Full Story Here: Up with Chris Hayes on lack of consequences for Bush era war criminals – YouTube.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of “grotesque distortion” in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei’s and other arms inspectors inside the country.

The Iraq war taught him that “deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,” ElBaradei writes in “The Age of Deception,” being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.

Full Story Here: ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team.

A federal trial judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, threw out the case on New Year’s Eve 2009 after he found the Justice Department mishandled evidence and violated the guards’ constitutional rights.

But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Urbina wrongly interpreted the law. It ordered that he reconsider whether there was any tainted evidence against four of the five defendants —former Marines Evan Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; Donald Ball of West Valley City, Utah; and Dustin Heard of Knoxville, Tenn.; and Army veteran Paul Slough from Keller, Texas.

Full Story Here: Appeals court says judge erred in dismissing prosecution of Blackwater guards in Iraq shooting – The Washington Post.

The lesson is clear, and soldiers take note: You’re better off committing a war crime than exposing one.

An Army intelligence officer stationed in Kuwait, the 23-year-old Manning – outraged at what he saw – allegedly leaked tens of thousands of State Department cables to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. These cables show U.S. officials covering up everything from U.S. tax dollars funding child rape in Afghanistan to illegal, unauthorized bombings in Yemen. Manning is also accused of leaking video evidence of U.S. pilots gunning down more than a dozen Iraqis in Baghdad, including two journalists for Reuters, and then killing a father of two who stopped to help them. The father’s two young children were also severely wounded.

“Well, it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle,” a not-terribly-remorseful U.S. pilot can be heard remarking in the July 2007 “Collateral Murder” video.

Full Story Here: Under Obama, Better to Commit a War Crime Than Expose One | Common Dreams.

As former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo, I know that until the US rights the record on torture, its human rights calls ring hollow

Once upon a time, Americans across the political spectrum were united behind efforts to prevent torture and punish torturers. The United States signed the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) in 1988 when Republican Ronald Reagan was president. A Democrat-controlled Congress ratified it in 1994. The CAT says, “No exceptional circumstance whatsoever … may be invoked as justification of torture,” a principle the US endorsed without reservation. The CAT requires nations to enact domestic laws criminalising torture, and in 1994, a torture statute was added to the US criminal code.

A Republican member of Congress sponsored the War Crimes Act in 1996, which made “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions – like torture – federal crimes. He wanted Americans abused by former adversaries to get the justice they deserved but had been denied. The measure passed a Republican-controlled Congress by unanimous consent and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law.

Americans were solidly against torture when they believed they were beneficiaries of anti-torture laws. But then, the 11 September 2001 attacks occurred – and created an exceptional circumstance used by some as justification to draw new lines between right and wrong.

Full Story Here: America’s much abused moral authority | Morris Davis | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Our belief is that Bush violated U.S. and international law when he authorized torture, including the water boarding of detainees. Torture is a crime under a federal statute, Torture Statute, as well as under the War Crimes Act, and the Convention Against Torture, of which the U.S. was a major proponent.

The support for the investigation stems from Bush’s open admission that the authorized water boarding, the necessity people feel to hold torturers accountable if we are to end torture, and the utter failure of the United States to investigate Bush and others. The U.S., as the most powerful country in the world, is an example to the world: If the U.S. can openly torture, so can every other country.

There have been some naysayers to the attempts to internationally prosecute Bush and other officials. They have it wrong. They want a world in which if a country does not investigate its own torturers, then no other country should. They argue, as David Frum did in a recent column on this site, that efforts by the Center for Constitutional Rights and its partner legal organizations to seek criminal accountability of former President Bush in Switzerland amount to “law as a weapon of politics” and “assault upon the basic norms of American constitutional democracy.”

Full Story Here: Why there should be a case against George W. Bush under torture law – CNN.

Gail Davidson, cofounder of Lawyers Against the War, told the Straight by phone that she’ll also send copies to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, and “try to make a little bit more effective noise about keeping him out of the country this time”.

Davidson offered her comments in response to Surrey mayor Dianne Watts’s announcement today that Bush and former U.S. president Bill Clinton will speak at the fourth annual Surrey Regional Economic Summit later this year.

Full Story Here: Vancouver lawyer says she’ll try to stop George W. Bush from visiting Surrey | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com.

Center for Constitutional Rights : :

CCR Announces Bush Indictment for Convention Against Torture Signatory States

On February 7, 2011, two torture victims were to have filed criminal complaints for torture against former president George W. Bush in Geneva, who was due to speak at an event there on February 12th. On the eve of the filing of the complaints, George Bush cancelled his trip. Swiss law requires the presence of the alleged torturer on Swiss soil before a preliminary investigation can be open. The complaints could not be filed after Bush cancelled, as the basis for jurisdiction no longer existed.

These two complaints are part of a larger effort to ensure accountability for torturers, including former U.S. officials. So on February 7, 2011, CCR publically released the “Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment.” This document presents fundamental aspects of the case against George Bush for torture, and a preliminary legal analysis of his liability for torture and a response to some anticipated defenses. This document will be updated as developments warrant. The exhibit list contains references to more than 2,500 pages of supporting material.

Full Story Here: Bush Torture Indictment | Center for Constitutional Rights.

A 48-year-old Afghan citizen and Guantanamo detainee, Awal Gul, died on Tuesday of an apparent heart attack. Gul, a father of 18 children, had been kept in a cage by the U.S. for more than 9 years — since late 2001 when he was abducted in Afghanistan — without ever having been charged with a crime. While the U.S. claims he was a Taliban commander, Gul has long insisted that he quit the Taliban a year before the 9/11 attack because, as his lawyer put it, “he was disgusted by the Taliban’s growing penchant for corruption and abuse.” His death means those conflicting claims will never be resolved; said his lawyer: “it is shame that the government will finally fly him home not in handcuffs and a hood, but in a casket.” This episode illustrates that the U.S. Government’s detention policy — still — amounts to imposing life sentences on people without bothering to prove they did anything wrong.

This episode also demonstrates the absurdity of those who claim that President Obama has been oh-so-eagerly trying to close Guantanamo only to be thwarted by a recalcitrant Congress. The Obama administration has sought to “close” the camp only in the most meaningless sense of that word: by moving its defining injustice — indefinite, due-process-free detention — a few thousand miles north onto U.S. soil. But the crux of the Guantanamo travesty — indefinite detention — is something the Obama administration has long planned to preserve, and that has nothing to do with what Congress has or has not done. Indeed, Gul was one of the 50 detainees designated by Obama for that repressive measure. Thus, had Gul survived, the Obama administration would have sought to keep him imprisoned indefinitely without any pretense of charging him with a crime — neither in a military commission nor a real court. Instead, they would have simply continued the Bush/Cheney policy of imprisoning him indefinitely without any charges.

Full Story Here: Guantanamo death highlights U.S. detention policy – Guantanamo – Salon.com.

Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy:

I have not merely blogged. I would like to think that I spoke ‘truth to power’. I literally petitioned, perhaps harassed, my congressman –John Culberson, representing the 7th District. To his credit, Culberson responded though nothing he said was true, accurate or relevant. Most of the time he (or his staffers) just rewrote the official Bush ‘line’. It requires K-street size money to get real and/or effective access to your elected representatives.

Having put into place numerous Draconian measures, George W. Bush, it was feared, would not leave the White House. He had, after all, declared the Constitution to be ‘just a worthless piece of paper’; he had already begun a war against Iraq upon a pack of bald-faced lies!

§ 2441. War crimes(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

–U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441″>TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441

Full Story Here: The Existentialist Cowboy: Truth to Power: A Blunt Assessment of US Crimes in Iraq.

By STEVE HENDRICKS

Exactly two years have passed since President Obama banned the United States from torturing captives—sort of. More precisely, he banned the United States from torturing captives directly. He left intact the option of sending captives elsewhere to be tortured.

We know this because CIA Director Leon Panetta has assured us that extraordinary rendition—i.e., kidnapping someone and sending him to a Third World dungeon, where he will all but certainly be tortured—remains a tool in the president’s toolbox. If the president has availed himself of this maul, as is likely, then he has made himself a criminal no less than his predecessor in the Oval Office did.

