Preparations For Bush War Crimes Prosecution Continue

[LeftDemocrat]

Another call for Cheney's execution, after a War Crimes Tribunal finds him guilty.  Prima facie, due to a parallel with Nazis guilty of abetting torture the same as Cheney did, it looks like he could face capital punishment.

This article draws parallels with the post-WWII judicial system that the U.S. helped build to bring war criminals to book.  In this case, the parallel that is most glaring is with the war crimes tribunal for the Gestapo, which also used "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (a direct translation from the German). EITs were also referred to as "sharpened interrogation." The tribunal was held in Norway, in 1948.

01 Sep 2009
The Gestapo Precedent for "EITs"

by Andrew Sullivan

The Gestapo did not use waterboarding - so their methods of interrogation in this case were not as extreme as Cheney's. Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture:

    "As extenuating circumstances, [accused torturer] Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely."

    "The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence."

And they were executed for these war crimes.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is why they hold the former president and vice-president to lower moral and ethical standards than the United States once held the Gestapo. That's all. And that's everything, isn't it?

Here's a document from Norway's 1948 war-crimes trial detailing the prosecution of Nazis convicted of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (the phrase in its original German is "verschaerfte Vernehmung)" in the Second World War. In this Nazi bureaucratic description of these techniques, you will note the striking similarities between its content, its legalisms, its bureaucratic tone, and the recent CIA documents pried out of the US government's hands by the ACLU:



Notice how the Gestapo, like Cheney, had doctors present, and all torture was very carefully monitored. Blows with a stick, like collaring someone and bashing his body against a plywood wall - were carefully monitored to a maximum number of times. The "windowless cells", and sleep deprivation are identical to Cheney's methods. In the 1948 trial, cold baths were also used to bring prisoners' temperatures down to near-death levels, like those used by Navy SEALS in Afghanistan, by McChrystal's special ops in Iraq, and by Cheney's supervised torture in Gitmo. The victims wore no uniforms (which was used as a defense by the Nazis in the trial as they have been used by some on the right to defend American torture), and, unlike those subjected to Cheney's torture techniques, none of those tortured by the Gestapo died in the process. In fact, the Gestapo's defense at trial was the same as John Yoo's today:

    "Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement."

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/the-gestapo-precedent-for-eits.html

It seems difficult to accept, but worthwhile underlining, that according to the trial evidence, "none of those tortured by the Gestapo died in the process."  Contrast popular depictions of Gestapo interrogations leading to death, such as in the film Roma : Citta Aperta.

By contrast, the sadists that committed the crime of torture for the U.S. in recent years, at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo, among other places, are increasingly acknowledged to have killed many people in the process of torturing them, ostensibly for the sake of "information."  What information can a dead man provide?   This extra-judicial killing is clearly contrary to U.S. law, and torturers should be sentenced for their criminal actions.

The author, Andrew Sullivan, goes on:

Abu Ghraib is the one place where we have been able to see what neoconservatism has come to stand for: brutal torture and abuse of Arabs and Muslims. It means murdering over a hundred of such prisoners - merely because they are suspects and Arab Muslims.

We also know for a fact that the majority of all those who have been abused and tortured by the US under Bush and Cheney were innocent of any terror offenses. (At Abu Ghraib, one of the test-sites for Cheney's methods, up to 90 percent were completely innocent, according to the Bush administration). We have no idea how many of those captured, abused and tortured at Bagram were and are innocent.

It was Reagan who signed the UN Convention on Torture which these neocons have torn up and despise. It is his legacy of American support for human rights that they reject. No president until Bush authorized and enforced torture and abuse of war prisoners as a national policy.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/the-latest-euphemism-from-the-torture-party.html

Neo-con = another word for Nazi, American-style

100 extra-judicial murders.

Holder?  You're going to let them get away with this?

Defense Department Conceals Data on Detainee Deaths

      Last year, as Dr. Steven Miles, professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, was researching the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, he noticed something strange. Although the Department of Defense had in the past issued press releases when detainees died at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, at some point in 2006, he says, the “entire prisoner death reporting system was turned off in Afghanistan.” Although at that time deaths in Iraq were still being reported, he says, that system was “turned off” at the beginning of 2008.

Miles, a member of the board of the Center for Victims of Torture and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” published in 2006 by Random House, was working on an updated edition of the book, which documents how physicians and psychologists working for the U.S. military violated the Hippocratic oath and American Medical Association rules by helping the government design and monitor abusive interrogations. The Hippocratic oath requires doctors to consider above all the health of their patients and to do no harm, while an AMA directive prohibits physicians from “providing or withholding any services, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture” and obliges doctors to support victims and to “strive to change situations in which torture is practiced.”

