Bringing the 'Bush Six' to Justice

[Octafish]

This is what I think democracy is all about: No one is above the law.

Bringing the 'Bush Six' to Justice

If those responsible for the Bush administration's torture policy will not face charges in the US, then in Spain it must be

by Michael Ratner
Published on Friday, January 7, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Today, the Centre for Constitutional Rights filed papers encouraging Judge Eloy Velasco and the Spanish national court to do what the United States will not: prosecute the "Bush Six". These are the former senior administration legal advisors, headed by then US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who violated international law by creating a legal framework that materially contributed to the torture of suspected terrorists at US-run facilities at Guantánamo and other overseas locations.

Friday's filing provides Judge Velasco with the legal framework for the prosecution of government lawyers – a prosecution that last took place during the Nuremberg trials, when Nazi lawyers who provided cover for the Third Reich's war crimes and crimes against humanity were held accountable for their complicity.

CCR would prefer to see American cases tried in American courts. But we have joined the effort to pursue the Bush Six overseas because two successive American presidents have made it clear that there will be no justice for the architects of the US torture programme, or any of their accomplices, on American soil.

Thanks to the US diplomatic cables recently released by WikiLeaks, we now know why seeking justice abroad has also been fraught with difficulty – why there have been so many delays and even dismissals. The same US government that will not pursue justice at home, not even when the CIA destroys 92 videotapes that show detainees being tortured, has put a heavy thumb on the scales of justice in other countries as well.

SNIP...

This 1 April 2009 cable, released 1 December 2010, shows Obama administration officials trying their best to stop the prosecution of the Bush Six. They fret that "the fact that this complaint targets former administration legal officials may reflect a 'stepping-stone' strategy designed to pave the way for complaints against even more senior officials" and bemoan Spain's "reputation for liberally invoking universal jurisdiction". Chief Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza reassures the US that while "in all likelihood he would have no option but to open a case", he does not "envision indictments or arrest warrants in the near future", and will "argue against the case being assigned to Garzon" (a notoriously tough judge, who has since been removed from the case).

CONTINUED w LINKS...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/07-5

Of course, Justice also means putting their traitorous bosses behind bars, as well.

[Octafish]

1. The Bush Six...

...has a nice ring to it.

Spanish judge to hear torture case against six Bush officials

EXCERPT...

The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

[hootinholler]

2. What, no Harriet Meyers?

I thought she was the Bush legal mastermind. :rofl:

The Bush Six. Indeed. A good start.

-Hoot

[Octafish]

7. She's a lady! Wo-oo-wo-wo. She's a laaa-dy.

She hangs out with the swells.



Bass, Rainwater, GTech Lottery & Miers

"Memories...of the way we used to steal..."

[azul]

3. Stepping stones are the path of justice against crime and cover-ups.

Unfortunately continuing the path of steps through the succeeding offices that continue cover-ups and non-investigations.

Unfortunate for rule of law in the USA which has been taking a major beating from this base criminality at the highest levels such that we have to appeal to the world to help us.

[Octafish]

9. Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture: No One Can Be Above the Law

Thank you for putting it into words, azul. Turning over these stones is what justice is all about.

Dave Lindorf also has been on their gangster arses:

Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture: No One Can Be Above the Law

by Dave Lindorff
Published on Thursday, December 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional wisdom in our conventional media that Barack "No Drama" Obama will not seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for crimes committed over the past eight years-not even for authorizing and promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America's wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and "terror."

Take that pillar of conventional thinking, the New York Times. A lengthy December 18 editorial laid out a solid case that approval for torture had come from top Bush/Cheney administration officials, and then concluded that "A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials in the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse." But then the paper's editors went on after that to give Obama a pass, saying, "Given his other problems-and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign-we do not hold out real hope Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step." In the view of Times' conventional-thinking editors, it would appear that the American government cannot be expected to prosecute criminals and fight a recession at the same time.

SNIP...

A new torture report, just released by the current, only narrowly Democratic, Senate Armed Services Committee, has definitively laid the blame for the sickening campaign of torture of captives by American military personnel and CIA agents, on officials all the way up to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chief of Staff Richard Myers, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, White House legal counsel (and later attorney general) Alberto Gonzales, and others. It really traces the approval directly up to President Bush, noting that it was Bush's signing of an executive order on February 7 2002, exempting captives in the so-called (and loosely defined) "War" on Terror from protections of the Geneva Conventions, which authorized the military's and CIA's descent into rampant, brutal lawlessness.

Others, myself included (in my book The Case for Impeachment, co-authored with Stanford University law professor Barbara Olshansky, and published in 2006 by St. Martin's Press), have long argued that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are guilty of war crimes, especially for their authorization, condoning, encouraging, protecting, and failure to halt and to punish the practice of torture by American forces under their control. But here we have a bi-partisan committee of Congress finally, belatedly, making the same case. How can the new incoming president and commander in chief not order a criminal investigation of all of those responsible for crimes that not only were grievous violations of US and international law, but that, by the admission of key American military leaders, led to practices at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib which were "the first and second identifiable causes of US combat deaths in Iraq."

On its face, I would submit that if as president Obama blocks prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration war criminals, it will be the wounded American soldiers and their relatives, and the relatives of Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of fighters in those countries who were recruited into battle by the images of the torture and abuse who will make his decision "politically fraught." (And let's not forget that failure to prosecute torture violations is itself a war crime-making Obama himself potentially culpable should he fail to act.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/18-12

Apart from a revolution or a coup d'etat, we're going to have to hold their feet to the fire.

[felix_numinous]

4. K&R

[bobthedrummer]

5. K&R. n/t

[WillyT]

6. K & R !!!

:kick:

[EFerrari]

8. K&R

[tomp]

10. obama and holder have become complicit.

when criminals openly confess their crimes, heinous crimes, and you do nothing, though you have the power, you become an accessory after the fact, i.e., guilty of the same crime.