Full Story Here: Steve Hendricks: Exporting Torture, Courting Prosecution … Still.

In a rare blistering attack on the Department of Justice, a career veteran of the agency recently told Raw Story that the Obama administration handing Bush-era officials “a get out of jail free card” sets “a dangerous precedent” that could encourage other offenses by future leaders.

J. Gerald Hebert, a former acting Justice Department chief who served the government’s enforcement wing in various capacities between 1973 and 1994, said in an exclusive interview that the failure of federal prosecutors to charge former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) with even a single crime was indicative of a greater problem.

On the heels of the successful prosecution of DeLay for money laundering and conspiracy in Texas, Hebert said he hoped it was clear that the Department of Justice had nothing to do with that conviction.

Full Story Here: Exclusive: DoJ veteran sees ‘dangerous precedent’ in letting Bush officials walk | Raw Story.

In a interview with the Dallas Morning News published yesterday, former President Bush touted his authorization of waterboarding as a key accomplishment to “leav[ing] behind a firmer foundation for my successors.” “[W]e passed laws that Congress endorsed and embraced, like the Terrorist Surveillance Program, military tribunals and enhanced interrogation techniques. The enhanced interrogation techniques are available to presidents if they so choose to use them.” Bush’s comments come on the heels of the revelation, published in his memoir released this week, that he personally authorized the waterboarding of 9/11 suspects.

Bush has adamantly defended his use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” over the years, saying the practices saved lives, were completely legal, and were not torture — but many rightly disagree. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union “joined a growing chorus in the human rights community calling for a special prosecutor to investigate” Bush’s use of waterboading to determine whether his administration “violated federal statutes prohibiting torture.” “[T]he former President’s acknowledgment that he authorized torture is absolutely without parallel in American history,” the ACLU wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

And yesterday, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez — who was himself tortured by the Argentinean junta in the 1970s — firmly stated that waterboarding is torture — “immoral and illegal.” In a radio interview with Mark Colvin of ABC News in Australia, Mendez said the legal memos authorizing waterboaring that Bush “hides behind” were “completely flawed,” and that there isn’t “any question” under international law that what Bush authorized was torture:

Full Story: ThinkProgress » UN Torture Rapporteur: ‘Couldn’t Be More Clear’ That Waterboarding Is Torture, ‘Immoral and Illegal’.

He has not lost his arrogance. He wants to sell his book, titled ‘Decision Points’.

He still dodges questions that are uncomfortable.

I caught a short clip of George Bush’s appearance with Matt Lauer regarding the legality of waterboarding. He was told by experts that waterboarding was legal; so he said: ‘Let’s do it’. When Lauer then reasoned that establishing waterboarding as legal would make it acceptable to use the technique on American captured troops, there wasn’t a hole big enough into which Bush could hide. He just wasn’t going to ‘debate the issue’.

I, for one, do not intend to read or buy this book, because there is nothing in its pages that would forgive the deception sold to the American people by Bush and his administration to take us to war in Iraq.

Full Story: Waterboarding: call to indict Bush following his memoirs confession – National Foreign Policy | Examiner.com.

“Not only does the administration claim to have sweeping power to target and kill U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, but it makes the extraordinary claim that the court has no role in reviewing that power or the legal standards that apply,” said CCR Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei, who presented arguments in the case. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the government’s claim to an unchecked system of global detention, and the district court should similarly reject the administration’s claim here to an unchecked system of global targeted killing.”

The ACLU and CCR were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi. The lawsuit asks the court to rule that, outside the context of armed conflict, the government can carry out the targeted killing of an American citizen only as a last resort to address an imminent threat to life or physical safety. The lawsuit also asks the court to order the government to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.

Full Story: Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority to Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones | CommonDreams.org.

In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled “Decision Points,” Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was “Damn right” and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

Full Story: Green Change : Bush says in memoir he approved waterboarding. It’s time to prosecute..

Ex-Prime Minister and post-Downing Street millionaire Tony Blair, to celebrate the publication of his book “A Journey,” was to have held “signing” session at Waterstones, Piccadilly on September 8 that he cancelled at the last minute. That this man, responsible for taking us into an illegal war, playing his part in the ruination of an ancient country because he “believed he was right,” should advertise himself in this way has caused outrage. Time, I think, to look at where we – and Blair – actually stand in terms of what we can and cannot do to call him to account.

What hope for international law?

We have spent years constructing that body of treaties, statutes and conventions known as international law, only to ignore it when it is most needed. How often has any state – or rather, any powerful Western state – been brought to account for breaching international law? And how many exempt themselves from the laws while insisting others abide by them?

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | The Long Road to the Hague: Prosecuting Blair.

OPS: Hague ‘em high

Powell also stated during an Aug. 24 telephone interview that he regretted the false intelligence that led the United States to claim the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which Powell presented to the United Nations and which underpinned the U.S. case to invade Iraq.

“I will always be seen as the one who made the major public presentation of that intelligence. I regret that it was wrong but, at the same time, we had every reason to believe it was correct,” Powell said of the false WMD evidence.

Full Story: Powell tells Mainichi Iraq invasion was avoidable, regrets false WMD intelligence – The Mainichi Daily News.

The violations included illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers, according to company and government officials familiar with the deal.

The settlement, which has not yet been publicly announced, follows lengthy talks between Blackwater, now called Xe Services, and the State Department that dealt with the violations as an administrative matter, allowing the firm to avoid criminal charges. A company spokeswoman confirmed Friday that a settlement had been reached. The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said he could not immediately comment.

Full Story: Blackwater Reaches $42 Million Settlement With U.S. – NYTimes.com.

The Pentagon warned that would be more damaging to security and risk more lives than the organisation’s initial release of some 76,000 war documents.

That extraordinary disclosure, which laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, has angered US officials, energised critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drawn the attention of the Taleban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.

Full Story: WikiLeaks prepares to release more Afghan war files – Technology – NZ Herald News.

|Center for Constitutional Rights|:

A group of 72 Iraqi citizens who allege they were tortured while imprisoned at detention facilities across Iraq can continue with their lawsuit against military contractor L-3 Services, Inc. and a former employee, a federal judge in Maryland ruled Thursday.

In a 92-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Peter J. Messitte denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss the Iraqis’ federal and state court claims. He wrote, “On the facts alleged, Defendants’ actions arguably violated the laws of war such that they are not immune from suit under the laws of war.” The court also rejected claims of government contractor immunity defense.

“During wartime,” the court wrote, “‘many things are lawful in that season, which would not be permitted in a time of peace.’ Some actions, however, have been deemed so repulsive to mankind, or so disconnected from prosecuting and winning a war, that they are universally condemned. The law of war attempts to rein in these behaviors. …One such universally recognized rule is that torture is prohibited.”

Full Story: Judge Denies Motion to Dismiss Abu Ghraib Torture Case | Center for Constitutional Rights.

The group's review, which examined Bush-era documentation, asserts that the administration violated laws set up in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent medical testing on prisoners of war. (Nazi doctors sometimes experimented on their prisoners.)

The report states that, “Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures.” Notes the Associated Press:

Full Story: Doctors group says Bush Administration conducted medical experiments on detainees | Raw Story.

The report was a 32-page summary of the findings of a task force whose members were drawn from national security agencies across the executive branch. The group worked throughout 2009 to evaluate each of the 240 detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when the Obama administration took office and to decide their fates.

The task force’s general findings have been known since its report was completed in January. But the report itself was not made public. It was obtained Friday by The Washington Post, which posted the report on its Web site.

Full Story: No Terror Evidence Against Some Detainees – NYTimes.com.

Hague, a member of the Conservative-led coalition that took power after May 6 elections, had supported calls for an inquiry while in opposition last year. Binyam Mohamed, a former Guantanamo detainee and U.K. resident, alleges he was tortured with the collusion of British officials while held in the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The previous Labour government rejected the claims and argued in a series of cases that releasing information about Mohamed’s treatment could damage relations with the U.S.

