A Dream Come True: The "Bush Six"

I always love hearing a good story about how seemingly crazy, wishful thinking slowly but surely becomes certifiable fact. Case in point is British lawyer Phillippe Sands who wrote a book claiming that several of the top men in the Bush Administration would be tried in court for their crimes against humanity. The subjects of the book responded harshly and most of the traditional media in the U.S. ignored it. Now however, Sands' prediction is starting to stand on more solid ground and the story caught the eye of the New Yorker this week:

Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects. Among those whom the court singled out was Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

In Washington the other night, over a cup of camomile tea, Sands described the behind-the-scenes role he played in spurring the Spanish court to action. He paced his hotel room, seeming by turns proud and stunned at what he had done. “This is the end of these people’s professional reputations!” he said. “This is no joke. We’re talking about the serious potential deprivation of liberty.”

A deprivation of liberty is exactly what those men need, and you can add Dick Cheney and George Bush to that list as well. Yet one has to wonder, how did this Brit get so involved in the illegalities of American politicos?

The current torture case began in the spring of 2004, when photographs of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib surfaced. Sands said that he read the protestations of innocence from Bush Administration officials, who blamed a few “bad apples” for the incidents, with the eye of a barrister. He recalled, “I could spot right away that they were speaking as advocates of a cause. So I decided to find out what really happened.” While keeping up his busy law practice, he travelled to America to interview the key players in what he described as “a writing project I am engaged in on international law and the war on terror.” Many Bush officials, including Feith and William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel, who was also named in the Spanish lawsuit, agreed to meet with Sands, perhaps expecting a friendly chat. “I spent two years trekking around the country, finding out that they were manifestly untruthful,” Sands said. “I’ve got a particular bugbear about lawyers,” he added. “If not for lawyers, none of these abuses would have ever occurred.”

Like Sands, I've got a serious bugbear with all of the White House goons that were involved with the condoning of torture. There were some serious crimes committed under Bush's watch and hardly anyone tried to stop the perpetrators. Without much scrutiny, the masterminds were able to blame the little people and expected to get away with their terrible deeds. Now that we have at least one court in trying them, hopefully justice will prevail as Sands predicts.

Under George Bush, Freedom Of Speech And The Press Were The First To Go

We pride ourselves as a nation of being a beacon of freedom, land of liberty, shelter for the oppressed masses....or at least we used to before George Bush became President. As bad as we saw it get under our last President, it was much, much worse. It was obvious President Bush didn't have much respect for the laws, but not to the degree that Attorney General Eric Holder has uncovered.

From ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder released several Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel memos, which show the astonishing extent to which the administration expanded its wartime powers. An October 2001 memo from John Yoo, for example, states that the “Fourth Amendment would not apply” for domestic military operations. The memo also restricted basic First Amendment rights:

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Yoo wrote in the memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States.”

Thank goodness we have a competent and truthful Attorney General now that is willing to uncover and expose the abuses from the previous Administration. The more I hear from Holder, the more I like him. Of course, I could like a horde of rats in a dark subway tunnel more than John Yoo and the Attorney Generals that he worked for from 2001 to this past January. Hopefully these small nuggets of truthful morsels will keep coming out and ideally, that we prosecute each and every Bush Administration official that willingly broke the laws of our country that are supposed to keep us as free a nation as possible.

Bushie Has Trouble Saying That We Won't Bury People Alive

These two minutes of testimony speak volumes about the Bush Administration and their views on torture:

Bush Signed Off On Torture

Forget John Yoo (who?), forget the absent-minded media and pay attention to ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern. McGovern has the goods on Bush and finally nails him to the floor about torture. We all know, either in the back of our conservative heads or in the front of our liberal ones, that George Bush wants to torture people. It is sick, but hey, people can be sick and when they have power like our buffoon of a President bad things can happen. Really bad things. Well he said we didn't torture, but like in many other areas, he lied about that as well and now we have the proof.

From Consortium News:

Is it because John Yoo, the former Justice Department's hired hand, is such an easy target? Is it because of the cheeky, in-your-face way in which Yoo argues that the president has the authority to have your eyes poked out and your sons' testicles crushed, because we are "at war" and he is commander in chief.

Or is it because our press is STILL reluctant to go after Yoo's guys – first and foremost his ultimate client – President George W. Bush? Oh, but that would be hard, you say.

