Investigations

Judge Bybee and the Challenge of Removing a Stain on the Legal System

dlindorff — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:54:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New
York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to
step down from his bench and leave his position following his
disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior
to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced
something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been
disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for
“swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six
years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law
in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge
Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he
continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards
Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could
remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a
similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge
which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department
of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for
the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as
waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on
captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to
release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of
Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as
other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal
Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law
school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend
disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of
the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case,
the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page
internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to
the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could
warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work
in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge
with a lifetime appointment. Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and
many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a
law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one. While every
judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with
their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the
judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,
but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial
system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A
disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing
court orders, but removal from office, under the Constitution, requires
impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and
conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the
judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses
and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is
reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,” and then continued to
serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal
Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I
would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be
enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a
disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court,
there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is
certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that
point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment
proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he
have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department
Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by
the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear
violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which
the US is a signatory.

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus
independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach
the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming no abstentions), is
an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in
San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while
the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the
process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme
and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.”

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate
at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to
argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define
as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is
only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation
since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to
that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US
personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation
of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific
intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the
torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an
individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not
produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

As I wrote in an article on April 20 on my website ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked
this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce
our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their
ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken
seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House,
artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of
title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the
Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing
any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal
behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War”
on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting
impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have
demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the
Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially
with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to
hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or
clearly unconstitutional behavior.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:47:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff),
Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he
was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at
the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun a program of
brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of
middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed
an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school,
he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18,
he began studying at a madrassa, or religious school. There he learned
about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free
that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a
brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of
that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh
volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration
officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for
a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more
useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered
America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a
fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and
the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war
against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was
still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the
Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces
troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there
or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t
just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an
American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg)
Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by
American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American
amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped
naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed
inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the
cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His
interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him
repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and
word that his parents had already arranged for representation was
withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in
his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of
death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a
traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where
Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,”
initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death
sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a
decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis to permit Lindh and his
defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that
confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it will
being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge
ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and
from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff,
then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge
of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it
a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked
contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced,
as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New
Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return to a guilty plea
to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would
cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the
offered deal, Lindh would also have to sign a letter stating that he
had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and
waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the
future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a
gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring
Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his
sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to
completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War
on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney
torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched
torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department
to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and
were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss
out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original
serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes
perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own
government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of
justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the
US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first
witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney
general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
_______________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and
rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

"Truth Commission versus Special Prosecutor

Navy_Chief — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:36:18 -0400

"Truth Commission" versus Special Prosecutor
Stephen Falgout, Psy.D. and Joanna Clark

Today in the United States we are faced with many, many complex problems affecting not only
our present situation but also our future prospects for prosperity and well being. While we must
look forward in order to chart our course, we cannot do this without also being mindful of
where we have been, what path has led us to this present moment. In looking both back and
forward we have the opportunity to make amends for past missteps and mistakes and to restore
our commitment to the ideals and principles upon which our wonderful nation was founded.

There are so many issues dodging about these days. Any one of them could be sufficient to derail
our nation, our democratic republic. Among the candidates are the banking and financial
scandals, the economic collapse that some are now calling a Depression, the shameless record
of many in the Congress and Senate who have labored for many years to enact legislation
needed to enable this economic Titanic to sail off into such perilous waters. In addition, there is
the bottomless pit of two unwinnable wars, the healthcare crisis, accelerating environmental
degradation that is sanctimoniously defended and justified as necessary for a functioning economy,
the deterioration of our schools and educational system, the crumbling of our aging engineering
infrastructure of roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, the antiquated power grid and
fossil fuel power generation. One issue that does seem to be paramount since it affects us here
at home while it also affects the whole planet is our nation's standing in the international community
of nations. This standing is in part based on our economy, in part on our environmental
stewardship, partly on our foreign relations, and partly on how the rest of the world views us,
our nation and its policies and how these policies are implemented.

More and more, the rest of the world is coming to regard the Land of the Free and Home of the
Brave as the Nation of Sanctimonious Bullies, Hypocrites, and Sadists. Torture? It's not just the
physical and psychological torture of suspected terrorists. It's not just the physical and psychological
torture of hapless bystanders swept up in a frenzy to rid the world of terror. It's not just
the tortured rhetoric and sophistry used to sell and justify sadistic interrogations to the American
people as necessary to protect them from attack and atrocity. The world now sees America
revealed as a brute nation of gluttons unwilling to obey its own laws, never mind the laws of the
international community. We are bound by international treaties that ban torture, the very
“harsh interrogation methods” we claim we do not use. The very same methods that have been
demonstrated over and over across many centuries of history to produce only lies and desperate
confessions offered in hope of escaping further cruel treatment that threatens to destroy the victim's
mind and sanity.