Full Story: Hague Orders Probe Into Whether U.K. Agents Colluded in Torture – BusinessWeek.

Harold Koh, the State Department’s top legal adviser, outlined the administration’s legal case for the robotic attacks last month. Now, some legal experts are taking turns to punch holes in Koh’s argument.

It’s part of an ongoing legal debate about the CIA and U.S. military’s lethal drone operations, which have escalated in recent months — and which have received some technological upgrades. Critics of the program, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have argued that the campaign amounts to a program of targeted killing that may violate the laws of war.

In a hearing Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s national security and foreign affairs panel, several professors of national security law seemed open to that argument. But there are still plenty of caveats, and the risks to U.S. drone operators are at this point theoretical: Unless a judge in, say, Pakistan, wanted to issue a warrant, it doesn’t seem likely. But that’s just one of the possible legal hazards of robotic warfare.

Full Story: Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says | Danger Room | Wired.com.

This was no ordinary protest. Tony Blair has been accused of war crimes in a legal initiative led by the country’s former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad.

A War Crimes Tribunal as well as a War Crimes Commission were set up integrated by renowned jurists. Documentary evidence of war crimes committed by Blair and Bush has been carefully compiled and collected since 2006. The prosecution is led by several of Malaysia’s most prominent lawyers.

Dr Mahathir in a public statement “expressed disgust at the companies that had sponsored Blair’s visit here. ‘How can you sponsor and get advice from a liar? Do you also intend to lie in carrying out your business?’ he asked.” (‘Thousands Of Slippers To ‘Greet’ Tony Blair In Malaysia’, April 24, 2010)

Full Story: Tony Blair very close to being indicted for War Crimes — Signs of the Times News.

Now that the horrors of Depleted Uranium are being revealed to the world, we can expect for apologists to begin moving into the next phase of damage control within the coming months. It will likely be claimed that the depopulation of much of the Middle East was an unfortunate result of the DU that the Pentagon used because it was not aware of the health effects it would have.

This article is meant to demonstrate why this is not the case. The radioactive waste is intentionally used to depopulate and economically cripple the nations that the United States government declared war on. A declassified memorandum from 1943 explains how radioactive material can be used as a gas warfare instrument.1 It mentions that:

As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty

Full Story: Evidence that Depleted Uranium is intended as a weapon of genocide « Wake-up Call.

Activists behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents have complained of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release a video showing an American attack in which 97 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.

Julian Assange, one of the founders of Wikileaks, has claimed that a restaurant where the group met in Reykjavic, the capital of Iceland, came under surveillance in March and one of the group’s volunteers was detained for 21 hours by police.

Assange, an Australian, says he was followed on a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen by two American agents. The group has riled governments by publishing documents leaked by whistleblowers.

Full Story: Whistleblowers on US ‘massacre’ fear CIA stalkers – Times Online.

The World Wide Web was transfixed Monday when Wikileaks put up on YouTube a 38-minute video, along with a 17-minute edited version, taken from a U.S. Army Apache helicopter, one of two firing on a group of Iraqis in Baghdad at a street corner in July 2007. Twelve civilians died, including a Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., Wikileaks said it had got the footage from whistle-blowers in the military and had been able to break the encryption code. The Pentagon has confirmed the video is genuine.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Alexander Cockburn | The Cover-Ups That Exploded.

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, “all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” are “terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden's] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker.”

“We’re learning a great deal of information about how al-Qaida operates, and able to stop other terrorist attacks,” he added.

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Ex-Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

Full Story: George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’ – Times Online.

Graphic video footage of the shooting, which left several other people dead and wounded two children, was published on the Internet by WikiLeaks, a website that discloses information obtained from whistleblowers.

“The truth came out and the whole world saw. The American pilot should be judged by international justice and we want compensation because the act left orphans,” said Safa Chmagh, whose brother Saeed Chmagh, a Reuters driver, died.

Full Story: Reuters families demand US troops be tried over shooting – Yahoo! News.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John H. Durham, who is leading the investigation, recently bestowed immunity from prosecution on a CIA lawyer who reviewed the tapes years before they were destroyed to determine whether they diverged from written records about the interrogations, two sources familiar with the case said. That could signal that the case is reaching its final stages. Durham has been spotted at Justice Department headquarters in Washington over the past few weeks, in another signal that his work is intensifying.

The agency lawyer, John McPherson, could appear before a grand jury later this month or in April, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation continues. CIA lawyers have been essential to understanding the episode because they offered advice to agency personnel about handling the tapes, and whether they should have been included when agency records were turned over in other court cases. McPherson is not thought to be under criminal jeopardy but had previously hesitated to testify, the sources said.

Full Story: U.S. investigators winding down inquiry of destroyed CIA tapes – washingtonpost.com.

Other officials contacted by the panel include former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Bush adviser Stephen Hadley, among others.

“Members of Sir John Chilcot’s panel are believed to be willing to travel to the US to take evidence – almost certainly in private – on the administration’s policies between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2009,” The Telegraph reported on Sunday.

Full Story: British inquiry into Iraq war turns toward Bush, officials: report | Raw Story.

Sources in Washington said the inquiry sent out emails “about three weeks ago” to senior officials in Mr Bush’s government including, it is believed, the former president himself.

Other requests are understood to have been made to Dick Cheney, Mr Bush’s vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, and Stephen Hadley, an ex-national security adviser – as well as to their deputies and senior assistants

Full Story: Iraq Inquiry asks to question George Bush’s senior officials – Telegraph.

U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Andersen’s ruling did not say the two contractors had proven any of their claims. But it did say they had alleged enough specific mistreatment to warrant hearing evidence of exactly what happened.

Andersen said his decision “represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting.”

Full Story: The Daily Journal.

During 2007-2008 Democratic congressional committees subpoenaed dozens of Bush officials, who simply refused to comply. Although any committee has the undisputed power to use the Capitol Police to enforce its subpoenas, none did. They asked the Bush Justice Department to do it. They sued the Bush Justice Department in court. But, with the exception of a weird deal for partial and secret compliance by Karl Rove in 2009, not a single one of the scofflaws has been compelled to show up.

During 2009-2010 none of the subpoenaed officials have been re-subpoenaed. When torture memos were made public in April 2009, Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked memo author Jay Bybee to testify, and Bybee declined. Leahy did not issue a subpoena. Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, in 2009 and 2010 has impeached a judge for groping and another for petty corruption, but has not so much as asked Bybee (or Yoo) to appear.

Full Story: Why Leahy Is Afraid to Subpoena Yoo.

The once-secret CIA papers, obtained in a lawsuit by the conservative legal foundation Judicial Watch, shed new light on which lawmakers knew the details of the controversial interrogation program and when.

Human rights groups have argued the harsh interrogation methods were forms of torture and violated U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions on treatment of war prisoners. President Barack Obama banned the techniques shortly after taking office in January 2009.

The declassified memos show the program began after the capture of al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who was the group’s operations director, in the city of Faisalabad in central Pakistan in March 2002.

Full Story: CIA briefed 68 lawmakers on interrogation program | Reuters.

That answers why there will NEVER be an investigation

I didn’t think it was possible, but former Bush officials — desperately fighting what they know will be their legacy as war criminals — have become even more dishonest propagandists out of office than they were in office. At National Review, Bill Burck and Dana Perino so thoroughly mislead their readers about the DOJ report — rejecting the findings of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of ethical misconduct against John Yoo and Jay Bybee — that it’s hard to know where to begin. They devote paragraph after paragraph to hailing the intelligence and integrity of the report’s author, career DOJ prosecutor David Margolis, in order to pretend that he defended Yoo and Bybee’s work, claiming that Margolis “officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee” and that “Margolis rejected OPR’s recommendation and most of its analysis.” Perhaps the most deceitful claim is this one:

So, in one corner we have a legal all-star team of Mukasey, Filip, Estrada, Mahoney, Goldsmith [all right-wing Bush lawyers], and Margolis. In the other corner, we have OPR operating far outside its comfort zone and area of expertise. This shouldn’t have been close — and it wasn’t, on the merits.