Instead, Miles documented, first in the British medical journal the Lancet and then more expansively in his book, physicians actually helped facilitate torture. “The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, he wrote. Death certificates were falsified and military health officers were either reporting instances of torture late, or not reporting them at all, he found. And, he observes in the Appendix to the book’s second edition, titled Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors, published by University of California Press this year, the military appeared to be using physicians and psychologists to test the reactions of detainees to particular interrogation techniques, which may well violate ethical bans on experimentation on human subjects. Physicians for Human Rights recently released a report documenting similar concerns.

As Miles was working on his book, he realized there were huge gaps in the military’s reporting about the torture, injury and death of detainees in its custody. Although Miles says the Pentagon never reported the deaths of detainees subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — those sent to other countries for interrogation, sometimes under torture — the Pentagon had, at least, been reporting the deaths of some prisoners it acknowledged having in its custody.

Then one day, the press releases stopped. “They just stopped reporting it,” said Miles last week. It couldn’t be that no one died, he said, because “you have a certain expected death rate based on the size of the population. I’ve been able to trace all public death reports and can show when they turned them off.”

Last week,TWI first reported that the Department of Defense appears to have stopped releasing information about the deaths of detainees in its custody in Afghanistan and Iraq. (It has continued to release them concerning detainees at Guantanamo, most of whom are represented by lawyers.) Despite numerous daily requests for a response from the Pentagon since the middle of last week, TWI has still not received any information from the government about whether or why it stopped issuing these reports for its other detention centers abroad.

Miles, meanwhile, has used his findings to write an article about the Pentagon’s failure to disclose detainee deaths and their causes. The paper is now being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics, a leading bioethics journal and website. In his paper, Miles writes:

    In May 2004, shortly after media published photographs of lethal abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, DoD disclosed 22 prisoner deaths; of which 12 (54%) were attributed to natural causes. DOD did not disclose another 67 deaths that occurred during that same period. Only 13 (15%) of the total 89 deaths were due to natural causes. By the end of 2008, 93 of 165 known decedents (56%) are unnamed. Death certificates are available for 37 (22%). Homicides and shelling of prisons are the leading causes of death. DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.

That the government has concealed or delayed reporting on deaths in its custody is nothing new. The New York Times reported in 2004 that the Defense Department had provided incomplete or inaccurate information about deaths of prisoners in its custody. And Human Rights First, a leading human rights legal advocacy organization, in a comprehensive report in 2006 documented similar gaps in the government’s reporting of deaths in U.S. custody.

“Our report found that commanders failed to report deaths in custody,” said Devon Chaffee, advocacy counsel with Human Rights First. “Sometimes they reported them days or weeks later. But there clearly was a reporting problem. Some were simply not reported at all,” she said, although Army regulations require that deaths in U.S. custody be reported within 24 hours.

Human Rights First’s report, Command’s Responsibility, based on its study of autopsy reports and interviews with military personnel, witnesses and physicians, found that between August 2002 and February 2006 nearly 100 detainees had died “while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global ‘war on terror.’” Although the military had deemed 34 of those deaths suspected or confirmed homicides, Human Rights First counted a total of 45 cases where the facts suggested “death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention.” What’s more, in almost half the cases surveyed, “the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced.” Overall, the group found, by the beginning of 2006, “eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.”

The international Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, requires each signatory country to report publicly the deaths of detainees in its custody. But because President Bush early on decided that detainees in the “war on terror” are not technically “Prisoners of War” entitled to the protections the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. military has not followed that requirement.

The Obama administration does not appear to have changed the reporting policy, although at least some officials in the administration have declared the “war on terror” over. Still, the Pentagon under President Obama has not resumed regular reporting on the deaths of prisoners in custody, says Miles. The system is “still shut down,” he said. “Obama hasn’t opened it up. It’s just mysterious to me.”

TWI has called and written to officials in the Defense Department at least six different times in the last week, asking for a response to this claim about its reporting and for a statement of the current policy on reporting detainee deaths. Late yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the DoD issues press releases when detainees die at Guantanamo Bay; TWI still has not received an answer with regard to the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Regardless of the DoD policy, however, the result of the suppression of this information is that no one seems to know how many detainees in U.S. custody have died – including how many of those have been murdered or tortured to death – since the “war on terror” began.

