From Informed Comment (Juan Cole’s site):
Dick Cheney has cancelled a talk in Toronto because, he says, “Canada is too dangerous.”
This is the ultimate chicken hawk, who had 5 deferrals from serving in Vietnam, and who sent thousands of US troops to protect his oil in Iraq, where 30,000 were seriously wounded and nearly 5000 killed.
But, you know, he might be scalded by Tim Horton’s coffee or fatally confused when drivers stop to let jaywalkers cross the road.
Let’s take up a collection to send him to speak in Baghdad, which he made dangerous for millions of Iraqis.
http://www.juancole.com/...
I don’t really care if Canada is “dangerous,” for Dick Cheney. The problem is that America is not dangerous enough for him and has allowed him to get away with major violations of national and international law.
A new book by Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman claims that Dick Cheney should be prosecuted for violating federal laws.
My co-author Cynthia Cooper and I took a very long and hard look at what possible federal criminal statutes could be involved in President Bush and Vice-President Cheney’s misconduct during their administration. Their misconduct fell into three main areas: One, deceptions of Congress in connection with taking the country into the Iraq war, which now the figures suggest cost us $3 trillion aside from lives and injuries to American service people.
The second area of possible illegality is the possible violation of the wiretapping laws, which is a federal crime and a felony.
And the third area is the mistreatment of detainees, which can also be a federal crime under the anti-torture statute and it could be under the War Crimes Act, certainly as it was first written.
So we took a long and hard look at these statutes to see, first of all, do they appear to cover the actions that we know about from the press, from pubic documents, from congressional reports, and from federal documents themselves. Then we took out all the material that had nothing to do with President Bush’s own personal knowledge and Vice-President Cheney’s own personal knowledge. We did not want to charge them with actions of their subordinates. We wanted to make sure that they were knowing actors. Then we took a very hard look at the statutes and we believe that on the face of it, there’s three statutes that are implicated here in terms of possibilities for prosecution.
One is the conspiracy to defraud Congress, which is a violation of section 371 of the U.S. statutes. Then you have the wiretapping, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a federal crime, and third, you have the violations of the anti-torture act. Not only did we take a look at what crimes could cover these misdeeds, but we took a look at possible defenses, such as could they claim that there is a statute of limitations. Or could they rely on their lawyers’ advice—you know, "My lawyer told me that I could torture, so I could torture," that kind of thing.
http://www.alternet.org/...
It’s time for this chicken to come home to roost.