Full Story: Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

The chief author of the Bush administration’s “torture memo” told Justice Department investigators that the president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be “massacred,” according to a report released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department’s internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed “intentional professional misconduct” when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects.

The report by OPR concludes that Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and his boss at the time, Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, should be referred to their state bar associations for possible disciplinary proceedings. But, as first reported by NEWSWEEK, another senior department lawyer, David Margolis, reviewed the report and last month overruled its findings on the grounds that there was no clear and “unambiguous” standard by which OPR was judging the lawyers. Instead, Margolis, who was the final decision-maker in the inquiry, found that they were guilty of only “poor judgment.”

Full Story Report: Bush Lawyer Said President Could Order Civilians to Be ‘Massacred’ – Declassified Blog – Newsweek.com.

The investigation had brought outraged protests from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other defenders of Bush-era terrorist interrrogation methods.

John Yoo and Jay Bybee showed lousy judgment, but not professional misconduct by writing memos authorizing techniques such as waterboarding, the Justice Department report concludes, sources said.

Full Story Bush administration lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee cleared on torture rap.

Legal expert and one-time Nixon White House counsel John Dean appears to agree with that conclusion, although he cautiously told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Tuesday that Cheney had merely “admitted to torture, which once was a war crime.”

“I’m not quite sure after the Bush administration lawyers got finished with it that it was,” Dean continued, though his tone of voice made it clear that he didn’t actually mean his words. “At least [Cheney] doesn’t seem to believe that it is. But by normal beliefs, it is a war crime.”

Full Story ‘By normal beliefs,’ Cheney committed war crime: John Dean | Raw Story.

He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he’s dragging us further in

Osama bin Laden’s favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father’s cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama’s vision can’t even inspire his own kids. But Omar bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to shore up his flailing, failing cause – and we are giving it to him.

The day George W Bush was elected, Omar says, “my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs – one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country”. Osama wanted the US and Europe to make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed – from London to Gaza to Syria – said their ranks swelled with each new whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to extinguish fire with a blowtorch.

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama’s orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out Al Jazeera any night.

Full Story Johann Hari: Obama’s secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent.

OPS: This is also why Obama will never prosecute Bush or andyone in the Bush Crime Family -  He’s just a guilty.

MADRID/CAIRO: Public inquiries on the decision to wage war on Iraq that are silent about the crimes committed, the victims involved, and provide for no sanction, whatever their outcome, are not enough. Illegal acts should entail consequences: the dead and the harmed deserve justice.

On 6 October 2009, working with and on behalf of Iraqi plaintiffs, we filed a case before Spanish law against four US presidents and four UK prime ministers for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq. The case presented spanned 19 years, including not only the wholesale destruction of Iraq witnessed from 2003, but also the sanctions period during which 1.5 million excess Iraqi deaths were recorded.

We brought the case to Spain because its laws of universal jurisdiction are based on principles enshrined in its constitution. All humanity knows the crimes committed in Iraq by those we accused, but no jurisdiction is bringing them to justice. We presented with Iraqi victims a solid case drawing on evidence contained in over 900 documents and that refer to thousands of individual incidents from which a pattern of accumulated harm and intent can be discerned.

Full Story Law Suit against 4 US Presidents & 4 UK Prime Ministers for War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity & Genocide in Iraq.

The reasons for an inquiry into his government’s actions, he argued during a recent interview, stem merely from an “obsession” to uncover a grand “conspiracy” to take the two nations to war.

But it’s not just Blair who should be sweating the British inquiry. UK officials are also considering interviews with Bush administration officials, The Washington Post noted Monday evening.

Full Story As Blair blasts Iraq ‘conspiracy’ hunt, British officials eye Bush, aides | Raw Story.

But, says Lord Bingham, any legal redress is unlikely

The Guardian once ­described Lord “call me Tom” Bingham as “the radical who is leading a new English revolution”. That would not ­necessarily be your impression on meeting the gentlemanly, old-school 76-year-old who, when I arrive at his tall-ceilinged, book-lined, art-filled mansion flat in Notting Hill, west ­London, immediately makes me ­ coffee, served in a silver pot. If this is ­revolution, it will not be instant.

Bingham – Baron Bingham of Cornhill to give him his proper title – was the first person ever to manage the judicial triple-whammy: master of the rolls from 1992-96, lord chief justice from 1996-2000, and senior law lord from 2000-2008. He retired in 2008 – at 75, an age when I’d assumed judges were just getting into their stride – and has now written a book called The Rule of Law, which he chose as a subject “because [though] the expression was constantly on people’s lips, I was not quite sure what it meant”. It is not untypical of Bingham that he would admit to not understanding the meaning of the phrase “rule of law” after a lifetime spent applying it.

The book is pleasingly short and essayistic but also heavily footnoted; he says it is for the general reader but perhaps wants to keep his legal peers onside too. He has a serious purpose – to try to establish what this totemic phrase means – but, happily, his natural quirkiness sometimes intrudes. “So, if you maltreat a penguin in the London Zoo, you do not escape prosecution because you are Archbishop of Canterbury,” he writes when seeking to establish that no one is above the law. He is also good at rooting out legal nonsense, such as this sentence in an adjunct to the 1979 Banking Act: “Any reference in these regulations to a regulation is a reference to a regulation contained in these regulations.” He has spent 50 years going through this stuff, and appears to have kept his sanity.

Full Story Iraq war was illegal, says former lord chief justice | UK news | The Guardian.

Punishing the guilty for deeds they committed in the past is the only way to show the world that we are truly on a new path.

In a week when one-year report cards on the Obama administration were piling up and not all the grades were good, Americans searching for the real change we heard so much about on Obama’s campaign trail were hit with some news that would send his grades plummeting. Late last Friday, we learned that Obama’s Department of Justice plans to go easy on John Yoo and Jay Bybee — the two assistant attorney generals under Bush who penned the infamous torture memos. For those who have been working long and hard in the accountability movement to make sure no one — not even presidents or their top advisors — is above the law, this was a serious setback.

As part of that movement, I was appalled. Not just because I want to see those who committed crimes in office punished rather than excused. Not just because I want to see the Obama White House restore accountability to government rather than cover up crimes committed by the former administration. And not just because Yoo and Bybee memo’d-up legal opinions stating that torture techniques as egregious and illegal as waterboarding were acceptable. No, there is a deeper question in play here: Why were they really asked to render these opinions in the first place?

Full Story Why We Can’t Afford to Let Obama Give Bush’s War Criminals a Free Pass | Civil Liberties | AlterNet.

Clare Short, who was the International Development Secretary before resigning shortly after the March 2003 invasion, also revealed she was “jeered” at by Cabinet colleagues and told to be quiet by Blair when she attempted to dispute the legality of the war.

She added that Prime Minister Gordon Brown had complained to her that Blair was “obsessed with his legacy” and was determined to use a short, decisive victory in Iraq to secure it.

Full Story Blair ‘was ready to deceive to go to war’ – World – NZ Herald News.

Elfyn Llwyd, Plaid Cymru’s parliamentary leader, said he had seen a confidential memo to that effect, although he would not divulge its exact contents.

Critics of the military action in Iraq have long suspected Mr Blair and President Bush came to an agreement at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in April 2002, a claim Mr Blair denied in evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry last week.

Mr Llwyd said he had offered to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry himself, in private if necessary.

Full Story WalesOnline – News – Wales News – Bush and Blair did strike Iraq deal, says Welsh MP.

Democracy NOW!

A new investigation by journalist Anand Gopal reveals harrowing details about US secret prisons in Afghanistan, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Gopal interviewed Afghans who were detained and abused at several disclosed and undisclosed sites at US and Afghan military bases across the country. He also reveals the existence of another secret prison on Bagram Air Base that even the Red Cross does not have access to. It is dubbed the Black Jail and is reportedly run by US Special Forces.

includes rush transcript, Video, Mp3 Download

Full Story “America’s Secret Afghan Prisons”: Investigation Unearths New US Torture Site, Abuse Allegations in Afghanistan.