Chafee said that Human Rights First and other human rights organizations, as far as she knows, have not had the resources to update their reports to keep an accurate count.

Representatives for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights said those organizations have not been able to track those numbers, either. Both have sought information from the government related to detainee deaths through the Freedom of Information Act

[LeftDemocrat]

John Yoo, author of the Torture Memos, Speaks & is Protested at The Cornell Club in NYC, 1.12.10 Thanks to World Can't Wait, Code Pink and individuals who refuse to believe the lie that torture is justified and 'legal'.
Category:  Nonprofits & Activism
Tags:  John Yoo  Cornell Club  World Can't Wait  Code Pink



Good! I hope all his guest lectures are similarly disrupted.  Unfortunately, I don't know if there's any chance of changing the minds of the boors who are actually there because Yoo has flaunted the laws, both domestic and international.  Wannabe fascists, I suppose, who don't mind imitating the Sturmabteilungen, the Nazi regime's yes-men.  Maybe just maybe they'll read the warning against the threat from enemies domestic to our constitutional way of life.  Of course, Yoo qualifies as an enemy foreign, in a sense, as well, being only a naturalized citizen of this country.

Further protests against Yoo, on the other side of the country, on the West Coast:

John Yoo’s Spring Course at Boalt: Hide and Seek
By Anna Bloom
January 13, 2010

John C. Yoo, a former lawyer in George W. Bush’s Justice Department and a professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, started the spring semester in an unconventional manner.

The group that wants his head, FireJohnYoo.com, began to protest outside the dean’s office Tuesday afternoon. In the fall, Professor Yoo’s class was disrupted more than once.

Calls seeking information from World Can’t Wait, a group behind FireJohnYoo.org, were not immediately returned. The group objects to the legal justifications Professor Yoo provided for the Bush administration’s tactics in its war on terror, including interrogation techniques like waterboarding.

On their site, they call him “the torturer of Berkeley Law” and a “war criminal.” A “News Hour” broadcast on PBS last fall covered the complaints of students who want to see Professor Yoo’s tenure revoked.

He is co-teaching with David A. Carillo, a deputy attorney general with California’s Department of Justice.

http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/john-yoos-spring-course-at-boalt-hide-and-seek/



 

[LeftDemocrat]

Nothing much doing in the U.S., under strangely invisible Eric Holder, so we turn to the UK, to see what the new administration there thinks of holding Bush-Cheney accountable for their crimes:

Britain to Probe Collaboration with CIA Renditions
by William Fisher, July 02, 2010

 Breaking from President Barack Obama’s insistence on "moving forward, not backward" in investigating U.S. detainee torture, the British government appears poised to investigate its own complicity with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in "rendering" British citizens and residents and subjecting them to "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

The British newspaper, The Guardian, is reporting that Prime Minister David Cameron and the new foreign secretary, William Hague, have agreed on the terms of a judge-led inquiry into claims that British security services were complicit in torture of terrorism suspects.

The newspaper says the inquiry is expected to offer compensation in cases, where necessary, and is likely to be held in private. A judge-led inquiry or commission may have the advantage of bringing together the 13 separate compensation cases currently going through the [UK] courts.

 U.S. constitutional lawyer Scott Horton wrote about the inquiry in his on-line column in Harper’s Magazine. He says the inquiry’s focus on compensation to torture victims shows that the British government takes seriously its obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

"Compare this with the dismissive posture taken by the U.S. Justice Department, which has sought zealously to foreclose all paths of compensation and pointedly ignores America’s formal treaty obligations, which are to be implemented by the Executive," he says.

The British inquiry is independent of the question of criminal prosecutions. As The Guardian notes, a police investigation is still pending, and it is likely to lead to a recommendation to the director of public prosecutions on specific criminal charges.

The government’s reviewer of terrorism legislation, Lord Carlile, said he did not believe the inquiry could be held until the Metropolitan police had decided whether to recommend to the director of public prosecutions (DPP) that charges against intelligence agents should go ahead. But he said this was not the universal view.

 Backbench MPs and human rights groups hailed the government’s imminent decision on the inquiry, while warning ministers that it needed to be independent and have a broad remit.

Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP whose all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition has been campaigning on this issue for several years, said: "It is essential that the judge is independent, and seen to be independent, and makes as much as possible of his or her findings public. It is in the national interest that we get to the bottom of this, get to the truth and move on."

Tyrie said the inquiry needed to examine not only complicity in torture, but also involvement in the U.S. rendition program, while others said the inquiry should also embrace abuses perpetrated by British armed forced in Iraq.

