From Democracy Now!
Broadcast Thursday June 30
Fmr. NY Congressmember Holtzman Calls For President Bush and His Senior Staff To Be Held Accountable for Abu Ghraib Torture
By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it has been very interesting to read this article and also look at your background, from dealing with the issue of Holocaust war crimes to Watergate, to now talking about torture and accountability. Can you relate all three?
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: Well, I think we need justice in this world. We need to make sure that people who commit horrendous crimes are held accountable, and we need to have social justice, as well. But I got to Congress in 1973 when nobody had any clue that Richard Nixon would ever be held accountable in connection with the Watergate break in that took place just before that. And then it was because of a lot of independent and relentless prosecutors and judges and, most important, press, and in the end, the American public, that a President of the United States was held accountable for something that nobody could have dreamed months before that he would be held accountable for, and his top administration officials.
And it seems to me that with the terrible scandal, Abu Ghraib, that we need -- we can’t, as they tried in Watergate to do, cut off the investigation at the small fry, at the lowest level. You have to look, and the international law precedence and American law requires it, you look up the chain of command. What I discovered by accident was that -- this is not a concern that I have alone -- President Bush's White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, himself, who is now the Attorney General of the United States, wrote a memo in January 2002 to President Bush saying one of the reasons we need to opt out of the Geneva Conventions wasn't just because they didn't like the Geneva Conventions because they don't like treaties, but he said, we have to worry about prosecutions under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996. That, it turns out, is a federal statute that applies to any U.S. national, military or civilian, high or low, who violates the Geneva Conventions in certain ways. In other words, who engages in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment. And it's not just those who engage in it, it's those who order it or those who, knowing about it, fail to take steps to stop it. That means higher-ups.
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