A Bush administration appointee, Bybee signed a memo from 2002 that approved the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees captured in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Those techniques included waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

Newsweek reported on Friday that the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility’s (OPR) report on the actions of Bybee and his subordinates has been edited to remove the finding of misconduct that was reached in the report’s original version
.

Full Story On The Hill: Campaign Calls For The Impeachment of Bush Administration Torture Lawyer Jay Bybee.

Secret document signalled support for Iraqi dissidents and promised aid, oil and trade deals in return for regime change

A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal.

Whitehall officials drafted the “contract with the Iraqi people” as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the dictator had been removed. Tony Blair’s team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York.

The document, headed “confidential UK/US eyes”, was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today. It states: “We want to work with an Iraq which respects the rights of its people, lives at peace with its neighbours and which observes international law.

Full Story Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion – UK Politics, UK – The Independent.

OPS:  Book ‘em Dano

When, oh when, are the Bush-Cheney-Blair war crimes trials going to commence? Spring the waterlogged Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all the other patsies and use the $200 million-dollar 9/11 cover-up fund to try the *actual* ‘masterminds’ — if such a moniker can be used to describe the Bush cabal — behind the 9/11 terror attacks and the war crimes in Iraq. –Lori Price

Iraq to file lawsuit against US, Britain –The report says that 2,000 tonnes of depleted uranium has been used in Iraq. 01 Feb 2010 Iraq’s Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says. Iraq’s Minister of Human Rights, Wijdan Mikhail Salim, told Assabah newspaper that the lawsuit will be launched based on reports from the Iraqi ministries of science and the environment. According to the reports, during the first year of the US and British invasion of Iraq, both countries had repeatedly used bombs containing depleted uranium.

A child born with defects attributable to exposure to depleted uranium (Press TV archive photo)

Secret US-UK plan to oust Saddam in coup two years before invasion –Secret document signalled support for Iraqi dissidents and promised aid, oil and trade deals in return for regime change 01 Feb 2010 A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal. Whitehall officials drafted the “contract with the Iraqi people” as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the president had been removed. Tony Blair’s team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York. The document, headed “confidential UK/US eyes”, was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today. ['First the war was about WMDs. Now, the war is against Hussein and for liberation. Tell that to the children whose limbs have been blown off, or whose skulls have been exploded by shrapnel. The only WMDs are those of the so-called "coalition" forces, exploding like the evidence in search of the crime.' --Michael Rectenwald, March 30 Anti-W-ar Rally Pittsburgh Speech, 30 Mar 2003. Heads up! Look for al-CIAduh 'burrowers' to carry out a big false flag (Vancouver?) to serve as a distraction for this nugget. --LRP]

Full Story Citizens For Legitimate Government.

The move could see Mr Blair follow former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic into a dock in The Hague.

Professor Bill Bowring says the revelation that the Government rejected Foreign Office warnings not to invade Iraq means there is a good chance Mr Blair can be ‘investigated, at the very least’ for war crimes.

‘We now know that the Government was explicitly warned beforehand that the UK risked being prosecuted for going to war,’ said Prof Bowring.

Full Story Chilcot War Inquiry: Professor to launch ‘Nuremberg’ war crimes prosecution against Blair | Mail Online.

OPS: Could BUSH be next?

The Crown Office, which leads prosecutions, is examining their arguments following the former prime minister’s appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry last week, in which he expressed “no regrets” over deposing Saddam Hussein.

A parliamentary motion calling for Blair to be prosecuted has been laid down at Holyrood and has been signed by eight MSPs. It cites the verdict of a Dutch commission of judges earlier this month, which concluded that the United Nations resolution used to go to war in 2003 was insufficient to justify military action.

The Nationalists claim that, as Scots law complies with international law, Scottish prosecutors have the power to investigate the findings. They say that if the Crown Office then finds that evidence compelling, they should prosecute Blair.

Full Story Call for Blair to face trial in Scotland – Scotland on Sunday.

OPS: Blair, Bush  and the Bush Crime Family should be tried in every country on the planet that has been effected by their criminal deceptions

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

Full Story Justice Official Clears Bush Lawyers in Torture Memo Probe – Declassified Blog – Newsweek.com.

* What was the real motivation for invading Iraq?

* Why did you not act like a Statesman and stand up to Bush?

* Do you think the world is a safer place after our illegal Iraq crusade/mission for regime change?

* I would like Tony Blair to tell us what he knows about the death of Dr Kelly

Try to imagine a U.S. media outlet proposing such questions to Blair’s senior partner in crime! But the Inquiry itself did not put these questions to Blair in any effective way.

In the lead up to Blair’s testimony, a London protest was planned here.

Full Story Tony Blair Forced to Testify on His War Crimes | The Smirking Chimp.

Goldsmith, the government’s senior legal adviser in the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, stated that he had believed that it would have been “safer” to get a second United Nations resolution until a month before the invasion. But he changed his mind prior to issuing his March 13, 2003, advice to the cabinet that war was justified by United Nations resolution 1441, approved in November 2002, which gave Saddam Hussein a “final opportunity” to comply with UN resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War in 1991. War began three days later.

Goldsmith expressed serious reservations about the legality of military action in a draft opinion given to then Prime Minister Tony Blair in January 2003, but he told Chilcot that he had been “overly cautious.” On February 27, he met with Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, and senior US lawyers. He then told Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, and other government advisers that specific authorisation from the United Nations for war was not required. Iraqi non-compliance with resolution 1441 would reactivate UN resolution 678, passed in 1991, authorising “all necessary means to restore international peace and security” in the region. “That was, on past precedent, sufficient to constitute the green light,” he said.

On March 7, 2003, Lord Goldsmith presented Blair with a 13-page legal opinion in which he said a “reasonable case” could be made for launching an attack without specific Security Council approval. Ten days later he stated without reservation that resolution 1441 provided the necessary authorization for war. Asked why he left it so late to issue such a definitive statement, he said that it was because the armed forces required an “unequivocal” judgment before troops went into battle.

Full Story Britain: Illegality of Iraq war dominates Chilcot inquiry.

That statement directly contradicted Mr Blair’s warning to MPs in September 2002 – six months before the invasion – that Saddam’s weapons programme was “active, detailed and growing”.

The former Prime Minister was making his long-awaited appearance as the star witness before Sir John Chilcot’s panel of inquiry, where, despite a nervous start, he delivered a typically unrepentant account of the decision to commit British forces to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Full Story Tony Blair admits Saddam threat was overstated – Times Online.

The report listed 66 countries that have allegedly been involved in secret detentions — from Ethiopia to Romania, from Kosovo to Pakistan — and called on governments to investigate and prosecute those who ordered such detentions.

In their first in-depth global study on secret detentions, the UN experts said that virtually no judicial steps had been attempted against the practice despite the “widespread” manner in which suspects were held in a legal limbo.

“Secret detention continues to be used in the name of countering terrorism around the world” in spite of international human rights norms, said the study, which is due to be submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in March.

Full Story Secret detention may amount to crime against humanity: UN experts – Yahoo! Canada News.

Devastating evidence at the Iraq inquiry yesterday revealed that every senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office believed the conflict was in breach of international law.

Astonishingly, Downing Street asked lawyers to assess what the consequences would be if Britain toppled Saddam Hussein without legal authority. When they received the lawyers’ memo, No.10 demanded: ‘Why has this been put in writing?’

Full Story Chilcot inquiry into Iraq war: The damning verdict of top Whitehall lawyers on invading Iraq which ministers refused to accept | Mail Online.

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

Full Story CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding | Foreign Policy.

Chilcot and the courts won’t do it, so it is up to us to show that we won’t let an illegal act of mass murder go unpunished

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called “the supreme international crime”: the crime of aggression.

But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury. As a senior judge told the Guardian in November: “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”. Last month Lord Steyn, a former law lord, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal“. In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law“.

Full Story Wanted: Tony Blair for war crimes. Arrest him and claim your reward | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Citing the Seton Hall report on the June 9, 2006 deaths, as well as “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,’” the St. Louis Post Dispatch assesses the situation perfectly and draws exactly the right conclusions:

Enough is enough. Prisoner abuse and botched investigations undermine national security, handing America’s enemies a devastating recruiting tool. Mr. Obama should appoint an unrelenting career prosecutor to the case, someone of the caliber of Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to dig deeper. He must follow where the evidence leads.

