Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire.
Consider this the natural follow-up to the recent release of The Black Sites, the detailed report about CIA "interrogation" (torture).
Nat Hentoff at Village Voice has an article based on an allegedly leaked report from the Red Cross which implicates Team Bush in war crimes.
I suppose the news is the news here: the fact it's now at least at the Village Voice level. It's continuing to be discussed, but I cannot find the "report" that Hentoff describes anywhere on the internet for the moment. His work is fueling a lot of other blog postings but I see no Old Media Cartel postings.
His is a lengthy article and I am only going to select a couple salient "grafs" for recommending the article and for discussion here.
After the jump.
First of all, most of the people reading this posting will already know that Team Bush is guilty of numerous war crimes.
In fact, probably the ONLY people left in the world who don't know this live here in America with their faces glued to the TV.
But the Democratic Party has an inescapable obligation to know:
While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn't let them in.
The Dems will be returning from vacations soon and their plate is already overloaded with tasks. Fortunately, launching the necessary investigations into Dick Cheney and following up on Alberto and Karl's attempts to skate away will also be the investigations into torture.
Alberto worked hard to excrete a legal "framework" which would appear to create extraordinary circumstances in which the Constitution, the Geneva Convention and US laws can be ignored with impunity. Karl is well-known to be one of the major brains of this criminal organization posing as a Presidential Administration.
Alberto's Scaffolding - his attempts to explain away the rule of law, essentially - has to be wrecked and dismantled.
Hentoff compares us (you and me) to the Germans of the late 1930's and 1940's who wanted to claim ignorance of all Hitler and his NAzi's were up to. We cannot use this cop-out, basically.
Some of the German people at that time DIDN'T know and likely could not possibly have known because of the relative absence of mass communication.
We do NOT have this excuse.
We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.
But it's not just the Red Cross pointing fingers at the US.
Physicians for Human Rights join the fray.
All U.S. personnel who engage in the CIA’s so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques and similarly abusive techniques are at serious risk of violating U.S. law. As detailed below, under U.S. law the severity of physical pain or mental harm caused by an interrogation technique is key to determining whether the technique can be considered torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. An extensive body of medical literature, derived from the treatment and study of torture survivors worldwide, demonstrates that the "enhanced" techniques are likely to cause significant physical and mental harm to detainees. As a result, officials and interrogators who authorize and participate in interrogations using these techniques face a substantial risk of criminal liability under the provisions prohibiting "torture" and "cruel or inhuman treatment" in the U.S. War Crimes Act (WCA), as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), and under The Torture Convention Implementation Act of 1994 (the Torture Act). Many of these interrogation techniques may also be prohibited by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA). To protect U.S. officials and personnel from potential criminal liability and to ensure that all U.S. personnel adhere to U.S. law, these techniques should not be authorized.
Hentoff continues:
Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial—and Congress continues to stay asleep—future historians of the Bush administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on CIA interrogations—which, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment"—"fails explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, "with the president's approval.
The good news is that the Democrats CAN do it. Nothing of any substance stands in their way.
One of them has already been hard at work:
Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques—so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.
The Democrats simply need to focus and flex their muscle.
Stop with the "keep the powder dry" nonsense and open up real investigations.
To the extent the Dems continue to drag their feet on investigating criminality the rest of the world already sees is pretty much the extent to which our elected Democratic leadership is complicit with these war crimes and Team Bush's other assaults on Humanity.
While I continue to lose faith in Reid and Pelosi, I don't believe for a moment THEY are complicit with all this. And since they have been elected to represent us and have "the power" their work is cut out for them and rather well-defined.
They need to get busy - they have a lot to do: so many crimes, so little time.
Team Bush should NOT be allowed to complete their Second Term without at least being charged with at least 1 crime.
In a better, less-corrupt world, impeachment proceedings would not just "be on the table"; they would already be underway.