 Speaking for the Liberal Democrat coalition partners, European Parliament member (MEP) Sarah Ludford said, "Only a very thorough cleaning of the stables can re-establish Britain’s reputation as a nation of principles rather than a sidekick to appalling human rights abuses. It should also be judge-led, held as far as possible in public, and not rule out the possibility of prosecutions."

Horton says her reference to being a "sidekick to appalling human rights abuses" is clear enough. "It’s an unpleasant consequence of what used to be called the ‘special relationship’," he noted.

The question of complicity between the British security services and the CIA has continued to raise contentious issues between the two countries.

http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2010/07/01/britain-to-probe-collaboration-with-cia-renditions/

Kudos to the Brits.

[LeftDemocrat]

Chomsky, gadfly of the American Left, argues Bush is guilty of war crimes, the same for which Nazis were hanged.

This in the context of the extrajudicial assassination of bin Laden, apparently unarmed and undefended at the time of his assassination by U.S. commando teams:

Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
May 6, 2011

By Noam Chomsky

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/

When even Democrats are presently celebrating Obama's illegal use of force for the targeted assassination of bin Laden, it seems inconceivable that America will ever return to a nation of principles, let alone a nation that respects and upholds international law.

[LeftDemocrat]

Article is part of a series of op-eds on legal news by law professors and JURIST special guests...

Avoiding Impunity: The Need to Broaden Torture Prosecutions

July 2011

by Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law

President Barack Obama declared "nobody's above the law" in 2009, as Congress contemplated an investigation of torture authorized by the Bush administration. However, Obama has failed to honor those words. His Justice Department proclaimed its intention to grant a free pass to Bush officials and their lawyers who constructed a regime of torture and abuse. US Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that his office will investigate only two instances of detainee mistreatment. He said the department "has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted." Holder has granted impunity to those who authorized, provided legal cover, and carried out the "remaining matters."

Both of the incidents that Holder has agreed to investigate involved egregious treatment and both resulted in death. In one case, Gul Rahman froze to death in 2002 after being stripped and shackled to a cold cement floor in a secret American prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. The other man, Manadel al-Jamadi, died in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists, which were bound behind his back. Tony Diaz, a military police officer who witnessed al-Jamadi's torture, reported that blood gushed from his mouth like "a faucet had turned on" when al-Jamadi was lowered to the ground. These two deaths should be investigated and those responsible punished in accordance with the law.

The investigation must also have a much broader scope. More than 100 detainees have died in US custody, many from torture. Untold numbers were subjected to torture and cruel treatment in violation of US and international law. General Barry McCaffrey said, "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A."

Detainees were put in stress positions, including being chained to the floor, slammed against walls, placed into small boxes with insects, subjected to extremely cold and hot temperatures as well as diet manipulation, blaring music, and threats against themselves and their families.

At least three men were waterboarded. ... US law has long recognized that waterboarding constitutes torture. The United States prosecuted Japanese military leaders for torture based on waterboarding after World War II. The Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act make torture punishable as a war crime. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Yoo have all said they participated in the decision to waterboard. Thus, they have admitted the commission of war crimes.

http://jurist.org/forum/2011/07/marjorie-cohn-torture-investigation.php

With revelations like these about the torture engaged in by U.S. armed forces and the C.I.A., the American people should seriously consider defunding these organizations, as hotbeds of sadism.  The C.I.A. could be outlawed and the world made a better place in one fell stroke.

A Christian nation, torturing "unmercifully"?  Can you say oxymoron?

[LeftDemocrat]

cross-posted from the ANSWER coalition:

The ANSWER Coalition is circulating the following message from Indict Bush Now, an organization founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and dedicated to holding Bush officials accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity they committed while in office. Diligently working to spread this message over years, their campaign took a giant step forward last week when a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must stand trial for torture.

We urge ANSWER supporters to read about this campaign, sign the Indict Bush Now petition and make a financial contribution to Indict Bush Now.

Ironically, the Obama administration's Justice Department is defending Rumsfeld, as they have with other Bush-era officials who have committed war crimes, torture, secret rendition, illegal spying and other criminal acts. The movement for prosecution of Bush-era crimes is gathering momentum not only in the United States, but also internationally, where there are multiple legal proceedings and grassroots organizations demanding prosecution.

Real justice demands that all those who have suffered as a result of the U.S. government's criminal acts--not just U.S. citizens, but also Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis--should have the right to bring their torturers to trial.
--ANSWER Coalition

Indict Bush Now

Rumsfeld must face trial for torture, Court of Appeal rules
Bush official does not have personal immunity for torture

It is hard to overstate the significance of the ruling by the US Court of Appeals that Donald Rumsfeld will face trial for torture. Every Bush-era official who committed crimes, including authorizing torture, has to be deeply alarmed.

The movement for accountability has entered a new, decisive stage and we are committed to stepping up the momentum.

Please make a much needed donation so that IndictBushNow can do this critical work.

Here is what has happened:

The court ruled on Tuesday that two U.S. citizens who worked for a private security firm in Iraq can proceed to take Donald Rumsfeld to trial for the torture they assert they endured during months of imprisonment in 2006 in a prison set up by the Pentagon at a military base near Baghdad's airport..

The two men say they were arrested and then brutally tortured after they tried to expose bribery and corruption in the private security firm that was on the Pentagon payroll. They informed U.S. authorities and began cooperating with them to expose bribery and corruption. In early 2006 they were unexpectedly arrested and sent to the prison at the US military base Camp Cropper located near Baghdad's airport.

After months of imprisonment they were taken from the jail and dropped at the airport without ever having been charged with a crime.

The Court of Appeals in Chicago on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling that the men have a right to take Rumsfeld to trial.

The court ruled, "We agree with the district court that the plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts to show that Secretary Rumsfeld personally established the relevant policies that caused the alleged violations of their constitutional rights during detention."

The IndictBushNow.org campaign was prominently mentioned in an interview on RT television yesterday.

Thousands of people watched the YouTube version of the interview. Please watch this video and share it with others. http://www2.answercoalition.org/site/R?i=2aJ1ATYXiFqnp4RLVUMMWQ..

Your support is vital. Please make an urgently need donation right now.
http://www2.answercoalition.org/site/R?i=fzFIHAMwE8FnuYYxtdKP7Q..

[LeftDemocrat]

The former President George W. Bush, was in British Columbia, Canada, in order to speak at an economic summit, last Friday. This was an opportunity to clap him in jail.  There certainly were more protestors declaiming against the presence of a known war criminal on Canadian soil, just as there had been previously this month, when Cheney dared to visit British Columbia.

Amnesty International called on the Canadian government to arrest Bush and either prosecute or extradite him for the torture of prisoners in the so-called "war on terror." Meanwhile, four men who say they were tortured in U.S. prisons under the Bush administration lodged a private prosecution on Friday against the former U.S. president in a Canadian provincial court.  The B.C. provincial government can have its own independent foreign policy as well, as if sufficiently idealistic politicians were in office in Lotusland, the provincial prosecutors might have been sicked on Bush as well.

DemocracyNow! provided extended coverage, that you won't see in the mainstream media [includes rush transcript]:

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Speaks Out on Lawsuit Seeking Bush’s Arrest in Canada for Torture

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Canadian Center for International Justice have already submitted a 69-page draft indictment to Canada’s attorney general, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, that set forth the case against Bush for torture. We are joined by one of the alleged torture victims, Murat Kurnaz, a former Guantánamo prisoner. He is a Turkish national who was born in Germany. He was detained in Pakistan at the age of 19 in 2001. "I believe George Bush is a criminal, and he has to pay for this, what he did. And even in my own case, even though I was got proven that I’m innocent and never had done anything wrong, so they kept me for like five years. After that I got proof that I’m innocent, they kept me five more years, and they never stopped the torture." We also speak with Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who is assisting the plaintiffs in the case.

Watch the interview online, or read the full transcript of the interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/20/former_guantnamo_prisoner_speaks_out_on

While Bush escaped from Canada without an indictment, he recently cancelled a trip to Switzerland, where state prosecutors might not have been so lacklustre.

Justice activists were filing a case in Switzerland on behalf of two Guantánamo detainees—one former, one current detainee—in conjunction with popular protests being planned against the potential visit of Bush to that country. On the day of the announcement of a press conference to announce the case against him, George Bush canceled his trip to Switzerland.

What is the name of the Swiss prosecutor who would have indicted and/or imprisoned Bush?  Did he have a hand in preventing Bush from stepping on European soil?   Is this a sure sign of the end of his reign of impunity, now that he's just another private citizen?

DemocracyNow!'s coverage of the case against Bush in Canada was provided with a write-up in yesterday's NY Times.

"A grass-roots newscast gives a voice to struggles"
by Brian Stelter
The New York Times.
10/23/11

“Democracy Now!,” the 15-year-old public radio and television newscast, distinguishes itself by documenting social movements, struggles for justice and the effects of American foreign policy, along with the rest of the day’s developments.