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan noted the deafening silence from the Obama Administration about this matter:

In Iran, when prisoners are turned into corpses after interrogation, even the Khamenei junta feels it necessary to respond. In America, not so much.

Full Story Time for a Special Prosecutor—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine).

INTERNATIONAL ARREST WARRANTS REQUESTED

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, U.S.A. has filed a Complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) in The Hague against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales (the “Accused”) for their criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” perpetrated upon about 100 human beings. This term is really their euphemism for the enforced disappearance of persons and their consequent torture. This criminal policy and practice by the Accused constitute Crimes against Humanity in violation of the Rome Statute establishing the I.C.C.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Nevertheless the Accused have ordered and been responsible for the commission of I.C.C. statutory crimes within the respective territories of many I.C.C. member states, including several in Europe. Consequently, the I.C.C. has jurisdiction to prosecute the Accused for their I.C.C. statutory crimes under Rome Statute article 12(2)(a) that affords the I.C.C. jurisdiction to prosecute for I.C.C. statutory crimes committed in I.C.C. member states.

The Complaint requests (1) that the I.C.C. Prosecutor open an investigation of the Accused on his own accord under Rome Statute article 15(1); and (2) that the I.C.C. Prosecutor also formally “submit to the Pre-Trial Chamber a request for authorization of an investigation” of the Accused under Rome Statute article 15(3).

Full Story ICC Complaint Filed Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Gonzales – Democratic Underground.

The letter, a copy of which is published for the first time today, warned the prime minister that the case for military action in Iraq was of dubious legality and would be no guarantee of a better future for Iraq even if Saddam Hussein were removed.

It was sent 10 days before Blair met George Bush, then the US president, in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. The document clearly implies that Blair was already planning for military action even though he continued to insist to the British public for almost another year that no decision had been made.

Full Story Revealed: Jack Straw’s secret warning to Tony Blair on Iraq – Times Online.

“There was insufficient legitimacy under international law for a military invasion of Iraq” for which the Netherlands gave political but no military support, commission chairman Willibrord Davids told journalists in The Hague.

The commission’s report said the Dutch government decision “was based mainly on international political considerations.”

Full Story Iraq invasion in 2003 was illegitimate: Dutch probe – Yahoo! Canada News.

The request, reproduced below along with a transmittal letter, asks for the OPR report that has long been promised by Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as an earlier OPR report completed during the last months of the Bush administration. The request also seeks the 10 page rebuttal of the 2008 report by then- Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Full Story FOIA Request Filed for OPR Report on Bush’s Lawyers | lawsnotmen.org.

• of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — for war crimes and treason against our Constitution.
• of 30 or so leaders of the largest banks and investment, insurance, accounting, bond rating and law firms responsible for the irresponsible home mortgage lending and fraudulent repackaging of bad mortgages into investment instruments that led to the housing crash — for crimes of purposeful lack of due diligence and any other crimes they perpetrated upon investors, including false balance sheets.
• of the high-level federal appointees at Treasury, the Federal Reserve and other agencies who were told by staff what was going on with the mortgages/investment instruments and what could be done about it, and who did nothing — thus violating their oaths of office and statutory authorities.

My second wish for 2010 is that Obama wakes up and says, “My God, I am guilty of Bush’s ‘sins.’ ” And that Obama immediately orders the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan; orders the cessation of illegal attacks against alleged terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere; orders the FBI to draft criminal charges against suspected terrorists and presents these charges to federal courts and international police agencies, requesting the apprehension of such terrorists through police channels; orders the cessation of illegal spying on all Americans; orders the immediate closure of GITMO and moves all prisoners to the basement of the Pentagon to stand trial in federal courts; orders the immediate cessation of all actions considered torture under the Geneva Conventions; orders the termination of all agency heads and generals who told him to do all these things; and orders the prosecution of present and past agency heads and generals who advocated the above actions or implemented these actions in violation of U.S. law.

Full Story Buzz Davis: In 2010, Obama must enforce law or be impeached.

The occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead. While this apparently constitutes an everyday act of kindness, far less intriguing than the vicious singeing of his pubic hairs by Captain Underpants, it is at least a variation on the ordinary American technique of murdering men, women, and children by the dozens with unmanned drones.

Also this week in Afghanistan, eight CIA assassins (see if you can find a more appropriate name for them) were murdered by a suicide bombing that one of them apparently executed against the other seven. The Taliban in Pakistan claims credit and describes the mass-murder as revenge for the CIA’s drone killings. And we thought unmanned drones were War Perfected because none of the right people would have to risk their lives. Oops. Perhaps Detroit-bound passengers risked theirs unwittingly.

The CIA has declared its intention to seek revenge for the suicide strike. Who knows what the assassination of sleeping students was revenge for. Perhaps the next lunatic to try blowing up something in the United States will be seeking revenge for whatever Obama does to avenge the victims (television viewers?) of the Crotch Crusader. Certainly there will be numerous more acts of violence driven by longings for revenge against the drone pilots and the shooters of students.

Full Story Shooting Handcuffed Children | Corrente.

Marjorie Cohn

President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.

In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The UN Charter is based on the principles of international peace and security as well as the protection of human rights. But the United States, one of the founding members of the UN, has often flouted the commands of the charter, which is part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans saw it as a justifiable response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The cover of Time magazine called it “The Right War.” Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war but escalating the war in Afghanistan. But a majority of Americans now oppose that war as well.

Full Story Obama’s Af-Pak War is Illegal | CommonDreams.org.

US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank

Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.

Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.

The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved – Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians' work.

Full Story CIA working with Palestinian security agents | World news | guardian.co.uk.

Obama should get off his butt and insist upon war crimes trials of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condo Rice. That Iraq had WMD was a bald faced lie to justify the seizure of Middle East oil fields! Ergo –every Iraqi death following is one count in a WAR CRIMES INDICTMENT on the scale of those charged to Adolph Hitler and high mucky mucks in the murderous Third Reich.

TITLE 18 >(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

– PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441, War crimes

I say let the trials begin with George W. Bush who believed himself above the law and that the US Constitution was just a ‘goddamned piece of paper’!

The government official who wrote the first draft of the “dodgy dossier” that helped propel Britain into war in Iraq today admits, “We were wrong.”

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: What Must Obama do about the Lie of the Century?.

British sources reported late Monday that though a British court had issued an arrest warrant for Livni over war crimes allegedly committed in Gaza while she served as foreign minister, it annulled it upon discovering she was not in the U.K.

Livni served as foreign minister alongside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak during the Israel Defense Forces offensive in Gaza. The three figures comprised the “troika” of top decision-makers who charted the course of the war.

The Guardian points out the significance of this arrest warrant, and goes on to explain that former Israeli leaders (no longer serving) lose their diplomatic immunity granted under the State Immunity Act:

Full Story The Seminal » War Crimes Catch Up With Israeli Officials: They Can No Longer Visit The UK.

The former British prime minister, who backed the US-led invasion in 2003, told the BBC he would “still have thought it right to remove” Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein because of the threat he posed to the region.

Lawyers representing the deposed Iraqi leadership said they would seek to prosecute Blair following his remarks, while one newspaper commentator said it was a “game-changing admission” for the ongoing official inquiry into the war.

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix added: “The war was sold on the WMD, and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of deployment of arguments, as he said, it sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up.”

Blair is due to give evidence to the inquiry into the war, led by former civil servant John Chilcot, early next year, and the commentator in the Sunday Telegraph said the investigation's focus must now change.

Full Story Outraged Brits want Blair prosecuted for war crimes | Raw Story.

OPS: If the Brits pull this off – the Bush Crime Family will be som much closer …..

His conversations with President George W. Bush when he was British Prime Minister, and details of the decision-making process that led Britain into war, will fall under the scope of national security and the protection of Britain’s relations with the United States. But well-placed sources also suggested anything “interesting” would also be shrouded in secrecy, leaving Blair’s public appearance containing little more than is known.

