A Travel Advisory Alert is sounded as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) weighs introducing more articles of impeachment, 25 more:
“The minute the leadership said `this is dead on arrival’ I said that I hope they believe in life after death; because I’m coming back with it,” Kucinich vowed in an interview with the Sleuth this week. “It’s not gonna die. Because I’ll come back with more articles. Not 35, but perhaps 60 articles.”
Wow, that’s one busy courageous guy. The House may not impeach but Kucinich can be comforted. War Crimes charges are being readied. No, not on American soil – look east, to Europe.
Prosecutor’s Exhibit A-1
Ret. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, the general who probed Abu Ghraib wrote:
McClatchy
‘The current Bush administration has committed war crimes’ and needs to be held to account
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Well, except for Rep. Kucinich, our supine Congress does not have the stomach for even a slap on the wrist – a requisite for others to charge. It leaves open the only other option, meaning if we won’t do the right thing and bring them to account, others will step forward.
Scott Horton, a New York attorney, writes at TNR that a travel advisory note is in order: A Pinochet Moment ahead for Bush’s top officials and dare we hope, the two biggies – Bush and Cheney. Bush did admit to impeachable offenses.
The U.S. isn’t likely to try Bush administration officials for war crimes–but it’s likely that a European country will.
Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing provided the latest evidence that top Bush administration officials directed the use of torture techniques on detained suspected terrorists. Three panels of witnesses traced the use of highly coercive techniques back to the high echelons of the administration. The day ended with the grilling of William J. Haynes II, the former general counsel of the Department of Defense and a protégé of Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, who is now widely viewed as the “station master” of the administration’s torture policy. And in April, ABC News reported that officials including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld had held a series of meetings to discuss the use of specific torture techniques on detained suspect terrorists. The ABC report amplified earlier stories which said the decision to destroy videotapes of interrogations of suspects in CIA captivity involved four senior White House lawyers and other senior figures.
At the same time, Philippe Sands’s new book The Torture Team reveals the falsity of White House claims that the push to introduce torture techniques came from interrogators in the field. Sands demonstrates that the decision to use techniques like waterboarding came from the top, and tracks the elaborate scheme to make it appear that the practices began with a request from Guantánamo.
[.]In other hearings, witnesses have treaded lightly and experienced frequent failures of recollection, perhaps driven by a concern over self-incrimination.
And, indeed, in what may be a sign of things to come, 26 American civil servants are being tried in absentia by an Italian court in Milan for their involvement in the rendition of a radical Muslim cleric to Egypt. So, is it really feasible for Bush administration officials to be tried for war crimes?
[.]
So, yes, there are ample theoretical grounds for a war-crimes prosecution. But the action requires political will, which makes it quite unlikely to happen in the United States. First, the Bush administration has, under the legal stewardship of Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and John Ashcroft, taken a number of clever steps designed to make it difficult for any future prosecutor to charge them for war crimes. In fact, the administration’s legal architects recognized from the outset that their dismissive attitude toward the law of war was not widely shared. Some of the earliest legal policy documents crafted by the administration were focused on avoiding or obstructing just such action by future prosecutors. The entire controversy surrounding the Office of Legal Counsel and the Jay Bybee-John Yoo opinions turns on just this point.
[.]
Is it likely that prosecutions will be brought overseas? Yes. It is reasonably likely. Sands’s book contains an interview with an investigating magistrate in a European nation, which he describes as a NATO nation with a solidly pro-American orientation which supported U.S. engagement in Iraq with its own soldiers. The magistrate makes clear that he is already assembling a case, and is focused on American policymakers. I read these remarks and they seemed very familiar to me.
In the past two years, I have spoken with two investigating magistrates in two different European nations, both pro-Iraq war NATO allies. Both were assembling war crimes charges against a small group of Bush administration officials. “You can rest assured that no charges will be brought before January 20, 2009,” one told me. And after that? “It depends. We don’t expect extradition. But if one of the targets lands on our territory or on the territory of one of our cooperating jurisdictions, then we’ll be prepared to act.”
[.]
Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, nails it: “Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales and–at the apex–Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.” Augusto Pinochet made a trip to London, and his life was never the same afterwards.
(emphasis where added are mine)
I may have to swim the Atlantic to secure a front seat. Just saying, I’m keeping my passport valid.
