same game plan used in the run-up to Iraq - hyping a threat that doesn't exist and going through the motions of diplomacy.

Bush & Co. are not motivated by rationality. They act in the interests of the huge corporations, at the expense of humanity. During the Bush years, oil companies have earned record profits. Dick Cheney's Halliburton has landed many of the juiciest contracts in Iraq. New Iraqi laws that US ambassador Paul Bremer put in place lock in significant advantages for US corporations in Iraq, including corporate control of Iraq's oil.

Neoconservative Thomas Friedman, in a March 1999 New York Times article illustrated by an American flag on a fist, accurately summed up US foreign policy:

For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty
superpower that it is ... The hidden hand of the market will never work without
a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the
designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and
Marine Corps.

As long as we allow our government to pursue this strategy, Abu Ghraibs and Hadithas will continue to emerge, our soldiers and thousands of people in other countries will continue to die, and our economy will continue toward bankruptcy. It is up to us to stop the beast - now!

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The Haditha Massacre

They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.
- Observations of Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones after the Haditha Massacre

On November 19, 2005, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton allegedly killed 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in a three to five hour rampage. One victim was a 76-year-old amputee in a wheelchair holding a Koran. A mother and child bent over as if in prayer were also among the fallen. "I pretended that I was dead when my brother's body fell on me, and he was bleeding like a faucet," said Safa Younis Salim, a 13-year-old girl who survived by faking her death.

Other victims included girls and boys ages 14, 10, 5, 4, 3 and 1. The Washington Post reported, "Most of the shots ... were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, doctors at Haditha's hospital said."

The executions of 24 unarmed civilians were conducted in apparent retaliation for the death of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas when a small Marine convoy hit a roadside bomb earlier that day.

A statement issued by a US Marine Corps spokesman the next day claimed: "A US Marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."

A subsequent Marine version of the events said the victims were killed inadvertently in a running gun battle with insurgents.

Both of these stories were false and the Marines knew it. They were blatant attempts to cover up the atrocity, disguised as "collateral damage."

The Marine Corps paid $38,000 in compensation to relatives of the victims, according to a report in the Denver Post. These types of payments are made only to compensate for accidental deaths inflicted by US troops. This was a relatively large amount, indicating the Marines knew something was not right during that operation, according to Mike Coffman, the Colorado state treasurer who served in Iraq recently as a Marine reservist.

Congressman John Murtha, D-Pa., a former Marine, was briefed on the Haditha investigation by Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee. Murtha said Sunday, "The reports I have from the highest level: No firing at all. No interaction. No military action at all in this particular incident. It was an explosive device, which killed a Marine. From then on, it was purely shooting people."

The Haditha massacre did not become public until Time Magazine ran a story about it in March of this year. Time had turned over the results of its investigation, including a videotape, to the US military in January. Only then did the military launch an investigation.

These Marines "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results," a US official told the Los Angeles Times.

"Marines over-reacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," Murtha said.

Murtha's statement both indicts and exonerates the Marines of the crime of murder.

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Premeditation and deliberation - cold-blooded planning - are required for first degree murder. Complete self-defense can be demonstrated by an honest and reasonable belief in the need to defend oneself against death or great bodily injury. The Marines might be able to show that, in the wake of the killing of their buddy Terrazas by an improvised explosive device, they acted in an honest belief that they might be killed in this hostile area. But the belief that unarmed civilians inside their homes posed a deadly threat to the Marines would be unreasonable. An honest but unreasonable belief in the need to defend constitutes imperfect self-defense, which negates the malice required for murder, and reduces murder to manslaughter.

An honest but unreasonable belief in the need to defend constitutes imperfect self-defense, which negates the malice required for murder, and reduces murder to manslaughter.

Many of our troops suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, a Marine in Kilo Company, did not participate in the Haditha massacre. TJ Terrazas was his best friend. Briones, who was 20 years old at the time, saw Terrazas after he was killed. "He had a giant hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back up in his skull," Briones said of his buddy.

"A lot of people were mad," Briones said. "Everyone had just a [terrible] feeling about what had happened to TJ."

After the massacre, Briones was ordered to take photographs of the victims and help carry their bodies out of their homes. He is still haunted by what he had to do that day. Briones picked up a young girl who was shot in the head. "I held her out like this," he said, extending his arms, "but her head was bobbing up and down and the insides fell on my legs."

"I used to be one of those Marines who said that post-traumatic stress is a bunch of bull," said Briones, who has gotten into serious trouble since he returned home. "But all this stuff that keeps going through my head is eating me up. I need immediate help."

A key quote from a Marine officer could be used to show premeditation - and thus malice - in support of a possible murder charge against the shooters. An article in yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune which is reprinted from the New York Times News Service, cites a report by "one Marine officer" that "inspectors suspected at least part of the motive for the killings was to send a message to local residents that they would 'pay a price' for failing to warn the Marines about insurgent activity in the area."

Curiously, that paragraph is missing from the same story in both the print and online editions of yesterday's New York Times. For some reason, the Times had second thoughts about that paragraph, and removed it, after the copy had been sent to other papers over the wire.

Regardless of how those who may ultimately be charged with murder fare in court, a more significant question is whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will be charged with war crimes on a theory of command responsibility.

Willful killing is considered a war crime under the US War Crimes Act. People who commit war crimes can be punished by life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be held liable if he knew or should have known his inferiors were committing war crimes and he failed to stop or prevent it.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are knowingly prosecuting a war of aggression in Iraq. Under the United Nations Charter, a country cannot invade another country unless it is acting in self-defense or it has permission from the Security Council. Iraq had invaded no country for 11 years before "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and the council never authorized the invasion.