The revelation will dash hopes that Blair will finally detail in public why he committed British troops to the invasion on the basis of flimsy intelligence. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said if a significant proportion of Blair’s evidence were held in private, the public would “rightly conclude that the inquiry is simply too weak to give us the truth”.

Full Story Cone of silence over Blair evidence – World – NZ Herald News.

I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day, only to learn that he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.

“Everyone knows,” he said, “except parliament and the public.”

“And the media?”

“The media – the big names – have been invited to King Charles Street [the Foreign Office] and flattered and briefed with lies. They are no trouble.”

As Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office, he had drafted letters for ministers reassuring MPs and the public that the government was not arming Saddam Hussein. “This was a downright lie,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Giving evidence before the arms-to-Iraq inquiry, Higson was the only British official commended by Lord Justice Scott for telling the truth. The price he paid was the loss of his health and marriage, and constant surveillance by spooks. He ended up living on benefits in a Birmingham bedsit where he suffered a seizure, struck his head and died alone. Whistleblowers are often heroes; he was one.

Full Story New Statesman – Iraq: the crime of the century.

The former British prime minister, who backed the US-led invasion in 2003, told the BBC he would “still have thought it right to remove” Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein because of the threat he posed to the region.

Lawyers representing the deposed Iraqi leadership said they would seek to prosecute Blair following his remarks, while one newspaper commentator said it was a “game-changing admission” for the ongoing official inquiry into the war.

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix added: “The war was sold on the WMD, and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of deployment of arguments, as he said, it sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up.”

Full Story Blair Iraq war admission sparks fresh outrage – Yahoo! News.

The ACLU is seeking disclosure of these records as part of its pending motion to hold the CIA in contempt for destroying the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify records responsive to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information (FOIA) request for records relating to the treatment of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas. The tapes, which show CIA operatives subjecting suspects to extremely harsh interrogation methods, should have been identified and processed for the ACLU in response to its FOIA request. Instead of identifying and processing the videotapes, however, the CIA destroyed them. The tapes were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, appointed by former President Bush and Congress, which had formally requested that the CIA hand over a variety of information pertaining to the interrogation of CIA prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, the subject of many of the videotapes. Special Prosecutor John Durham has been criminally investigating the destruction of the tapes since January 2008.

The CIA has previously said that it has roughly 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to the tapes, which it continues to withhold in their entirety, purportedly for reasons relating to national security. The new records obtained last month by the ACLU consist primarily of an index of CIA documents relating to the destruction of the tapes. Listed in the new index are November 8, 2005 and November 9, 2005 cables from a CIA field office to CIA headquarters requesting permission to destroy the 92 tapes and a November 9, 2005 cable confirming their destruction. The precise date of destruction confirms that the tapes were destroyed immediately after the Washington Post reported the existence of the CIA black sites and the New York Times reported that the CIA Inspector General had questioned the legality of the agency’s torture program. The chronology suggests that the CIA destroyed the videotapes in order to prevent the public from learning the full scope of the CIA’s torture program.

Full Story Documents reveal new information about destruction of torture tapes – The Hill’s Congress Blog.

Until Chilcot hears UN weapons inspectors’ testimony, the fiction of Britain honestly seeking a WMD smoking gun prevails

With its troops no longer engaged in military operations inside Iraq, Great Britain has been liberated politically to conduct a postmortem of that conflict, including the sensitive issue of the primary justification used by then Prime Minister Tony Blair for going to war, namely Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.

The failure to find any WMD in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of that country by US and British troops continues to haunt those who were involved in making the decision for war. The issue of Iraqi WMD, and the role it played in influencing the decision for war, is at the centre of the ongoing Iraq war inquiry being conducted by Sir John Chilcot.

Among the more compelling testimonies provided to date has been that of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, who served in that capacity during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Meyer convincingly portrayed an environment where the decision by the US to invade Iraq, backed by Blair, precluded any process (such as viable UN weapons inspections) that sought to compel Iraq to prove it had no WMD. Rather, Great Britain and the US were left “scrambling” to find evidence of a “smoking gun” to prove Iraq indeed possessed the WMD it was accused of having.

Full Story The truth of UK’s guilt over Iraq | Scott Ritter | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General at the time, wrote to Blair eight months before the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, but the premier ignored the advice, the Mail on Sunday claimed.

The newspaper said a public inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the war was in possession of Goldsmith’s letter and he and Blair are likely to be questioned about it when they give evidence next year.

The inquiry heard in its first week that Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time, Jeremy Greenstock, believed the invasion was “of questionable legitimacy”.

The Mail on Sunday reported that Goldsmith was “gagged” after he tried to dissuade Blair from lending Britain’s support to the war.

Goldsmith wrote the letter six days after a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, at which ministers were secretly told that the United States and Britain were set on “regime change” in Iraq, the report said.

Full Story AFP: Blair was told Iraq war ‘illegal’: report.

OPS: If Blair knew – so did Bush and  EVERYONE in the Bush Crime Family

The International Criminal Court claims jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

The Hague

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “great regret” in August that the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This has fueled speculation that the Obama administration may reverse another Bush policy and sign up for what could lead to the trial of Americans for war crimes in The Hague.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor, though, has no intention of waiting for Washington to submit to the court’s authority. Luis Moreno Ocampo says he already has jurisdiction—at least with respect to Afghanistan.

Because Kabul in 2003 ratified the Rome Statute—the ICC’s founding treaty—all soldiers on Afghan territory, even those from nontreaty countries, fall under the ICC’s oversight, Mr. Ocampo told me. And the chief prosecutor says he is already conducting a “preliminary examination” into whether NATO troops, including American soldiers, fighting the Taliban may have to be put in the dock.

Full Story Daniel Schwammenthal: Prosecuting American ‘War Crimes’ – WSJ.com.

OPS:  What about the largest Crime: Lying the several Nations into a war?

“Our present legislation criminalizes torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide — the most heinous acts known to humankind,” said opposition Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler.

“But Canadian law does not allow a civil remedy for the victims of such horrific acts.

“This legislation will: address the evil of such international crimes; target the impunity of those states and officials that perpetrate these crimes; remove the state immunity that operates to shield the perpetrators of such crimes; and finally allow Canadian victims to secure justice.”

Canada's right-wing government and three opposition parties have yet to state positions on the proposed law, but individual members of all four parties have vowed to support it.

Maher Arar, a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen, claimed he was tortured in Syria after US authorities arrested him in New York in 2002.

Full Story AFP: Canada bill clears way to sue foreign torturers.

With its troops no longer engaged in military operations inside Iraq, Great Britain has been liberated politically to conduct a postmortem of that conflict, including the sensitive issue of the primary justification used by then Prime Minister Tony Blair for going to war, namely Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.

The failure to find any WMD in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of that country by US and British troops continues to haunt those who were involved in making the decision for war. The issue of Iraqi WMD, and the role it played in influencing the decision for war, is at the centre of the ongoing Iraq war inquiry being conducted by Sir John Chilcot.

Among the more compelling testimonies provided to date has been that of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, who served in that capacity during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Meyer convincingly portrayed an environment where the decision by the US to invade Iraq, backed by Blair, precluded any process (such as viable UN weapons inspections) that sought to compel Iraq to prove it had no WMD. Rather, Great Britain and the US were left “scrambling” to find evidence of a “smoking gun” to prove Iraq indeed possessed the WMD it was accused of having.

Full Story The truth of UK’s guilt over Iraq | Scott Ritter | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Meyer, who was Britain’s ambassador to the US between 1997 and 2003, was speaking about British and American policy towards Iraq between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of March 2003. He explained how, before 9/11, the general feeling in the Bush administration was that Iraq was “running out of steam,” and that it was a low priority, but that, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Iraq rose to the top of the US agenda.

As Meyer explained, “On 9/11 itself in the course of the day I had a telephone conversation with (then national security adviser) Condoleezza Rice and I said, ‘Who do you think did it?’ She said, ‘There’s no doubt it was an al-Qaeda operation.’ At the end of the conversation she said, ‘We’re just looking at the possibility that there could be any link to Saddam Hussein.’ That little reference to him, by the following weekend, turned into a big debate between Bush and his advisers.”