What are we to do about this mess? Would a truth commission help us find our way out of this
enchanted forest? What would a truth commission do? The last time we had a truth commission,
in the form of Congressional inquiries, was the inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal. In
was nothing more than a ridiculous kabuki that culminated in a few convictions for crimes that
were then overturned by appeals courts because those convicted had been immunized by the
Congressional truth commissions. Others who might have been convicted were preemptively
pardoned by then-President Bush1, conveniently sparing him possible embarrassment or worse.
So much for truth. So much for justice. So much for what other nations might have thought
about the U.S. and how it dealt with its own miscreants.

The only hope we might have to rehabilitate our standing in the world must entail broad efforts
to restore the rule of law. Torture is insidious. Besides the obvious suffering it inflicts on the
subjects of such “inquiries” it also damages the thinking of the torturers, and not just the sadists
themselves but those who order the torture, and even those in whose name it is done. As torture
has become somewhat acceptable as U.S. policy it has also dragged us further along the path
Benjamin Franklin described when he said that those who would sacrifice liberty for security
deserve neither.

This means we must not only root out the truth about how we were lead so far off the path of
righteousness into the morass of using torture to further our international objectives, we must
show the world, and ourselves, that such crimes as torture will not be tolerated. The perpetrators
must be called to account for their illegal and immoral deeds; they must suffer severe penalties
and consequences for their crimes. They must be sent to prison where they will be
stripped of their liberty and be left with lots of time to contemplate the wrongness of their actions.
Yes, it is true, there have been a few show-trials of mid and low-level players in this tortured
tragedy, but this is not good enough, not by half. The ultimate responsibility for the use of
torture goes right to the top of the executive branch of our government, and the people in
charge of our military and intelligence organizations – former President Bush2, vice President
Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Attorney General Ashcroft, and
former Justice Department and White House lawyers including Yoo, Bybee, and others. This is
not the complete list of suspects. All of them, those named here and the others who contrived
with them to justify breaking laws prohibiting torture, prohibiting spying on American citizens
opposed to their designs, prohibiting kidnaping and assassination, all of them must be called to
the bar of justice. They must be put on trial, and those who are convicted for their crimes must
be sent to prison.

Their crimes can only be properly understood in the larger context of our nation's standing in
the world. Specifications for individual acts and wrongs must be evaluated together, as a whole.
Taken all together, the crimes surrounding this torture debacle amount to treason. The perpetrators
of this torture scandal, those at the very top of the chain of command, must be denounced
as traitors who sought to undermine, subvert, damage, and ultimately to destroy the United
States Constitution, even as they tried to preserve it as a hollow shell to give them a fig leaf for
their crimes.

Unless these perpetrators of torture as policy, these criminals, these traitors are made to suffer
the legal consequences of their wrongs, their high crimes that are so much greater than misdemeanors, the United States will not have much chance of regaining the respect of other nations.

Other nations that see the hypocrisy, the spineless, sanctimonious sophistry that will continue,
however subtly, so long as these traitorous criminals still walk free will not be so willing to
make common cause with us. Our economy will suffer as the world leaves us behind to stew in
our own predicaments. We will be less and less able to respond to the changes our evolving
world presents. We will be less secure. Perhaps the next attack will not be another explosion via
airplane, rocket, or car bomb. Perhaps it will be via the Internet, an attack to bring down our
electrical infrastructure as recent news reports have suggested may be in the works. Whatever it
is, a bomb, a cyber attack, or simply the plummeting value of the dollar, unless we improve our
standing in the world, we are sure of further decline, further economic erosion. Moreover, it is
not only in the eyes of the rest of the world that we must rehabilitate our nation. We must rebuild
our own esteem for our nation. Rote pledges and platitudes about patriotism are imitation
substitutes for integrity, honor, and love of country. The torture scandals have affected every
one of us because, whether we think of it in this way or not, the torture scandals have
besmirched the character of every American citizen since it was done in our names by those in
power in our government.

Could a Congressional truth commission accomplish this? Could a committee composed of officials
who have voted again and again for wars, again and again for expansion of military
spending, again and again for weapons based not on actual risk of attacks from without but on
the expectation of their own continued political power bought by ever expanding spending of
public money in their districts, money spent on weapons, spent on factories to make these
weapons, money spent on lulling their constituents, their fellow citizens into believing that
these weapons will make us safer? Really? Can we really be certain these weapons will make
us safer when the threats they are supposed to protect us from are known because of “Intel”
gained from torture?