A war that violates the UN Charter is a war of aggression.

Under the Nuremberg Tribunal, aggressive war is the supreme international crime.

Hagee flew from Washington to Iraq last week to brief US forces on the Geneva Conventions, the international laws of armed conflict and the US military's own rules of engagement. He is reportedly telling the troops they should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful." This creates a strong inference that our leaders had not adequately briefed our troops on how to behave in this war.

This, combined with the evidence that US forces are committing torture based on policies from the highest levels of government, as well as reports of war crimes committed in places such as Fallujah, served to put Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on notice that Marines would likely commit war crimes in places such as Haditha. Our highest leaders thus should have known this would happen, and they should be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act.

Murtha told ABC there was "no question" the US military tried to "cover up" the Haditha incident, which Murtha called "worse than Abu Ghraib." Murtha's high-level briefings indicated, "There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled," he said.

"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha asked on "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."

Murtha said the decision to pay compensation to families of the victims is strong evidence that officers up the chain of command knew what had happened in Haditha. "That doesn't happen at the lowest level. That happens at the highest level before they make a decision to make payments to the families."

Haditha is likely the tip of the iceberg in Bush's illegal war of aggression in Iraq.

"We have a Haditha every day," declared Muhanned Jasim, an Iraqi merchant. "Were [those killed in Haditha] the first ... Iraqis to be killed for no reason?" asked pharmacist Ghasan Jayih. "We're used to being killed. It's normal now to hear 25 Iraqis are killed in one day."

"We have a Fallujah and Karbala every day," Jasim added, referring to the 2004 slaughter by US forces in Fallujah and bombings by resistance fighters in the Shiite city of Karbala.

In Fallujah, US soldiers opened fire on houses, and US helicopters fired on and killed women, old men and young children, according to Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein.

"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Senator John Warner, R-Va., head of the Armed Services Committee, pledged to hold hearings on the Haditha killings at the conclusion of the military investigation. "I'll do exactly what we did with Abu Ghraib," he told ABC News.

Warner's pledge provides little solace to those who seek justice. Congress has yet to hold our leaders to account for the torture by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison. Only a few low-ranking soldiers have been prosecuted. The Bush administration has swept the scandal under the rug.

During the Vietnam War, the US military spoke of winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. But in 1968, US soldiers massacred about 400 unarmed elderly men, women and children in the small village of My Lai. A cover-up ensued, and it wasn't until Seymour Hersh broke the story that it became public.

"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "US troops are very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."

Graffiti on one of the Haditha victims' houses reads, "Democracy assassinated the family that was here."

So much for winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

We must pull our troops out of Iraq immediately, and insist that our leaders be held to account for the war crimes committed there.

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War Crimes: Goose and Gander

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his jail cell at The Hague Saturday. Since 2001, he had been on trial for genocide in Bosnia, and war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Although many have already adjudged him guilty, we will never hear the official verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

We will also never see a trial in the ICTY for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright or Wesley Clark for the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Nor will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld be prosecuted by an international tribunal for their war crimes in Iraq.

NATO's invasion of Yugoslavia was a war of aggression that violated the United Nations Charter. It was not undertaken in self-defense nor did it carry the approval of the Security Council. Between 1500 and 2000 civilians were killed and many thousands injured. When I visited Belgrade a year after the NATO bombing, I saw schools, hospitals, bridges, libraries and homes reduced to rubble. The ICTY statute prohibits the targeting of civilians. And even though it also forbids the use of poisonous weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering, NATO used depleted uranium and cluster bombs, whose devastating character is widely known. NATO also targeted a petrochemical complex, releasing carcinogens into the air that reached 10,600 times the acceptable safety level.

The American Association of Jurists and a group of Canadian lawyers and law professors filed a war crimes complaint against NATO leaders in the ICTY. Yet that tribunal conducted only a perfunctory investigation of the serious charges. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticized the ICTY for failing to thoroughly investigate.

By denouncing the International Criminal Court, Team Bush has ensured that US leaders will never be held to account for war crimes. Although virtually every Western democracy has ratified the statute under which the Court operates, the United States has thumbed its nose at this monumental international justice system.

Bush has reason to fear prosecution. He has used cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorous and napalm. And the torture of prisoners in US custody also constitutes a war crime. His war on Iraq is a war of aggression.

After the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing ... to initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal, labeled the crime of aggression "the greatest menace of our times."

For the first time, at Nuremberg, individuals were held criminally accountable for war crimes and waging a war of aggression. Japanese leaders were also tried for atrocities committed during World War II, in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

Yet US leaders who were responsible for some of the most heinous war crimes ever committed - the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and 66 other Japanese cities - were never brought to justice.

Only the vanquished Germans and Japanese were put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, dissenting at the Tokyo Tribunal, called this "victor's justice."

Indeed, Robert McNamara, who participated in the bombing of Japan during World War II, admitted in the film Fog of War that he and General Curtis LeMay would have been tried for war crimes if the US had lost the war. He said, "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He ... and I'd say I ... were behaving as war criminals."

It is no accident that the Iraqi Special Tribunal where Saddam Hussein is currently on trial only has jurisdiction over Iraqi citizens for acts committed prior to May 1, 2003, the day the US-UK occupation of Iraq began. The United States opposed sending Hussein to an international tribunal, and manipulated the Iraqi tribunal to prevent any US leaders from being tried for their war crimes in Iraq.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. But the leaders of the world's most powerful country continue to enjoy "victor's justice."

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Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers' Deaths

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview. It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

"And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."

For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.

Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

"It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

"There were countless such situations all over the theater of operations - Iraq and Kuwait - because female soldiers didn't have a voice, individually or collectively," Karpinski told Hackworth. "Even as a general I didn't have a voice with Sanchez, so I know what the soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier requirements and/or issues."

Karpinski was the highest officer reprimanded for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, although the details of interrogations were carefully hidden from her. Demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, Karpinski feels she was chosen as a scapegoat because she was a female.

Sexual assault in the US military has become a hot topic in the last few years, "not just because of the high number of rapes and other assaults, but also because of the tendency to cover up assaults and to harass or retaliate against women who report assaults," according to Kathy Gilberd, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild's Military Law Task Force.

This problem has become so acute that the Army has set up its own sexual assault web site.

In February 2004, Rumsfeld directed the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to undertake a 90-day review of sexual assault policies. "Sexual assault will not be tolerated in the Department of Defense," Rumsfeld declared.

The 99-page report was issued in April 2004. It affirmed, "The chain of command is responsible for ensuring that policies and practices regarding crime prevention and security are in place for the safety of service members." The rates of reported alleged sexual assault were 69.1 and 70.0 per 100,000 uniformed service members in 2002 and 2003. Yet those rates were not directly comparable to rates reported by the Department of Justice, due to substantial differences in the definition of sexual assault.

Notably, the report found that low sociocultural power (i.e., age, education, race/ethnicity, marital status) and low organizational power (i.e., pay grade and years of active duty service) were associated with an increased likelihood of both sexual assault and sexual harassment.

The Department of Defense announced a new policy on sexual assault prevention and response on January 3, 2005. It was a reaction to media reports and public outrage about sexual assaults against women in the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing sexual assaults and cover-ups at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, Gilberd said. As a result, Congress demanded that the military review the problem, and the Defense Authorization Act of 2005 required a new policy be put in place by January 1.

The policy is a series of very brief "directive-type memoranda" for the Secretaries of the military services from the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. "Overall, the policy emphasizes that sexual assault harms military readiness, that education about sexual assault policy needs to be increased and repeated, and that improvements in response to sexual assaults are necessary to make victims more willing to report assaults," Gilberd notes. "Unfortunately," she added "analysis of the issues is shallow, and the plans for addressing them are limited."

Commands can reject the complaints if they decide they aren't credible, and there is limited protection against retaliation against the women who come forward, according to Gilberd. "People who report assaults still face command disbelief, illegal efforts to protect the assaulters, informal harassment from assaulters, their friends or the command itself," she said.

But most shameful is Sanchez's cover-up of the dehydration deaths of women that occurred in Iraq. Sanchez is no stranger to outrageous military orders. He was heavily involved in the torture scandal that surfaced at Abu Ghraib. Sanchez approved the use of unmuzzled dogs and the insertion of prisoners head-first into sleeping bags after which they are tied with an electrical cord and their are mouths covered. At least one person died as the result of the sleeping bag technique. Karpinski charges that Sanchez attempted to hide the torture after the hideous photographs became public.

Sanchez reportedly plans to retire soon, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune earlier this month. But Rumsfeld recently considered elevating the 3-star general to a 4-star. The Tribune also reported that Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the Army's chief spokesman, said in an email message, "The Army leaders do have confidence in LTG Sanchez."

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Bush on Trial for Crimes against Humanity

The International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration convened last weekend in New York City's Riverside Church. Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait hangs in the foyer. Dr. King delivered his historic 1967 speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Place to Break the Silence," opposing the war and calling for the removal of all foreign troops from Vietnam, in that same church.

Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner, who delivered a keynote address to the commission of inquiry, invoked Dr. King's words from 1967: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." The following year, the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal put the US government on trial for "crimes without precedent" it was committing in Vietnam. In the tradition of the Russell tribunal, the panel of judges at the commission of inquiry heard evidence of George W. Bush's war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere.

Ratner said that Bush openly and notoriously "laid the plan for coup d'état in America" with a small paragraph in his "signing statement" attached to the McCain anti-torture amendment. Bush wrote that his commander in chief power allows him to do anything he thinks is necessary, including torture, notwithstanding the amendment passed by Congress. Ratner called that a "historic, unprecedented grab for power" that spells the end of checks and balances in our government. Bush, according to Ratner, has declared that George Bush is the law.

Harry Belafonte gave the other keynote address. "When a government fails to protect justice," Belafonte declared, "it is the responsibility of the people to rise up and change the guard, change the regime." In a hoarse voice, the legendary singer charged, "Those who fail to answer that call should be charged with patriotic treason."

T r u t h o u t writer Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1961 to 1990, took the testimony of Scott Ritter, a senior United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. The allegation that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was the only justification on which George W. Bush's war in Iraq was based, McGovern said. He cited statements by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice before September 11, 2001, that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and was unable to pose even a conventional threat to his neighbors. After September 11, however, Donald Rumsfeld expressed "no doubt" that Hussein had WMDs. "A trained ape knows that," Rumsfeld said.

Ritter noted that Rumsfeld knew Iraq had disarmed and had no ongoing weapons program. By 1998, the weapons inspectors had accounted for 95 to 98 percent of Iraq's WMDs, Ritter said. "No nation had hard factual data that Iraq retained or was reconstituting WMDs," Ritter added. "No nation had those facts."

The Bush administration willfully misled the American people about Iraq's weapons programs, Ritter charged. When Dick Cheney said that Iraq was constituting its nuclear program, he "was lying," Ritter said.

From 1991 to 2003, the United States policy in Iraq was regime change, according to Ritter. The US and the United Kingdom sought to maintain the public perception that Iraq was not complying with its obligations to disarm, in order to justify regime change. The US never intended to disarm Iraq; it would have had to lift the sanctions, which were aimed at undermining Iraq's welfare, weakening the government, and facilitating regime change.

"Intelligence" in the George W. Bush administration "was being fixed around the policy of regime change," Ritter maintained. "What passes for intelligence is nothing more than politically motivated propaganda." He said, "There was no intelligence failure because the policy wasn't disarmament; it was regime change."

Another witness, David Swanson, from www.afterdowningstreet.org, detailed the Downing Street Minutes, which were prepared in March 2002 and July 2002, but were leaked to the public last spring. They disclosed that Bush was determined to go to war and was building a case to accomplish that goal. "Intelligence was being fixed around the policy," the minutes reveal. "Going to the UN was an attempt to legalize a war that had already been decided upon," Swanson testified.

Dahr Jamal, who spent 8 months in occupied Iraq as an independent journalist, also testified at the commission. He charged that the US military carried out collective punishment in Fallujah in violation of international law. Snipers engaged in targeted killings, and troops prevented ambulances from reaching the wounded and prevented the wounded from receiving medical attention, violations of the Geneva Conventions.

The United States decided that the entire city of Fallujah, with more than 350,000 civilians, was "a free-fire-zone," Jamal said. In the attack on Fallujah in November 2004, between 4,000 and 6,000 civilians were killed. The US military employed illegal weapons, including cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and white phosphorous.

Jamal accused the media, including CNN, Fox, Judith Miller, Thomas Friedman, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, of aiding and abetting the Bush administration's war crimes and crimes against humanity in their coverage of the US assault on Fallujah.

Another eyewitness to the occupation, journalist Jeremy Scahill, testified about the targeted killing of independent journalists by the US military. He cited the killing of an Al Jazeera reporter and the bombing of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, both on April 8, 2004. More than 100 unembedded journalists were in that hotel, and the US knew it, Scahill contended. The attack killed two cameramen.

Scahill said the Pentagon warned unembedded journalists, "Baghdad is not a safe place. You should not be there."

The Bush administration has consistently attempted to link Iraq with the September 11 attacks. Scahill observed, "There is a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It's called Washington," he said.

Challenging the Democrats to end the war, Scahill alleged: "We can't be vegetarians between meals. A loyal opposition is not going to end this war."

Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, testified before the commission. Murray charged that Uzbekistan practices torture on an industrial scale. He cited a UN investigation that concluded torture was widespread and systemic in that country. Thousands of people are tortured every year, Murray said. This includes rape with objects like broken bottles, smashing of limbs, pulling out of fingernails, and immersing people into boiling liquid.

Uzbekistan, Murray said, is a US ally in the war on terror, a member of the coalition of the willing. Murray displayed a letter on the big screen. It was from Ken Lay, former chairman of Enron, to then Texas Governor George W. Bush in April 1997. It began, "Dear George" ["Look who's boss," Murray noted], and continued, "You will be meeting with" the Uzbek ambassador to the United States to discuss Enron's $2 billion oil and gas contract.

The real reason underlying the war in Iraq, Murray testified, was oil and gas. So "they needed false intelligence from torture chambers," he said, in order to justify the war on terror. Sir Michael Wood informed Murray that the official position was that it's not illegal to get information from torture provided they do not themselves torture or direct that a specific individual be tortured.

"You can't build security on evil," Murray said. "I don't believe torture works," he concluded. "But even it if did work, I'd rather die than have anyone tortured to save my life."

I presented the testimony of Janis Karpinski, a brigadier general who was assigned to Iraq in July 2003 to oversee 17 prison facilities, including Abu Ghraib. Karpinski described how General Geoffrey Miller transferred the interrogation techniques he had instituted at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay to Abu Ghraib.

Miller was specially selected by Rumsfeld and sent to Iraq to run the interrogations operation, to work with the military intelligence personnel and teach them new and improved interrogation techniques to obtain more actionable intelligence from their interrogations.

When Miller arrived at Abu Ghraib, he said, "It's my opinion that you're treating the prisoners too well. At Guantánamo, the prisoners know that we are in charge, and they know that from the very beginning." He said, "You have to treat the prisoners like dogs, and if you think or feel differently, you've lost control."

Miller declared, "We're going to Gitmo-ize the operation" (referring to the techniques they used at Guantánamo Bay).

Karpinski thought Miller came with the authority of Rumsfeld because General Ricardo Sanchez, who was a 3-star, deferred to Miller, although he was only a 2-star. Even though Miller told Congress he was sent to Abu Ghraib merely in an assisting capacity, Colonel Thomas Pappas furnished Miller with a daily report detailing the results of interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

Sanchez himself signed an 8-page memorandum with a laundry list of harsher interrogation techniques, including the specific use of unmuzzled dogs, Karpinski said.

Control of cellblocks 1-A and 1-B, "the hard sites," was transferred to military intelligence. Karpinski didn't learn of the torture and abuse until January 12, 2004. In fact, she never attended any of the meetings in which the progress of interrogations was discussed. Sanchez said, "We scheduled them specifically when she would not be available to attend."

When Karpinski was told about the photographs and the abuse, she prepared to hold a press conference and tell the Iraqis in Arabic that there would be a full investigation. But Sanchez warned her off. "He looked me dead in the eye and said, 'absolutely not. You are not to discuss this with anyone. And that's an order.'"

Karpinski discovered that all personnel and documents relating to the scandal had been removed from Abu Ghraib. The only thing that remained was a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld. It was called, "Approval of Harsher Interrogation Techniques," and listed sleep deprivation, stress positions, playing loud music, insulting religious beliefs. In the margin, there was a note in Rumsfeld's handwriting. It said, "Make sure this happens."

Sanchez would not have implemented the techniques without the approval of Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld would not have authorized them without the approval of the vice president, Karpinski testified. "And so it filtered down, and it never filtered down to me because I wasn't even responsible for interrogations."

Ultimately, however, Karpinski and 7 low-ranking soldiers were made the scapegoats. Karpinski was demoted to colonel. "I believe the Pentagon wanted to put this into a nice little package, 7 so-called bad apples, out of control on the night shift, and a female officer. They wanted to put that in a package, tie it up in a bow, and sink it forever, to make people believe we got it under control, we solved the problem."

Karpinski also testified that American female soldiers in Iraq were assaulted or raped by male soldiers in the women's latrines, and an alarming number committed suicide. "Because the women were in fear of getting up in the darkness [to go to the latrine], they were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon," Karpinski said. "In the 100 degree heat, they were dying of dehydration in their sleep. Rather than making everyone aware - it was shocking - they told the surgeon not to brief on the details, and don't say specifically that they were women." Karpinski identified the commander who ordered that the cause of death of the women not be listed on the death certificates. It was General Sanchez, she said.

The commission heard testimony about the Bush administration's criminal responsibility for indefinite detention, rendition for torture, destruction of the global environment, attacks on global public health and reproductive rights, and actions and inactions leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina. The panel of judges will consider the testimony and release its findings.

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Bush Game on Padilla May Backfire

Once again, at the 11th hour, the Bush administration has pulled its punches in the case of Jose Padilla. Using an approach that more closely resembles a game of chess than a system of justice, Team Bush has altered its strategy, while seeking to keep all options open. Its fancy footwork, however, may ultimately backfire.

Last Tuesday, just before today's due date for the government's reply to Padilla's petition to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the criminal indictment of Padilla. With this move, Bush hopes to prevent the high court from placing limits on his power to hold anyone he designates an "enemy combatant."

I remember the day in May of 2002 that Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft interrupted his trip to Moscow to ceremoniously announce on television that the government had foiled Padilla's effort to detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb on the streets of America. Coming just 8 months after the September 11 attacks, those were fighting words to the American people.

The day of Padilla's arrest, I appeared on MSNBC's Abrams Report. Dan Abrams was foaming at the mouth about "the dirty bomber." When I reminded Abrams, a lawyer himself, about the presumption of innocence, he became furious, slamming his papers on the table.

Bush & Co. were banking on a similar reaction from the American people and the US courts. Team Bush hoped we would just salute and march when they rounded up hundreds of "terrorists," locked them up, and then threw away the key. They hoped we would look the other way when they tortured their prisoners. They hoped that the Imperial President could designate anyone an "enemy combatant" and no questions would be asked.

The government has changed its designation for Jose Padilla 3 times. When Padilla was arrested, he was called a "material witness," being held to testify against the terrorists. A month later, Bush labeled Padilla an "enemy combatant." Padilla was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina and denied any contact with counsel. Even though a federal judge ruled in December 2002 that Padilla was entitled to have a lawyer to challenge his detention, he was not permitted to consult with counsel until March 2004.

Bush finally allowed Padilla to meet with a lawyer in order to pre-empt an unfavorable ruling in his upcoming Supreme Court case in 2004. And while the Court was considering Padilla's case, the Justice Department announced that he had planned to use natural gas to blow up apartment buildings in the US. These 2 moves by the administration were designed to save face and undercut Padilla's case in the Supreme Court.

In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Yaser Hamdi that a US citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant has a due process right to contest his detention before a neutral decision maker, and that includes the right to counsel. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the Court: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens."

The same day, however, the high court declined to rule on Padilla's case because his habeas corpus petition had been filed in New York, where he was originally held, rather than South Carolina, where he was currently incarcerated. Five of the 9 justices said that Padilla must re-file his petition in South Carolina and name the commander of the military brig, rather than Donald Rumsfeld, as a defendant. Padilla filed a new petition.

In the Hamdi case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and 4 other justices limited the definition of "enemy combatant" to someone "carrying a weapon against American troops on a foreign battlefield." But Padilla was arrested in the United States. Padilla's lawyers are asking a question that the Bush administration is afraid for the Court to answer: "Does the President have the power to seize American citizens in civilian settings on American soil and subject them to indefinite military detention without criminal charge or trial?"

Bush will argue that this issue is now moot, since he filed criminal charges against Padilla. But, talking out of both sides of its collective mouth, the Bush administration also maintains that even if Padilla is ultimately acquitted of the criminal charges, it can re-arrest him and hold him as an enemy combatant. Thus, Padilla's lawyers are arguing that the issue is not moot and the Supreme Court should decide it.

Ironically, the charges the government brought against Padilla have nothing to do with dirty bombs or natural gas explosions. The indictment portrays Padilla as a bit player in a conspiracy to murder and kidnap, but not in the United States. And it accuses him of providing material aid to terrorists. It does not even allege he is a member of al Qaeda.

If the government had charged Padilla with dirty bomb or explosion charges, the testimony of the prosecution's only "witnesses" would be inadmissible or unbelievable since they were tortured to implicate Padilla. One of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suffered excessive use of "waterboarding," a torture technique that simulates drowning. This was confirmed last year in a report by the CIA inspector general. Another review released by US intelligence agencies in April 2003 assessed the quality of Mohammed's information as "Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies."

A second government "witness" against Padilla, Binyan Mohammed, was taken to Morocco to be tortured, according to his lawyer Clive A. Stafford Smith. "He signed a confession saying whatever they wanted to hear, which is that he worked with Jose Padilla to do the dirty bomb plot. He says that's absolute nonsense, and he doesn't know Jose Padilla."