Nonsense.

Available on the Web, in its original format, is a 7 Feb. 2002 action memorandum that the president signed to implement the dubious advice he was getting from Yoo and those at Justice who hired Yoo – and from the vice president's office which guided Yoo.

Yoo did their dirty work (and now he takes the rap).

So it wasn't a little Bushophile that was ultimately responsible for this madness, the directions to torture came straight from the top. From that bastard Dick Cheney and his sidekick George. Let me say it again. They. Signed. Off. On. Torture. That means waterboarding, electrocution, sleep deprivation, whips, torches, you name it. If the Geneva Convention (which we signed) said no, Bush said yes.

Just in case you don't want to click on that big, bad PDF file....

In his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum, Bush wrote: "I determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees." (Common Article 3 bans "torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.")

Then, drawing on the lawyerly legerdemain, Bush did something really dumb. Using words drafted by Vice President Dick Cheney's lawyer, David Addington, for a memo dated Jan. 25, 2002, signed by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the president ordered that detainees be treated, "humanely ... to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."

Tacked onto the end of that sentence is a classic circumlocution: "in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." But that is not what Geneva says, and there is no way to square that circle.

Squaring circles is what Bush tries to do in all aspects of his Presidency. This peg warrants impeachment and imprisonment. He is a war criminal, there really isn't much more to that. Conservatives can come up with all the BS arguments about the GWOT all they want, this is a war crime and Bush's signature is more than plenty of evidence.

Has Torture Becoming Boring To The Media?

A huge bombshell landed in our laps this week and no one really noticed. That explosive contained the rationale for George Bush and his henchmen to torture anyone they want. Anyone. John Yoo at the Department of Justice had an 81 page memo crafted and is now declassified. Why would the Administration want to open up this part of their book for people to see how they've been on a crusade for an Executive branch that makes Congress look like a whimpering puppy? Perhaps it was because they knew the media would be unable to digest it in their endless 24 hour cycle of ratings-grabbing insanity.

From The Huffington Post:

On cable news, mentions of the memo's declassifications were few, brief, and undetailed. CNN's Headline News noted that the story was "one of the most popular stories at cnn.com," but apparently, that's not enough to warrant a lengthier report. MSNBC featured a brief mention on Morning Joe, and a near-noontime mention that was three sentences long and followed by a lengthy report on the hospitalization of an American Idol performer.

Only Fox News took the matter to the level of discussion, but even then, the report was largely short-sighted and full of equivocations and unsubstantiated claims. The major takeaway was that the memo noted that "constitutional protections do not apply to foreign prisoners being held outside the United States" and that interrogation "becomes torture when severe pain and suffering cause permanent or irreversible damage...death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function." (As you'll see below, the full ramifications of the memo were far more vast.)

Later in the day, Fox added, "Numerous presidents have ordered the capture and questioning of enemy combatants during virtually every major conflict in the nation's history. Recognizing this authority, congress has never attempted to restrain or interfere with the president's authority on this score." This sort of implies that if an action was taken in the past, it imbues a "rightness."

Along the way, Fox salted the coverage with equivocations. "A number of major Republicans and Democrats said this is a terrible mistake." None were named, and the wisdom of their position was unexplored. "Some constitutional scholars say the 81-page legal opinion must be placed in historical context...[it should be viewed as] a period piece." That's a classic "some say" assertion that again suggests that "history" trumps a moral foundation or factual evidence that indicates torture is ineffective. Finally, Fox lets Kit Bond have the last word, and it's a stupefyingly inane one: "Some are more interested in recycling old news and scoring political points with the ACLU."

It is amusing, if not sad, that Fox News went the farthest with this. Perhaps they knew that no one else would pay too much attention to it. That would give them ample opportunity to spin this the way the Administration would want. That Bush is right to torture people if it serves a "higher purpose," even if we do not know what that purpose is, despite all the facts to the contrary that torturing prisoners does interrogators absolutely no good at all.

What the media did with this story, both actively and passively, shows that they are not doing their jobs at protecting the freedoms of the American people. The fourth estate was meant to be a stop gap when the three branches of our government were not working to the best of their ability. Unfortunately now, that fourth estate is either in bed with the Executive branch, or in the other room playing video games while King Bush gets to do as he pleases.