If a Congressional truth commission cannot serve this need, then what about a special prosecutor
from the Department of Justice? This would be the same DOJ that is now going into the
Courts arguing in support of Bush-era policies regarding illegal wire tapping, illegal detention
of persons accused of intending to harm our nation. Accusations made without presentation of
evidence. Accusations made without legal representation for the accused. Detentions carried out
without any legal process, in violation of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, one of the foundation
principles of our republic. Maybe this could achieve righteous and noble goals, but it
would seem unlikely. Rather, it would actually only further aggravate the problems, as those
wielding this power would most likely seek to further consolidate this power and their grip
upon it, for power tends to corrupt.

What alternative is left if neither a Congressional truth commission nor a DOJ prosecutor can
do what is needed? We have ample precedent, from the Watergate era. An independent Special
Prosecutor needs to be appointed. A nominating committee needs to be assembled. This
committee could be composed of persons from independent public interest organizations not
beholden to positions in government such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty
International, the National Lawyers Guild, and People for the American Way, to name a few
possible sources. This Special Prosecutor would be legally empowered by the President and the
Congress but would operate entirely independently from them. Ultimately, his or her findings
would presumably lead to indictments, and those charged would be tried in the Federal Courts.
There should be no free passes given, no slaps on the wrist, no pre-emptive pardons, and those
persons convicted of crimes should receive prison sentences and other serious penalties.

To do less than this will only hasten the end of our great nation. Not that the United States of
America will cease to exist, but it will not be the same nation that emerged from the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution. The choice is stark: Either we, the United States of
America, the people, the citizenry will stand up for our laws and the ideals upon which they are
based, or we will sit passively as one ego-driven despot after another shrugs off his duty to
uphold the laws and thus drags us closer and closer to our own eclipse. The great democratic
republic that was so recently touted as an empire by members of the Bush2 administration will
be neither. Not a republic, and not an empire, but only a zombie nation ruled by hypocrites and
liars who speak with forked tongues.

Stephen Falgout is a psychotherapist who worked for many years in mental health and has
taught psychology. In addition, he has been an activist working on civil rights and environmental
causes.

Joanna Clark is a human rights and environmental activist who served 19 years in both the US
Navy and US Army Reserve, including Vietnam. Employed as a Project Coordinator on the
Safeguard/Sprint anti-missile defense system in the early 70's, she has spent the last two
decades working on global AIDS prevention education.

Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?

dlindorff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:31:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out.
But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly
wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the
NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush
Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper
conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli
government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s
warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her
being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone
conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and
ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold
off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James
Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’
phone and internet communications.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly,
the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged
Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage
charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby
accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli
government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman
is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy
of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to
have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a
wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in California donate money to Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to
name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of
the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to
say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times,
which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI
to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom
the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program.

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary
glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the
centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments
to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for
members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were
doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli
government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning,
and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. Instead, they
flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as President Obama did almost
immediately upon winning the November election, and a large proportion
of both houses from both parties happily accept its campaign largesse.

A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA’s spying activities
themselves. According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep.
Harman inflagrante with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap—part
of an investigation into Israeli government spying activities. But even
if this is true—and at this point, we’re relying on what the government
is telling us about it—it shows how dangerous the broader unwarranted
monitoring program of the NSA has been, and remains. Back in 1978,
Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in
direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and
subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using
the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war
activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent such
police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA
legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of
top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to
consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret
electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens
abroad.

President Bush used the pretext of the 9-11 attacks to secretly
order the NSA to begin a massive compaign of surveillance without going
through the FISA Court for warrants, even secretly soliciting the
cooperation of the nation’s several telecom companies in splicing in
routers at their switching hubs to make it possible to monitor all
conversations moving across the wires and the internet. It seemed to
some observers, myself included, that the only reason the
administration could have had for bypassing the FISA court (which over
30 years of operation has been incredibly accommodating of government
spying requests) was that it was planning to engage in spying that
would outrage the public and the Congress and even the FISA judges. It
also seemed likely, given the Bush/Cheney administration’s public
stance that everyone was either “with us or against us,” and that
critics of the administration’s “War on Terror” or of its plans to
invade Iraq, were “unpatriotic” or “soft on terror,” that congressional
opponents of the administration would be obvious—and indeed
irresistible--targets of that surveillance.

Now that we have seen proof that the administration was not above
using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it
becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department
investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims
of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harmon were similarly
extorted or otherwise compromised.

The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the
integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that
politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public
interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control
the National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the
integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised
by NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.