Padilla has been held by the Bush administration in solitary confinement for more than 3 years without criminal charges. Now, in the government's haste to avoid an unfavorable ruling in the Supreme Court, it has charged Padilla with crimes that may be trumped up. For the first time, Padilla will have an opportunity to tell his side of the story in court; it may be a story of harsh interrogation that the government would prefer to keep quiet. Padilla will undoubtedly be offered a plea bargain to prevent his telling the truth about what happened to him while he languished in military custody for so long. The government may offer Padilla a deal like the one it offered John Walker Lindh, who was also facing life in prison. Lindh was allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges on the condition that he not mention the mistreatment he suffered while in custody.

The legal maneuvering by the Bush administration is "a remarkable game of musical courtrooms," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice. "The Justice Department cannot continue changing course each time action from the courts is imminent," according to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Bill Goodman, Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, characterizes the charges against Padilla as a "stale conspiracy" and predicts the government will try to have Padilla's petition to the Supreme Court dismissed as moot. "In my judgment," Goodman said on Democracy Now!, "that borders on abuse of process by the Justice Department. What they are doing is manipulating the process in order to sustain an opinion that says the President can virtually shred the Constitution ... and saying someone who had been held in violation of constitutional principles because he was such a danger to the United States because of these allegations, now they're irrelevant. It's shocking. It's an outrage."

Jose Padilla's case may end up being a lose-lose situation for the Bush administration if the Supreme Court decides to go ahead and hear Padilla's petition anyway. Depending on the composition of the high court after Samuel Alito's confirmation hearing, the Court could place some limits on the President's power to indefinitely detain a US citizen arrested on American soil and held as an "enemy combatant." Padilla could refuse a plea bargain and testify about how he was treated - or mistreated - while in custody. And the defense may have a meritorious motion to dismiss the criminal charges because the government denied Padilla due process by its delay in filing the charges against him.

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Graham Amendment Invokes Constitutional Crisis

The "accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
--James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 47

In blatant defiance of the Constitution's guarantees of Habeas Corpus and separation of powers, the Senate on Thursday approved the Graham Amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization Act by a vote of 49 to 42. Five Democrats joined all but 4 Republican Senators in giving the President unfettered power to hold prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the rest of their lives, with no criminal charges, and no right to challenge their confinement by Habeas Corpus.

Last year, the Supreme Court held in Rasul v. Bush that the Guantánamo detainees are entitled to file habeas petitions in US courts to contest their detentions. The high court determined that non-US citizens held at Guantánamo, "no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts' authority" to hear their petitions under 28 USC § 2241, the US Habeas Corpus statute.

The Supreme Court stated firmly in Rasul, "Consistent with the historic purpose of the writ, this Court has recognized the federal courts' power to review applications for habeas relief in a wide variety of cases involving Executive detention, in wartime as well as in times of peace."

The Graham Amendment is crafted to render Rasul a nullity by cutting off the rights of Guantánamo prisoners to have their habeas petitions considered by the federal courts. The Amendment limits federal court review to the narrow issue of the validity of decisions rendered by Combatant Status Review Tribunals. These kangaroo courts were set up to determine whether the Guantánamo prisoners are "enemy combatants." They are not independent judicial tribunals, but rather administrative proceedings stacked with military officials who can use secret or even fabricated evidence. The prisoner is not entitled to be represented by an attorney.

Only a handful of prisoners at Guantánamo have been charged with crimes. Their cases will be heard in military commissions that George W. Bush established to impose long sentences and even execute detainees with virtually no judicial oversight. Without habeas access to federal courts, Bush and Donald Rumsfeld will ostensibly serve as prosecutor, judge and executioner in the military commissions. This flies in the face of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. Three days before the Graham Amendment was passed, the Supreme Court announced it would review the legality of those military commissions in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Even though the majority of prisoners detained at Guantánamo admittedly pose no threat to the United States, they continue to languish in virtual isolation under torturous conditions. Two hundred of them, who have decided death is preferable to life, are trying to starve themselves in a hunger strike.

Last month, the Senate passed the McCain Amendment, which makes it unlawful for any "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location [to be] subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." Bush and Cheney have fought this measure tooth-and-nail because it would interfere with their ability to torture prisoners with impunity. The Graham Amendment will undermine the ability of tortured prisoners to enforce the McCain Amendment in federal courts.

By foreclosing judicial review of sentences imposed by the military commissions, the Graham Amendment also violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, a ratified treaty and therefore part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. That article prohibits "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." Unlawful combatants are protected by Common Article 3.

Violations of Common Article 3 constitute war crimes under the federal War Crimes Act. Violators can receive life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

Sen. Lindsey Graham's pernicious Amendment was proposed and passed with no debate about its far-ranging implications and without any hearings. The senators who voted for it bought into Bush's "war on terror" mantra, ignoring the basic constitutional principles that inform our system of government.

These senators will have the opportunity to rectify this grave threat to the Constitution. As early as today, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) will attempt to strike from the Graham Amendment the language barring Guantánamo prisoners from habeas relief. Senator John McCain may support a compromise. He said, "Based on ongoing discussions, it is entirely possible that the current version of the amendment will be modified to address concerns about lawful treatment and the scope of independent appeals."

More than 100 legal scholars, including this writer, have signed a letter urging senators to adopt an amendment of the kind proposed by Senator Bingaman. The Center for Constitutional Rights concurs: "Habeas Corpus is a fundamental right that our entire legal tradition is founded on. Unfettered Executive power jeopardizes our free and democratic society. Creating 'no law zones' of unreviewable Executive power at Guantánamo undermines the moral standing of the United State in the eyes of the world and endangers the lives of US soldiers abroad."

The Graham Amendment has also drawn opposition from Judge John Gibbons, who argued Rasul v. Bush before the Supreme Court; John Hutson, Dean of Franklin Pearce Law Center and former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy; and the National Institute for Military Justice. NIMJ President Eugene R. Fidell wrote, "We disable ourselves from objecting to flagrant lawlessness elsewhere when we shut the doors to our courts, which are the jewel in the crown of our democracy."

Habeas Corpus, known as The Great Writ, is the final bastion of liberty for those unjustly held. There was an attempt to suspend Habeas Corpus during the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II. That travesty is now universally recognized as a shameful chapter in our nation's history. To suspend The Great Writ while allegations of systematic torture continue to emerge from US prisons, will threaten our Constitution and render "quaint" our democracy.

The Democrats who voted in favor of the Graham Amendment were Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Ben Nelson (Neb), Mary L. Landrieu (La), and Ron Wyden (Or).

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The President and His Vice: Torturer's Puppetmasters

The dots have finally been connected and the picture is not a pretty one. It is the face of the president of vice, Dick Cheney. The policies on the treatment of prisoners emanating from Cheney's office triggered the abuse and torture, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff.

"It was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field," Wilkerson, a former colonel, said on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." The interrogation techniques sanctioned by Cheney "were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war," Wilkerson declared.

Not coincidentally, Cheney has been lobbying Congress to prevent it from outlawing torture (which is already against the law, by the way). After Republican Senator John McCain secured 90 votes in the Senate to codify the prohibition against cruel, unusual, or degrading treatment or punishment, Cheney began to sweat. With CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, Cheney paid a visit to McCain and tried to convince the senator to allow an exemption for the CIA. McCain refused to legalize the CIA's ongoing illegal torture of prisoners.

Last week, Dana Priest wrote in the Washington Post that the CIA has been surreptitiously interrogating prisoners in a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. Human Rights Watch identified Romania and Poland, two supporters of Bush's wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, as locations for these secret prisons.

Only Bush and a few of his top officials, undoubtedly including Cheney, have known about the existence and situs of these "black sites," as they are called in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and Congressional documents, according to Priest.

The secret prisons were established pursuant to a presidential "finding" signed by Bush six days after the September 11 attacks. That finding gives the CIA permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world. Assassination, or summary execution, violates US and international law.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been taken to these "black sites." Many are held underground and subjected to torture out of view of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

CIA interrogators use "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," which violate US law. They include "waterboarding" (mock drowning) and mock suffocation. Another enhancement is a "stress position," in which a prisoner in suspended from the ceiling or wall by his wrists, which are handcuffed behind his back. Iraqi Manadel Jamadi was subjected to this treatment before he died in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib in November 2003. Tony Diaz, an MP who witnessed his torture, said that blood gushed from Jamadi's mouth like "a faucet had turned on" after he was lowered to the ground.

Several current and former intelligence officials are nervous about these "black sites," which were set up in a knee-jerk response to 9/11, Priest reported.

About the same time the "black sites" were established, Cheney undertook a campaign to introduce torture as a standard interrogation technique, according to the Washington Monthly. One of his test cases was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda prisoner captured shortly after 9/11. An ex-FBI official reported that "they duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for some torturous Egyptian interrogations, in violation of US law prohibiting extraordinary renditions.

A newly declassified memo reveals that al-Libi provided us with false information that suggested Iraq had trained al-Qaeda to use weapons of mass destruction. Even though US intelligence thought the information was false as early as 2002 because it was obtained under torture, al-Libi's information provided the centerpiece of Colin Powell's now thoroughly discredited February 2003 claim before the United Nations that Iraq had developed WMD programs.

Dick Cheney not only ordered the torture; he was willing to use false information obtained through torture to support Bush's pre-determined decision to make war on Iraq.

Now that Cheney has been fingered as complicit in the torture, it is just a matter of time before the official torture dots connect to the President himself. In December 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union released an internal FBI email that the ALCU received pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. The email, dated May 22, 2004, describes an Executive Order that authorized sleep deprivation, placing hoods over prisoners' heads, the use of loud music for sensory overload, stripping detainees naked, the use of "stress positions," and the use of dogs. The White House, Pentagon and FBI officials denied that Bush had issued such an Executive Order, saying that it was really a Defense Department directive instead.

It is undisputed that Bush determined in a February 7, 2002, order that he had the authority to suspend the Geneva Conventions, a position never before taken by an American president and a clear violation of US law.

Bush wrote in that order, "As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." (Emphasis added.)

In essence, Bush declared, incorrectly, that as commander in chief, he had the power to override the law with his policy. Where did he get that idea? From a January 25, 2002, memo sent by Alberto Gonzales to the President, which described the Geneva Conventions as "obsolete" and "quaint." That memo was inspired by David Addington, just named by Cheney to replace the indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the Vice President's chief of staff.

Addington was assistant general counsel to the CIA when Reagan was funding the death squads in El Salvador and the illegal Nicaraguan contras. Cheney's new chief of staff helped draft the infamous August 2002 memo that illegally narrowed the definition of torture, and justified torture in some cases. Now, Addington is trying to prevent the Pentagon from adopting the language of Geneva in its revised rules for handling prisoners. The circle of torture remains unbroken.

Libby is charged with obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI about the outing of a CIA agent. As in the Watergate scandal, a White House official is being prosecuted for the cover-up. There is plenty of evidence that officials in the Bush administration have been trying to cover up their torture since the inception of Bush's "war on terror."