Operated as a nonprofit organization and distributed on a patchwork of stations, channels and Web sites, “Democracy Now!” is proudly independent, in that way appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who are skeptical of the news organizations that are owned by major media companies. The program “escapes the suffocating sameness that pervades broadcast news,” said John Knefel, a comedian and freelance writer who started listening about four years ago and now tries never to miss an episode.

Though it has long had a loyal audience, “Democracy Now!” has gained more attention recently for methodical coverage of two news events — the execution of the Georgia inmate Troy Davis and the occupation of Wall Street and other symbolic sites across the country. Ms. Goodman broadcast live from Georgia for six hours on Sept. 21, the evening of the execution, and “Democracy Now!” reporters were fanned out in Manhattan from the first day of the protests against corporate greed.

“At the time, we had no idea if the protest would even last the night, but we recognized it as potentially an important story,” said Mike Burke, a senior news producer for the program. He noted that “it took NPR more than a week to air its first story on the movement.”

Distribution for “Democracy Now!” — which is live each weekday at 8 a.m. Eastern — comes from public, community and college radio stations; public access television stations and some PBS affiliates; the noncommercial satellite networks Free Speech TV and Link TV; and from the program’s Web site, DemocracyNow.org, which streams each hourlong newscast in full.

The producers say the program is broadcast on more than 950 stations. But because the distribution is cobbled together and because the program has no commercials, no Nielsen ratings are available.

The media, Ms. Goodman said in an interview last week, can be “the greatest force for peace on earth” for “it is how we come to understand each other.” But she asserted that the views of a majority of Americans had been “silenced by the corporate media.”

“Which is why we have to take it back,” she said, echoing the sentiments of many of her fans.

Friends and former colleagues describe Ms. Goodman as ferocious and persistent, traits that have not changed since the program’s inception in 1996 on five Pacifica Radio stations.

“On the radio, she sounded at times like a giant, at others a giant slayer,” said Jeremy Scahill, now an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine, who practically begged Ms. Goodman to let him volunteer for the program in 1997. She agreed and initially paid him $40 a day from her own pocket. On Facebook he lists the program as his college education.

“What drove us was telling stories we felt were being ignored, misreported or underreported by corporate media outlets,” Mr. Scahill said.

The program slowly gained more stations and, amid a dispute with Pacifica, which was later resolved, it established itself as a nonprofit news organization in 2001. The week of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the program began to be simulcast on television. Since then, Ms. Goodman said, “the growth has just been phenomenal.”

While many media outlets were faulted for playing down antiwar protests after the attacks, “Democracy Now!” covered such events extensively.

Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.

Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.

The nonprofit nature of the program means that the producers “never have to worry about how an advertiser might feel,” avoiding potential self-censorship, Mr. Burke said.

It's good to see the NY Times covering the chutzpah of the independent media's coverage of the controversy, at least in some way, even if the Times editors can seem to find the space on the front page to dedicate to the potential prosecution of our former "decider-in-chief".

Can the New York Times be brought round to seeing the good sense in indicting the former U.S. president??   

Will the U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, ever grow a pair and actually uphold the United States’ obligations, under the Convention against Torture?

[LeftDemocrat]

This thread is almost cold.  But out of the embers...

British Court: Bush-Blair Conversation From Before Iraq Attack Must Be Released
Foreign Office Sought to Keep Information Secret
by Jason Ditz,
May 21, 2012

A British legal tribunal today ruled that the government must release the details of a phone conversation between Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush on March 12, 2003.

The ruling said “the circumstances surrounding a decision by a UK government to go to war with another country is always likely to be of very significant public interest, even more so with the consequences of this war.”

The details of the conversation have been kept secret for nearly a decade, but reportedly included a discussion between Blair and Bush of whether or not to seek UN authorization to attack Iraq. Ultimately they did not.

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/05/21/british-court-bush-blair-conversation-from-before-iraq-attack-must-be-released/

More details:

A panel chaired by tribunal judge Professor John Angel overruled objections from the Foreign Office.

The tribunal ordered that an edited version of the note should be released within 30 days.

The Foreign Office has been ordered to release parts of the note detailing the conversation on 12 March 2003, a week before the invasion of Iraq began.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-and-george-bushs-phone-conversation-a-week-before-iraq-invasion-must-be-released-7771236.html

Will the cabal pressing for a war of aggression and a crime against peace finally be revealed?