The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation
into the NSA’s seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless
electronic eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in
the wake of the Harman episode, could well be an indication that the
political figure in question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or
worse, that she or he has been threatened by those who have the
records. Every citizen concerned about the fate of American democracy
should demand that his or her senators and representative promptly call
for such a public probe.

It is no longer a wild idea at all to imagine that our Congress has
been reduced to the status of a Potemkin legislature because of real or
imagined spying by the NSA.

_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Torturing Judge Bybee: Make Him Eat His Own Words

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:55:49 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an
impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee,
the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored a key
memo justifying the use of torture against captives in the Afghanistan
invasion and the so-called “War on Terror,” it would be fitting
punishment to watch him squirm as his own words as a judge were played
back to him.

It was as an Appeals Court Judge Bybee, sitting on a case being
heard in 2006 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that he wrote the
following words:

“The only thing we have to enforce our judgements is the power
of our words. When these words lose their ordinary meaning—when they
become so elastic that they may mean the opposite of what they appear
to mean—we cede our own right to be taken seriously.” (Amalgamated
Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.).

Yet causing words to become “so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean” was precisely the goal of the
48-page memo, just released by the Obama Administration, which Bybee
wrote for the Bush/Cheney White House authorizing the use of what any
ordinary person, and indeed the US Criminal Code, would define as
torture against captives held in Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and
elsewhere.

The actual Geneva Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, incorporated in 1996 by
act of Congress as a part of the US Criminal Code, Title 18, Sections
2340-2340A, is quite unambiguous in its proscription. As Bybee notes in
his memo, the Convention Against Torture defines torture as:

“…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as
obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession,
punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is
suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a
third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind,
when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or
with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person
acting in an official capacity."

Now we know that what US CIA agents, military interrogators, and
even prison guards charged with “softening up” detainees, were doing to
captives included repeated waterboardings (over 100 times in the case
of some captives), slamming into walls while leashed to a neck
restraint, enforced sleeplessness for as long as 11 days at a time,
subjection to prolonged periods of extreme heat or cold, attacks by
dogs, being locked in a box with biting insects, etc. ad nauseum.

Yet Bybee, in his capacity as counsel to the president in the
office of the Attorney General, went to great creative lengths to make
the words in that act “elastic” to the point that they “lose their
ordinary meaning.”

For example, in his memo Bybee wrote:

“We…conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhumane or
degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite
intensity to fall within Sec. 2340A’s proscription against torture.”

Then, because he saw that that term “severe” in the statute was
problematic, Bybee went out of his way to try to make it mean something
more extreme. He found a legal case involving a hospital that was being
sued for refusing to admit an emergency medical patient, concluding
that severe pain would have to be pain “equivalent to (sic) intensity
to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ
failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”

Obviously, when someone says they have a “severe headache” or tells
the doctor that they have a “severe pain” in their lower back, they
aren’t talking about facing death, organ failure of impairment of
bodily function. They are using the word in its “ordinary meaning” to
communicate that they are hurting badly. But then Asst. Attorney
General Bybee isn’t interested in what Judge Bybee called “the ordinary
meaning” of words. He’s looking for weasel words. He’s trying to get
words to be “elastic,” and to mean “the opposite of what they appear to
mean.”

But Bybee also recognized in the event that Bush or his
subordinates were someday to be hauled before a court and prosecuted
for war crimes, he would need to offer them a second line of defense,
so, ever the good mob attorney, the future appellate court judge
offered up this beauty:

“To violate Section 2340A, the statute requires that severe
pain and suffering must be inflicted with specific intent. In order for
a defendant to have acted with specific intent, he must expressly
intend to achieve the forbidden act.”

What this means, writes Bybee, is that, “If the defendant [the
government torturer] acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was
reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would
have acted with only general intent” but not “specific intent” to cause
pain.” Put another way, he writes, “As a theoretical matter therefore,
knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not
constitute specific intent.”

How’s that for elastic? Let’s imagine a killer who fires a gun at a
victim, hitting him square between the eyes and killing him. He could
offer up the Bybee Defense, arguing that when he pointed his gun
towards the victim, at a range of 10 feet, he knew that death was
“reasonably likely” to result from his actions, “but no more.” Using
Bybee’s reasoning here, he should not be convicted, or even charged
with first-degree murder, because he lacked “specific intent” to kill.

But Bybee, noting that a jury might not buy such a line of defense,
offers up yet another rationale for torture not being torture. He
writes, in the memo:

“Furthermore, a showing that an individual acted with a good
faith belief that his conduct would not produce a result that the law
prohibits negates specific intent.”