The earliest example of the official cover-up was when John Walker Lindh, captured in Afghanistan shortly after September 11, 2001, was given a plea bargain that required him to keep mum about the mistreatment he suffered while in US custody. Col. Janis Karpinski told me in an August 3, 2005, interview for t r u t h o u t (Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration) that after she first learned of the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez took systematic steps to hush it up. Soldiers reported to Human Rights Watch that US soldiers, called "Murderous Maniacs," broke prisoners' bones every other week at FOB Mercury; then, "those responsible would state that the detainee was injured during the process of capture and the physician assistant would sign off on this."

Most recently, in an effort to smooth over the torture of the hunger strikers by US officials at Guantánamo prison, Donald Rumsfeld said, "There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that." Rumsfeld refuses to allow UN human rights investigators to meet with the prisoners there.

What is Rumsfeld trying to hide at Guantánamo? About 200 prisoners, many of whom have been there nearly four years without criminal charges, have been on a hunger strike for several weeks. Several of them are being force-fed through large tubes inserted into their noses and down into their stomachs, with no sedatives or anesthesia. One prisoner explained to his lawyer, "Now, after four years in captivity, life and death are the same."

The Washington Post reported today that Cheney has waged an intense, largely unpublicized campaign over the past year to prevent Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from restricting interrogations of terrorist suspects.

Dick Cheney is right in the center of the Bush administration's government of dirty tricks. By replacing Libby with Addington, Cheney has signaled his determination to continue Bush's torturous policies. In a recent editorial, the Washington Post called Dick Cheney "Vice President for Torture." The President and his Vice continue to pull the torturers' puppet strings. Will Bush be deemed complicit in the torture? Or will his deputies cover up for him the way Ronald Reagan's men insulated him from liability in the Iran-Contra scandal?

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Continuing in His Defiance of the Law

Republicans and Democrats have finally found something they can agree on. They have bipartisan support to stop Bush's inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners in United States custody: It's bad for our image in the Arab and Muslim world. It breeds more resentment against the US, making us more vulnerable to terrorism. And it's just plain un-American.

Last month, an Army captain and two sergeants from the 82nd Airborne Division contacted Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) and Human Rights Watch with allegations that members of the unit routinely beat, tortured and abused detainees in 2003 and early 2004. Capt. Ian Fishback, a Westpoint graduate, said he was frustrated that his reports to superiors went unheeded.

They reported seeing soldiers break prisoners' legs, and strike blows to the heads, chests, and stomachs of prisoners - on a daily basis. They described witnessing soldiers pour chemical substances on prisoners' skin and into their eyes. They said the mistreatment at a base near Fallujah was "just like" what happened at Abu Ghraib.

Capt. Fishback told Human Rights Watch that he believes the abuses he witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused in part by Bush's 2002 decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions protections to detainees captured in Afghanistan. Fishback said:

[In Afghanistan,] I thought that the chain of command all the way up to the National Command Authority [President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] had made it a policy that we were going to interrogate these guys harshly ... We knew where the Geneva Conventions drew the line, but then you get that confusion when the Sec Def [Secretary of Defense] and the President make that statement [that Geneva did not apply to detainees].
Two weeks ago, 90 percent of the Senate voted to ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners held in US military custody. Although the vote merely reflects prohibitions already existing in several treaties the United States has ratified - making them binding domestic law under the Constitution - the Bush administration has refused to follow the law.

The measure introduced by McCain and other Republican senators was an amendment to a $440 billion Defense Appropriations bill. It was adopted by the votes of 46 Republicans, 43 Democrats and one Independent. The amendment also prohibits the use of any interrogation treatment or technique not authorized by and listed in the US Army Field Manual on Intelligence Information.

Notwithstanding the universal prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in the laws that bind the United States, the Bush administration has taken the position that they apply only within US territory, and only within limits recognized in the US War Crimes Act with respect to US nationals abroad.

For that reason, the McCain amendment specifies there will be no "geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."

McCain, a POW in Vietnam for nearly six years, said, "Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us - every single one of us - knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies."

More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili, both former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, support the McCain amendment.

Bush sent Dick Cheney to pressure McCain to withdraw his amendment, without success. Now that the amendment has been adopted by the Senate, Bush threatens to veto the appropriations bill if the McCain amendment is appended to it. The White House says the measure would "restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bringing terrorists to justice."

A presidential veto can be overturned by a two-thirds majority in both houses. But some House Republicans plan to push for the McCain amendment to be dropped from the spending bill in a joint House-Senate conference committee.
An editorial in the Washington Post said: "Let's be clear: Mr. Bush is proposing to use the first veto of his presidency on a defense bill needed to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan so that he can preserve the prerogative to subject detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In effect, he threatens to declare to the world his administration's moral bankruptcy."

It's a pity that Congress continues to finance the failed US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the Democrats recapture the House and Senate in the mid-term elections, and if, as Bob Herbert wrote in yesterday's New York Times, the Democrats "get over their timidity, look deep into their own souls, discover what they truly believe and then tell it like it is," they could push Congress to stop funding those wars and we could withdraw our troops. That is how US involvement in Vietnam ended. But don't hold your breath.

The Bush administration persists in blocking any independent investigation of the torture, murder and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, and Congress has thus far failed to demand one.

Bush is probably taking solace from a statement by Professor John Yoo, one of the principal authors of the Bush administration's torture memos, who wrote in the Washington Post: Harriet Miers "may be one of the key supporters in the Bush administration of staying the course on legal issues arising from the war on terrorism." When legal challenges to Bush's policies come before the Supreme Court, Miers may well salute and march to the orders of her former boss.

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