It's over. Bush is finished. This says all.
http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/2006/09/center-cannot-hold-bush-regime-in_22.htmlThe Center Cannot Hold: The Bush Regime in Crisis
by Juan Santos
<snip>
The headlines tell the tale:
From the Washington Post: “Torture Is Torture”
From the Boston Globe: “Rebelling against torture and Bush”
From Fox News: “Bush Faces Election Year Revolt in Own Party”
From Legal News Television: “Bush Fears War Crimes Prosecution”
The President is naked: He is no longer a “wartime president” – he’s now the Torture President.
Officials in the Bush White House could be charged with war crimes.
So they were warned by then – White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez after they launched their war against Afghanistan, according to documents obtained by Newsweek last Spring. Gonzalez warned that violations of the War Crimes Act can be punished severely – including by death, and that it was “difficult to predict with confidence” how a future Justice Department might apply the law.
Special focus was placed on language in the Geneva Conventions that condemns "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners. These crimes were "undefined," according to Gonzalez, the same plea we hear today from President Bush.
Warning the administration of its potential culpability, Gonzalez urged the President, to, in effect, bluff it out. He wrote, "Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
A series of Administration torture memos have been made public, memos vetted by Gonzalez, lawyers at the National Security Council and staffers for Vice President Dick Cheney. They were meant to provide the regime with legal cover for state-approved torture and held that Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, was above the law.
According to a Justice Department memo on August 1, 2002, the administration’s “ban on torture is limited to only the most extreme forms of physical and mental harm" – actions that might cause "death or organ failure." Anything “less,” the regime defined as mere “abuse.”
“Abuse” would seem to include these techniques used against detainees in Iraq, according to an FBI memo released by the ACLU: “strangulation, beatings,
placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings."
In a February, 2002 letter, Bush took the matter of torture on himself: "I accept the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority to suspend Geneva (conventions) as between the United States and Afghanistan. I reserve the right to exercise this authority in this or future conflicts."
That defense evaporated with the recent Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which held that the US is bound by the letter of the Geneva Conventions.
The administration, facing the reality of potential prosecution as war criminals, is increasingly desperate.
The GOP is a party in revolt against itself, one trying to distance itself from itself, ducking for cover from itself and from the fallout of simultaneously being too fascistic and not fascistic enough.
The Bush regime and the Republicans are in profound danger on other fronts as well. Following the lead of imperialist strategists from Democrat Zbignew Brzezinski to the Project for a New American Century, the regime committed itself to a plan of conquest in the Middle East and Central Asia, and to a fascistic program of political and racial repression at home, all under the rubric of a “war on terror.”
>>>>More at http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/2006/09/center-cannot-hold-bush-regime-in_22.html
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