Call this the Faith-Based No Torture Defense. According to FBNTD,
if you don’t believe you are torturing someone, you aren’t torturing
them. Here Bybee turns to case law with, not a torture case, but rather
the example of a defendant in a mail fraud trial, who successfully
argued that if he had a good faith belief that the material he was
mailing was truthful, he wasn’t guilty of mail fraud. But of course,
torture isn’t mail fraud, and the evidence of the pain and suffering
being inflicted at the hands of the torturer is right there before his
eyes, whatever he may “believe.”

Let’s face it. This word-twisting judge, sitting in his black robes
in a court that ranks just below the US Supreme Court in importance, is
a disgrace not just to the US court system, not just to the legal
profession, but to the English language.

He should not only be impeached and removed from his post by
Congress; he should be disbarred by fellow members of his legal
profession and then prosecuted as a war criminal by his former
employer, the US Dept. of Justice, for his role in authorizing and
promoting the use of torture by US military and intelligence agency
personnel. If convicted, he should be sentenced to a long term in jail,
and while confined should be forced to write 100 times a day on a
blackboard:

While Bybee himself may have never personally tortured anything but
the English language, his eventual prosecution for war crimes could be
facilitated by a little legal research he did in that same memo. For as
Bybee noted in that memo, the USA PATRIOT Act, in addition to
eviscerating much of the Bill of Rights, also amended Section 2340A of
the US law prohibiting torture to include the offense of “conspiracy to
commit torture”--and if Bybee’s memo doesn’t meet the definition of
conspiracy, I don’t know what the word conspiracy means.

Hey, I never thought I’d find myself commending the PATRIOT Act,
but here’s one little piece of it that we should not be trying to
rescind.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His most
recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Why Can Sen. Judd Gregg See What Obama Can’t?

dlindorff — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:38:40 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Hand it to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). The conservative senator from
the Granite State turned down an appointment to the position of
President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce citing “irreconcilable
differences.”

Citing the latest Senate vote on Obama’s economic stimulus package,
for which Gregg voted “no,” Gregg said, “ We are functioning from a
different set of views on many critical items of policy."

Truth to tell, that can be said about the entire Republican Party,
in both House and Senate, which voted almost unanimously against
Obama’s signature domestic effort to date to try and kick-start the
economy. The House vote on the measure was completely along party lines
with no defections, while in the Senate, only three liberal Republican
senators voted for that chamber’s version of the $800-billion bill—but
only after those three Republicans had managed to sabotage it, probably
fatally, by forcing Obama and Senate Democrats to agree to making a
third of the bill be in the form of meaningless and useless tax cuts,
instead of programs to ease the plight of laid-off workers and people
losing their homes.

The fact is, Obama and his supposedly brilliant political
strategists have adopted a bone-headed approach of trying to seem
“post-partisan” which has led them directly into a Republican trap on
many key policy fronts. The economy is just one such area, where
Republicans let Obama water down his stimulus program in an effort to
woo them, and then simply voted against the package in the end. The war
in Afghanistan is another example, where Obama has been so busy buying
into the right’s agenda of continued war that he is about to commit the
nation to years more of expanded war in that war-torn region. Even
Obama’s cabinet picks have been terrible, made with an eye to appearing
“centrist” and even Republican-friendly, with many key holdovers, like
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, or appointments like Treasury Secretary
Tim Geithner, Bush’s pick for head of the New York Federal Reserve
Bank, not to mention his attempt to put a Republican in as Commerce
Secretary.

That last botched appointment was particularly pathetic. It had
offered Obama the chance to pick up a key Democratic vote in the
Senate, since if Gregg had taken the job and left his Senate seat, the
Democratic governor of New Hampshire could, and surely would have
appointed a Democratic replacement. But Obama, again wanting to show
his post-partisanship, cut a deal with Gregg in which the governor
agreed to appoint a Republican replacement.

Having seen how needing to get two Republican votes in order to
avoid filibusters in the Senate on key legislation can destroy the
legislation, Obama now needs to rectify this mistake.

It’s clear that, even if Obama doesn’t sink himself as he has been
doing, that the Republicans are out to sabotage his presidency. That
being the case, Obama should change course immediately and develop a
new strategy based upon confronting and attacking the Republicans in
Congress forcibly. One way to do that would be to name a few liberal
(not Gregg-style) Republican Senators from states with Republican
governors to posts in the cabinet. Example: Maine Senator Olympia
Snowe, who has served on the Senate finance committee and on a
subcommittee on small business, would make an excellent commerce
secretary (much better than Gregg, who at one point had called for the
abolition of the department), and if appointed, could be replaced by
Maine’s Democratic Governor John Baldacci with a Democratic senator.
Obama could also put Gates out to pasture and name the other Maine
Senator, Susan Collins, as Defense Secretary. Collins has served on
both the Senate Homeland Security and Armed Services committees, and it
would be a great idea to have a woman running the Defense Department.
Again, Maine’s Democratic governor could replace Collins with a
Democratic Senator, giving Obama 60 votes, eliminating his need to
cater to that treacherous turncoat, Connecticut Senator Joseph
Lieberman, who backed McCain last fall, and who renounced his
Democratic Party membership after being denied the party’s nomination
back in 2006. (This calculus assumes an eventual win by Democrat Al
Franken in the still-unresolved Minnesota Senate race.)

Even short of enhancing the Democratic margin in the Senate, Obama
could change the political climate in the Upper House by making it
clear that Republicans who obstruct his agenda will be barred from
having any legislation passed for the next four years. Their bills will
not get hearing, and if somehow passed, will be vetoed. He and his
Democratic Party allies in the Senate, should, in other words, start
treating Republicans in the Senate the way they were treated by
Republicans during Bush’s presidency: as irrelevant.

Even with 57 or 58 seats, Democrats have a much stronger position
in Congress today than they had when they took over the House and
Senate in 2006. They also have a much stronger position than
Republicans had between 2002 and 2006, too. But they, and Obama, are
still acting as though they are the opposition party, not the ruling
party.

If Obama wants to be a successful president, and if he hopes to be
re-elected in 2012, he will need to simply run over Republican
opposition in Congress and start pushing through the agenda that he was
elected to promote.

Bi-partisanship, post-partisanship, or whatever caving in to forces
of the thoroughly discredited right is called, is a doomed strategy. It
only encourages the Republicans, like wolves pursuing a wounded elk, to
move in for the kill.

Right now, the public is still blaming Bush, Cheney and the
Republicans for the messes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the US economy. But
it won’t be long before all those crises will have Obama’s and the
Democrats’ name on them, which is precisely the goal of the Republican
policy of obstruction and sabotage.

Obama doesn’t have much time to start taking charge of this
situation. A good place to start would be by calling on his Justice
Department to appoint a special prosecutor or two or three to start
aggressively investigating the crimes of the Bush/Cheney
administration, including any collusion with Republican members of
Congress .Democrats in Congress, too, could get much more aggressive
about their investigations in to the abuses of the last two
presidential terms. That would sure signal to Republicans in Congress
that he is serious, and not to be pushed around.

_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Obama and Congress Must Act to Restore the Constitution

dlindorff — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:13:08 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The calls for a reckoning for the criminals of the Bush/Cheney
administration are growing by the day, as the final few days of the
Bush presidency tick down, and as new evidence of their crimes keep
pouring out of the deflating gas bag that was the Bush White House.

For years, the Democrats in Congress, with a few notable
exceptions, have sat on their hands, allowing the ongoing destruction
of the Constitution, of the US military, of the nation’s reputation,
and of the rule of law, as well as of the institution of Congress
itself, by a cabal of Republicans in the White House, led by Vice
President Dick Cheney, who have sought to establish an executive-led government
that answered only to itself.

Obama, running for the White House, initially talked of restoring
the constitutional order, and of prosecuting crimes where they had
occurred, much as he talked of ending the war in Iraq. But now, as he
increasingly assumes the role of President, he is backing away from
that kind of talk, with plans instead to extend the war and occupation
in Iraq for years, while actually expanding the war in Afghanistan, and
to give the outgoing administration of criminals and
Constitution-wreckers a free pass, in the name of “letting bygones be
bygones.” Ironically, he is doing this even as some in Congress,
including House Judiciary Chair John Conyers, who ducked the issue of
impeachment and sat on proposed impeachment articles against Bush and
Cheney filed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) for two critical years when
he could have ordered a formal hearing by his committee, are now
calling for a special prosecutor.

But broken promises about the war aside, Obama cannot have it both
ways. If, as he is still declaring, “no one is above the law” in
America, then it is essential that those who have committed grave
crimes must be indicted and tried for those crimes. As he takes the
oath of office on Jan. 20, Obama will swear to uphold and defend the
Constitution. That means not only defending the integrity of the
document itself, but enforcing all the laws that have been passed in
accordance with that document.

As President, Obama has no more right than did his predecessor to
pick and choose which laws to enforce. At a time when the nation’s
jails are crammed to overflowing with hundreds of thousands of people
whose crimes are as minimal as stealing CDs from a convenience store,
if President Obama and his Justice Department fail to order an
investigation into profound White House crimes like the destruction of
evidence in the Valerie Plame spy-outing case, or the investigation
into the politicalization of the appointment and firing of US
Attorneys, or of the deliberate campaign of lies to justify an
unnecessary invasion of Iraq, if they fail to investigate fully what
the president’s illegal National Security Agency wiretapping program
was really all about, if they fail to investigate the rampant fraud and
profiteering by White House-connected private contractors in the Iraq
War zone, if they fail to investigate the clear evidence of White House
efforts to undermine fair elections in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008, if
they fail to prosecute the White House, right up to the offices of Vice
President and President, for authorizing, directing and then covering
up evidence of systematic torture of captives in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and in the so-called “war” on terror, if they don’t
investigate what the administration really knew and what it covered up
in the days and weeks before the 9-11 attacks in 2001, it will no
longer be possible to say, with a straight face, that in America
everyone is equal under the law.

But that is only part of it.

Many of the current administration’s “crimes” are not statutory
violations. They are so called “high crimes” as defined by the
Founders. That is to say they are abuses of power that threaten the
nation’s very essense. They are not crimes in the sense that they
violate a law, but, even more seriously, they undermine our political
system and consequently threaten the very continued existence of our
free and democratic society.

The appropriate remedy for these high crimes—things like Bush’s
refusal, expressed through signing statements, to enact or envorce laws
or parts of laws duly passed by the Congress, his and Vice President
Cheney’s refusals to comply with Congressional subpoenas, his lies to
Congress regarding the true situation regarding the alleged threat
posed by Iraq in 2002 and 2003, and his overall assertion of “unitary
executive” power as commander in chief—was impeachment, but with Bush
and Cheney about to leave office, that is probably a lost cause.
(Certainly the two men could still be impeached, as impeachment itself
does not require that the impeached party still be in office, and the
potential penalty for conviction of an impeachable offence, besides
removal from office, also can include a permanent ban on holding any
future public office—an important sanction for the historical record.)
But here Obama—and the Democratic Congress--could act creatively, for
example by ordering the creation of a commission of inquiry to
investigate and condemn such constitutional undermining. By compelling
the testimony of witnesses under oath, it is possible that actual
punishable crimes such as contempt or perjury could still be committed
by White House officials and even by Bush and Cheney, but more
importantly, the nature of these crimes would be publicly exposed and
condemned, so that it would be far less likely that any future
administration would again commit them.

Obama should also act unilaterally to undo as much of the damage as
possible—for example revoking all unconstitutional presidential signing
statements from the Bush/Cheney years, and canceling all
unconstitutional Executive Orders, such as those authorizing torture
and extraordinary rendition programs.

The time is right for these actions. The public is almost uniformly
angry at the outgoing administration, which is walking away from office
leaving the nation a smoking ruin. Contrary to what Obama and his
advisers and the pathetic leadership in both houses of Congress seem to
think, the American public doesn’t want them to simply “move forward.”
Sure we want action to fix the wrecked economy, and to get all the
troops safely back home, but we also way the country put back together,
and we want those who wrecked the place to pay for the damage they’ve
done.

Few Americans would be dismayed to see Bush and Cheney squirming in the dock. Most would, in fact, be cheering and jeering.

The time has come for the newly empowered Democratic government in
Washington to stand up proudly and unambiguously for the Constitution
and the rule of law, and to prove that the phrase “No one is above the
law” isn’t just, as Bush’s hack lawyer Alberto Gonzales once said of
the Geneva Conventions, a “quaint historical artifact.”
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His most recent
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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New Congress Continues Investigating Bush Administration

fast2write — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:00:08 -0500

U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and the House of Representatives took concrete steps in the first days of the 111th Congress to ensure a continuation of ongoing investigations of the Bush administration, specifically torture of detainees, warrantless wiretapping, and for politicizing the Department of Justice by firing independent prosecutors and wrongly prosecuting Democrats.

To read all about it, check out the full story in the aggresive progressive Locust Fork Journal.

http://blog.locustfork.net/2009/01/07/house-moves-to-continue-investigat...

A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

dlindorff — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:34:51 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off
half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in
the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from
neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and
“thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was
responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

`Instead of a “transparent” investigation, we got secret sessions
of the Congressional intelligence committees, closed-door interviews of
key officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney by
the 9-11 Commission, and of course the secret round of thousands of
mostly Islamic people living in the US, many of whom were held of
months incommunicado and without charge, some of whom were subjected to
torture, and many other of whom were deported to likely arrest, torture
and even death.

Instead of a calm assessment of what had happened and who was
responsible, the Bush Administration rounded up Saudi members of the
Bin Laden family, and others connected to the regime in Saudi Arabia,
whence came most of the people reportedly involved in the hijacking of
the four planes used in the attacks, and, with no attempt at
interrogation, flew them home to Saudi Arabia. Then, again with only
minimal evidence, the US launched an all-out war within days upon
Afghanistan, with the goal of ousting and destroying the Taliban
government of that country. Shortly after that aggressive move, the
Bush/Cheney administration shifted its focus and launched an even
larger all-out war against Iraq, a nation that had no connection
whatsoever with the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

So much for transparency and measured responses.

Here again, we have an example of the US expecting one mode of behavior for the rest of the world, and another for itself.

We Americans, it would appear, are not required to operate in a
logical manner, are not required to think through the consequences of
our actions, are not required to obey international laws, and are not
required to listen to the counsel of others. If the United Nations will
not support our plan to attack and topple the government of another
sovereign nation, we will just do it ourselves. But other countries may
not behave in this manner.

There is another way that India and the US are different which has
come to light in this latest atrocity. Following the Mumbai attacks,
India’s minister of security resigned, in an admission that his
department had failed to discover an attack that was clearly at least
six months in planning, and had failed to prevent the massive loss of
life because of inadequate preparation of police and troops for such an
eventuality (police and soldiers were not equipped even with sniper
rifles and scopes that might have enabled them to shoot and kill some
of the 10 terrorists with minimal threat to their hostages).

Nobody resigned for the manifold failings that led up to and allowed
for the 9-11 attacks. Nobody resigned for intelligence failures, nobody
resigned for air defense failures, nobody resigned for investigative
failures, nobody resigned for the lies that were the basis for the
attack on Afghanistan and the war against Iraq. There has indeed been
zero accountability in the US for the biggest national security
disaster since Pearl Harbor. But in India, it took only days for the
chief person responsible for security in the Indian government to
resign his post in disgrace.

Let us hope that saner heads prevail in India when it comes to Pakistan, as the story of this latest terror action is exposed.

And let us hope that Americans finally demand an honest accounting
of what happened on 9/11/2001 and that those who are guilty of allowing
it to happen, and of sending the country off on a pointless, bloody and
seemingly endless jihad in the Middle East as a result are exposed and
forced to pay for their ineptness and their crimes.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

"Toward a Brighter Future"

Jonathan Schwarz — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:14:06 -0500

Judge Patricia Wald, former chief judge for the D.C. Court of Appeals and jurist on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, writing in the new report "Guantánamo and Its Aftermath" (pdf):

There are bound to be casualties when any nation veers from its domestic and international obligations to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on the minds and bodies of many of the 62 former detainees interviewed for this report, many of whom suffered infinite variations on physical and mental abuse, including intimidation, stress positions, enforced nudity, sexual humiliation, and interference with religious practices. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully supported by the United States. The officials and guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving with the tribunal—for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide.

From an AP story, June 30, 2001:

The dramatic decision to deliver Milosevic to the tribunal in defiance of an order by the Yugoslav Constitututional Court staying any extradition threatened to plunge the Balkan country into a political crisis.
Milosevic's successor, Vojislav Kostunica, denounced the handover as ''illegal and unconstitutional.'' Others accused Serb Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who spearheaded the decision, of ''treason'' and knuckling under U.S. pressure....
President Bush praised Yugoslavia for handing over Milosevic, saying the move showed the Balkan nation wants to turn away from ''its tragic past and toward a brighter future.''
U.S. officials said the administration planned to make a pledge in the range of about $100 million for a Yugoslav assistance package, to be discussed Friday in Brussels at a conference of international aid donors.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the handover as ''a thoroughly good thing.''

The full statement by Bush, available on the White House website:

I applaud today’s transfer of indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. This very important step by the leaders in Belgrade ensures that Milosevic can finally be tried for his war crimes and crimes against humanity. During various visits by Yugoslav authorities to Washington, they pledged that Yugoslavia was committed to cooperating with the Tribunal. Milosevic’s transfer is a strong sign of that commitment. We are confident that the government of Yugoslavia will continue down the path of cooperation with the Tribunal.
The transfer of Milosevic to the Hague is an unequivocal message to those persons who brought such tragedy and brutality to the Balkans that they will be held accountable for their crimes. Milosevic’s transfer further signals the commitment of the new leadership in Belgrade to turn Yugoslavia away from its tragic past and toward a brighter future as a full member of the community of European democracies.
The United States stands ready to assist the people of Yugoslavia as they continue to take the difficult steps to advance its democratic and economic reform.

(Suggested by Glenn Greenwald's reference here: "[T]here were early statement from the Bush White House in 2001 about how critical it was to prosecute these Yugoslav leaders for war crimes...")