Meyer also focused on the neo-cons within the Bush administration who relied on faulty intelligence to bolster their claims that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, stating that US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz “was quite convinced that there was a strong connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. There was a constant reference to the fact that Mohammed Atta (one of the 9/11 hijackers) had met Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague. That wasn’t true, but you couldn’t dig it out of the bloodstream of certain members of the US administration. There was another idea that there was an al-Qaeda camp on the Iraqi border where Saddam would allow them to do things. That wasn’t true either.”

Full Story Iraq Inquiry: Sir Christopher Meyer Confirms That Iraq War Was Illegal | Andy Worthington.

Tony Blair and George Bush might have “signed in blood” their agreement to topple Saddam Hussein a year before the Iraq war, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington.

Sir Christopher Meyer told the Iraq Inquiry that the two men spent an afternoon meeting in private at the former president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, which appeared to lead to a shift in the then Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq.

Sir Christopher said: “I took no part in any of the discussions and there was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there.

The two men were alone in the ranch so I’m not entirely clear to this day what degree of convergence (on Iraq policy) was signed in blood, if you like, at the Crawford ranch.

Full Story Iraq inquiry: deal might have been ‘signed in blood’ by Blair and Bush in 2002 – Telegraph.

Dave Lindorff

Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House of Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade Iraq,” was lying.

Full Story British Inquiry: Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as February 2002 to Plot Iraq Invasion | The Smirking Chimp.

*  UK dismissed idea in 2001 as having no basis in law
*  Terror attacks ended US support for ‘containment’

Tony Blair‘s government knew that prominent members of the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam Hussein years before the invasion but initially distanced itself from the prospect knowing it would be unlawful, it was disclosed at the Iraq inquiry today.

British intelligence also dismissed claims by elements in the US administration that the Iraqi leader was linked to Osama bin Laden, it heard.

Evidence given at the opening day of the inquiry, chaired by the former top civil servant Sir John Chilcot, painted a picture of a Whitehall slowly realising the significance of George Bush‘s election in November 2000 on US policy towards Iraq.

Full Story Iraq war inquiry: Britain heard US drumbeat for invasion before 9/11 | UK news | The Guardian.

“The report is completed. It's in its last stages of review now,” Holder said in response to a question by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-Rhode Island), who queried the attorney general about the status of the report. “A career prosecutor has to review the report. We expect that process should be done by the end of the month. At that point, the report should be issued.”

Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday about, anong other issues, his announcement last week that self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo would be prosecuted in federal court in New York.

Full Story t r u t h o u t | Holder: DOJ Report on Yoo, Bybee Torture Memos to Be Released by Month’s End.

Blood on the floor and walls of a cell at Abu Ghraib. Defense Secretary Robert Gates invoked his new authority to block images like these from being released under the Freedom of Information Act. (Photo: Wikicommons)

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has blocked the release of photographs depicting US soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, invoking new powers just granted to him by Congress that allows him to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and keep the images under wraps on national security grounds.

In a brief filed with the US Supreme Court late Friday, Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said Gates “personally exercised his certification authority” on Friday to withhold the photos and “determined that public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States.”

“Based on that determination, the Secretary has concluded that the photographs are ‘protected documents’” and are “exempt from mandatory disclosure under FOIA,” the government's brief states.

via t r u t h o u t | Gates Invokes New Authority to Block Release of Detainee Abuse Photos.

The former prime minister will be among a series of senior Labour figures to be publicly grilled just months ahead of the general election expected next spring.

Sir John Chilcot, who is chairing the probe, indicated that Mr Blair and other Government ministers would be asked to appear before his committee early in the new year.

Some may be called to give evidence again, in more detailed sessions, but they will not take place until after the election, which must be held in June at the latest. The report will not be published until the end of 2010, or even 2011.

However, the appearance of Mr Blair and other ministers early next year could prove damaging for Labour ahead of the election. There is also an outside chance that Mr Blair might be the new President of the European Union by then, although his prospects for the job are currently slim.

The parents of soldiers killed in Iraq have already warned that they intend to confront the ex-PM at the hearings. In a statement, Sir John said the first five weeks of public evidence sessions, which will begin on November 24, would hear from senior officials and military officers.

Full Story The Press Association: Blair set to face Iraq war probe.

The Goldstone report, which accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, was endorsed by the assembly on Thursday by a margin of 114 to 18, after two days of debate.

Forty-four member-nations abstained from voting.

The report, which was compiled by a panel led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, had already been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council, which sponsored the fact-finding commission.

Full Story Al Jazeera English – Americas – UN endorses Gaza war crimes report.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Full Story Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’ | Raw Story.

Bush’s Cover-Up of Abuse Turning into Obama’s Cover-Up

The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.

We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.

In Britain earlier this month, a two-judge High Court panel rejected arguments made first by the Bush team and now by the Obama team and decided to make public seven redacted paragraphs in American intelligence documents relating to torture allegations by a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British national, says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and at a C.I.A.-run prison outside Kabul before being transferred to Guantánamo. He was freed in February.

via Editorial – The Cover-Up Continues – NYTimes.com.

Many blamed the former prime minister for the deaths of their loved ones in an “illegal” conflict, and some even called for him to be prosecuted for war crimes.

Inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot has confirmed that Mr Blair will give evidence and insists he and his committee will not shy away from criticising individuals.

The panel has not begun hearing from witnesses, but yesterday it held the first in a series of meetings for bereaved families and Iraq veterans to say which areas they want it to examine.

Full Story: Blair should be tried for war crimes, say families of soldiers killed in Iraq – Scotsman.com.

On Monday, a federal court ordered the government to turn over a videotape of the brutal interrogation of a Guantanamo detainee to the prisoner’s lawyers.

t r u t h o u t | A federal court judge on Monday revealed that the brutal interrogation of an alleged “war on terror” detainee imprisoned at Guantanamo for more than seven years was videotaped and she ordered the government to turn over the materials to the prisoner’s lawyers.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was someone Bush administration officials had referred to as the “20th hijacker” of the 9/11 attacks. The government claimed the Saudi man intended to take part in 9/11, but he was denied entry into the United States by an immigration official a month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Court Documents Reveal Existence of New Torture Tapes.

Obama Administration Seeks To Keep Torture Victims From Having Day In Court (6/12/2009)

Justice Department Asks Court For Rehearing In Extraordinary Rendition Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The Justice Department today argued that the victims of the “extraordinary rendition” program should not have their day in court, asking a federal appeals court to block a landmark case the court had earlier ruled could go forward. In April, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., for its role in the Bush administration’s unlawful “extraordinary rendition” program could proceed, but today the government asked the appeals court’s full panel of judges to rehear that decision.

“The Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration’s shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the case for the plaintiffs. “The CIA’s rendition and torture program is not a ‘state secret;’ it’s an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of liability.”

In April, the appeals court reversed a lower court dismissal of the lawsuit, brought on behalf of five men who were kidnapped, forcibly disappeared and secretly transferred to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. The Bush administration had intervened, improperly asserting the “state secrets” privilege to have the case thrown out. The appeals court ruled, as the ACLU has argued, that the government must invoke the “state secrets” privilege with respect to specific evidence, not to dismiss the entire suit.

“The extraordinary rendition program is well known throughout the world. The only place it hasn’t been discussed is where it most cries out for examination – in a U.S. court of law,” said Steven Watt, a staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. “Attempts to keep this case from moving forward fly in the face of Obama’s promise to reaffirm our commitment to domestic and international human rights law and restore an America we can be proud of. Victims of extraordinary rendition deserve their day in court.”

via American Civil Liberties Union : Obama Administration Seeks To Keep Torture Victims From Having Day In Court.

Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White’s decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees.

“Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct,” White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against Yoo.

If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo “set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla’s constitutional rights,” White said.

White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted that Padilla’s lawsuit accuses Yoo of helping to design administration policy on detention and torture, and then crafting legal opinions to justify it – stepping outside the usual role of a lawyer.

via Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture.