Any Member Of Congress Who Does Not Stand Up For Investigation, Hearings And Prosecution Of The Bush Administration Should Be Investigated For His/Her Own Collaboration And Criminality.
Let’s Be Honesty About All This; We Now Have Enough Disclosed To Send Bush, Cheney and Others To A Hague Dictated Gallows Or Life Without Parole In A US Federal Prison.
"The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then,
to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in
broad daylight!"
- Emile Zola, J'accuse! (1898) –
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude
than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask
not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed
you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget
that ye were our countrymen!”
-Sam Adams-
Leahy Announces List of Witnesses For 'Truth Commission' Hearing
The Public Record - Los Angeles,California,USA
Pelosi, who refused to hold impeachment hearings when George W. Bush was President, signaled that she now prefers a proposal by House Judiciary Committee ...
See all stories on this topic
THERE IS SERIOUS WORK TO BE DONE, SERIOUS ACTION TO BE TAKEN
Secret Bush Memos Released: Read Them Here!
6.) Memorandum Regarding Swift Justice Authorization Act (04-08-2002)
7.) Memorandum Regarding Determination of Enemy Belligerency and Military Detention (06-08-2002)
Full Impeach, Indict, And Prosecute Posting:
Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List by Andy Worthington
Links to the list:
Part 1 (ISNs 002 to 200): http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-1/
Part 2 (ISNs 201 to 496): http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-2/
Part 3 (ISNs 497 to 732): http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-3/
Part 4 (ISNs 743 to 10030): http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-4/
The list, which is the result of three years’ research and writing about Guantánamo, provides details of the 533 prisoners who have been released, and includes, for the first time ever, accurate dates for their release. It also provides details of the 241 prisoners who are still held, including the 59 prisoners who have been cleared for release. Although some stories are still unknown, the stories of nearly 700 prisoners are referenced either by links to Andy’s extensive archive of articles about Guantánamo, or to the chapters in “The Guantánamo Files” where they can be found.
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files/
MEMOS PROVIDE BLUEPRINT FOR A POLICE STATE!
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Justice Dept May Release More Bush Admin Terrorism Memos
By The Huffington Post News Editors
Can these attorneys be disbarred for their behavior in giving legally unjustified opinions to the Executive Branch? Further more can't Congress impeach the federal judge - J. Bybee who was a part of these legal opinions? Reply Favorite Flag as abusive Posted 12:07 AM .... Bush, Cheney, Woo and others are responsible for lowering America to the ranks of lesser nations. And you are an apologist for vomitous acts. Reply Favorite Flag as abusive Posted 11:16 PM on 03/03/2009 ...
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/
Get Real News: John Dean: Bush almost became an 'unconstitutional ...
By overtherainbow
Responding to the recent release of several legal justifications for President Bush's most criticized policies, Dean summarized, "Reading these memos, you've gotta almost conclude we had an unconstitutional dictator. ... ULC Minister · Cheney: Bush's actions legal if not impeached · CBS newsman's $70m lawsuit likely to deal Bush leg... HAPPY NEW YEAR · Harold Channer's Holiday Party Live 12/19/08 9:00 ... Bush's shoe attacker has broken arm, ribs: brother. ...
Get Real News - http://getrealnews.blogspot.com/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#29498844
| Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy |
http://cafecamuspoliticalcoffeehouse.blogspot.com/2009/03/bush-secret-memos-and-guantanamo-list.html
t r u t h o u t | Prosecuting the Bush Team?
While the legal minds speculate on the possibility of prosecution of the Bush/Cheney administration's legal flacks for their arcane maneuvering around the definition of torture, the real issue is conveniently ignored. ... The advantage would lay in cutting operational capabilities along the lines of the strengthened coverage, cutting off the need for impeachment in the first place. Another angle of attack would lay in specifically banning torture, within the constitution ...
Truthout - All Articles - http://www.truthout.org/
Bush Was a Dictator for 7 Years | Democrats.com
By Bob Fertik
We called for impeachment immediately after the Downing Street Memos were published on 5/1/05, proving the Bush Administration deliberately lied about pre-war intelligence. ... And then later we had our "Dictatorship Is Easier" blog to likewise keep daily track of Bush-Cheney's designs. If Bush said a "dictatorship would be easier" in public three times, including right after their theft of the 2000 election -- I'd like to hear more about what he was saying privately. ...
Democrats.com - The Aggressive... - http://www.democrats.com/
Why Sen. Patrick Leahy Wants a "Truth Commission"
U.S. News & World Report - Washington,DC,USA
Leahy, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held a hearing today on potential commission formats. "We must not be afraid to look at what we ...See all stories on this topic
Secret Bush Memos Released: Read Them Here!
http://www.aclu.org/newsroom/viewallpressreleases_21660.html
Senate Hears Testimony On Proposed Truth Commission
ACLU Urges Supreme Court To Deny Motion To Dismiss Al-Marri's Indefinite Detention Case
House Hearing Spotlights Need For Better Health Services For Immigration Detainees
Justice Department Releases Bush Administration National Security Memos
CIA Destroyed 92 Interrogation Tapes
Supreme Court Should Hear Illegal Detention Case Of Ali Al-Marri-
Feds: Justice secretly authorized President Bush to use the military inside the U.S. to snoop on, raid and even kill citizens in order to fight terrorism without regard to the Fourth or Fifth Amendment, according a 2001 memo just aired, Threat Level’s Ryan Singel says. New documents show the CIA has destroyed far more terror interrogation tapes than previously acknowledged, The Associated Press’ Devlin Barrett records — as The Washington Post’s Del Quinten Wilber tracks the spooky Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s shift to new, secure quarters.
Docudharma:: Turley on Tyranny....and How Close We Came
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WASHINGTON -- Can Americans face the truth about the Bush administration’s abuse of power?
I believe so, but clearly President Barack Obama and some Democratic lawmakers think they can’t. Or possibly they don’t want to be bogged down in a search which could be viewed as vindictive against the former regime. Too bad.
Obama -- a former constitutional law professor -- has ruled out a look backward, claiming that any review of possible illegalities by Bush and his coterie would lead to "politics that have made Washington dysfunctional."
Picking up on the last Bush mantra that we should move "forward," Obama with his don’t-rock-the-boat perspective is not about to nail his predecessor. After all, Obama is now a member of the club and shows signs of fitting in very quickly and easily.
President Richard M. Nixon had a more courageous opposition in the form of the Democratic-led impeachment drive that led to his resignation in disgrace.
But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., quickly took any discussion of Bush impeachment off the table because she feared such a prosecution would disrupt the Democratic legislative agenda.
This double standard embraced by nervous politicians nourishes the perception that laws do not apply equally when politicians seek to protect each other.
Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, are the few congressional leaders who have the courage to say in effect: "Stop the music. We can’t go forward until we have a clear understanding of what travesties were perpetrated by the Bush administration."
They reflect the view of philosopher George Santayana that if we do not remember the past we are condemned to repeat it in the future.
But we’re not talking about grand jury indictments here.
Leahy is proposing the creation of a "truth-finding panel" designed "to get to the bottom of what happened -- and why -- to make sure it never happens again."
Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: "For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib (the notorious prison near Baghdad), the disclosure of torture memos and the revelation of warrantless surveillance of Americans."
He noted that some political leaders "say do nothing." A few senators even tried to make Attorney General Eric Holder promise in his confirmation hearings that he would not prosecute anyone for Bush-era lawbreaking.
"At the opposite end of the spectrum, others say that even if it takes many years and divides the country and distracts from the urgent priority of fixing the economy, we must prosecute the Bush administration to lay down a marker," Leahy said.
"It is easier for prosecutors to net those far down the ladder than those at the top, who set the tone and the policies," the senator noted.
Thus, low-ranking soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib were prosecuted, but their commanders and CIA personnel -- who inflicted cruel, inhuman "enhanced interrogation" such as "waterboarding," which simulates drowning, have gone free.
The inhumane policies on treatment of prisoners were set by Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and legal advisers in Bush’s White House and Justice Department. Those higher-ups haven’t paid the price for approving torture.
Leahy said the truth panel should include people universally recognized as fair-minded and without axes to grind.
"Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth," he said. "People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments but to assemble the facts."
Leahy also said that immunity from prosecution could be given in order to get the whole truth.
I suggest that former President Jimmy Carter would make a fine chairman of the suggested truth forum.
Leahy’s bottom line: "We need to get to the bottom of what happened -- and why -- to make sure it doesn’t happen again."
142 Organizations Join Together Calling for Special Prosecutor
The Crimes of Bush, Cheney, and Other Top Officials Must Be Prosecuted
Mad Max's Justice Department | The scary post-9/11 thinking of the Bush legal team
MAGINE A PLACE where soldiers are entitled to burst through doors without warrants and citizens can be locked away without trial. Imagine that the leader of this place has the power to silence dissenters and the press and has the right to keep duly elected legislators from having a voice in these matters. Imagine further that he can unilaterally rip up and disregard any treaty he dislikes and that he has been told he is on solid legal ground by a hand-picked circle of advisers.
This is not some lawless Third World country or dusty fictional outback from a sci-fi movie but the United States of America, as described in a series of newly released Justice Department memos from the early years of the Bush administration.
Some of the ideas in these memos, authored by lawyers in the Justice Department's elite Office of Legal Counsel, have been known for some time, and later iterations of the Bush Justice Department repudiated many of the principles the memos espouse. What their public disclosure this week makes clear is how intellectually dishonest Bush-era lawyers were in coming to these preposterous conclusions.
Many of the memos conflate and distort existing statutes and case law to give Mr. Bush the answers he wants. For example, a Sept. 25, 2001, memo concludes that law enforcement officers need not obtain search warrants to conduct intelligence operations inside the country. The legal reasoning: Foreign intelligence constitutes "national self-defense." In other contexts, courts have ruled that the use of deadly force in self-defense is justifiable under the Fourth Amendment. Therefore, the memo concludes, "if the government's heightened interest in self-defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it also certainly would justify warrantless searches." Never mind that Congress specifically passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the 1970s to forbid such warrantless searches.
Steven G. Bradbury, the last Bush administration lawyer to head the OLC, spelled out in a mid-January memo the OLC's ultimate rejection of the conclusions outlined in the eight OLC opinions that were released this week. He also explained that the original decisions were made "in the wake of the atrocities of 9/11, when policy makers, fearing that additional catastrophic terrorist attacks were imminent, strived to employ all lawful means to protect the Nation."
Fair enough. But those are precisely the kinds of circumstances that can lead even competent officials to embrace deeply flawed positions that lead to disgraceful results. And that is precisely why such opinions must be made public whenever possible or at least be shared with lawmakers with relevant oversight authority and appropriate clearances.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took a step in the right direction by releasing these memos and by reportedly preparing to release more. He must now ensure that his own Office of Legal Counsel does not make the same mistakes.
Release of Memos Fuels Push for Inquiry Into Bush’s Terror-Fighting Policies
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: March 3, 2009
WASHINGTON — A day after releasing a set of Bush administration opinions that claimed sweeping presidential powers in fighting terrorism, the Obama administration faced new pressure on Tuesday to support a broad inquiry into interrogation, detention, surveillance and other practices under President George W. Bush.
Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.
Officials who discussed the process spoke on the condition of anonymity because memorandums still under review might involve classified information. Among those that have not been disclosed but are believed to exist are a memorandum from the fall of 2001 justifying the National Security Agency’s program of domestic surveillance without warrants and one from the summer of 2002 that listed specific harsh interrogation techniques, includingwaterboarding, that the C.I.A. was authorized to use.
The Justice Department officials said the decision to release the nine memorandums on Monday came after some of the opinions were sought in a civil lawsuit in California. They said department lawyers had determined that the opinions did not contain classified information.
The lawsuit was filed by Jose Padilla, a United States citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and detained for years as an enemy combatant before eventually being tried and convicted in a civilian criminal procedure. Mr. Padilla is suing John C. Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer who was the author of many of the opinions justifying detention and interrogation policies.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday on whether to create a commission to look into the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy. The committee chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, has already called for a commission, and another Democrat on the panel said Tuesday that he would support such an approach.
But David B. Rivkin Jr., an associate White House counsel under the first President Bush who is scheduled to testify at the hearing on Wednesday, said he planned to urge Congress not to move forward with that proposal, which he said would violate the rights of Bush administration officials and set them up for prosecutions by foreign courts.
“They want to pillory people,” Mr. Rivkin said. “They want to destroy their reputation. They want to drag them through the mud and single them out for foreign prosecutions. And if you get someone in a perjury trap, so much the better.”
President Obama has signaled a reluctance to open a wide-ranging investigation into his predecessor’s policies, saying he preferred to fix the policies and move on. In his first days in office, he issued executive orders requiring strict adherence to rules against torture. As a senator, he voted for legislation that brought surveillance efforts into alignment with federal statutes.
The increased calls for a greater public accounting come as the Justice Department’s internal ethics office is preparing to release a report that is expected to criticize sharply members of the Bush legal team who wrote memorandums purporting to provide legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees despite anti-torture laws and treaties, according to department and Congressional officials.
The Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department is examining whether certain political appointees in the department knowingly signed off on an unreasonable interpretation of the law to provide legal cover for a program sought by Bush White House officials.
The report is expected to focus on three former officials of the Office of Legal Counsel: Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, now on leave at Chapman University, who was the principal author of opinions on national security matters from 2001 to 2003; Jay S. Bybee, who oversaw the counsel’s office during that period and is now a federal appeals court judge; and Steven G. Bradbury, who oversaw the counsel’s office in Mr. Bush’s second term.
Mr. Bradbury wrote two of the opinions released on Monday. Written last October and this January, they broadly repudiated the aggressive theory of virtually unlimited commander-in-chief power at the heart of Mr. Yoo’s memorandums.
Although he was a critic of Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury himself wrote three memorandums on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in 2005. Those documents are believed to be part of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation.
In a footnote to Mr. Bradbury’s January memorandum that sharply criticized Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury signaled that he did not want a repudiation of Mr. Yoo’s legal reasoning to be used against him as part of the ethics inquiry.
Mr. Bradbury wrote that his retractions were not “intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question” violated any “applicable standards of professional responsibility.”
Scott Shane contributed reporting.
Justice Department to Reveal More Bush Administration Legal Memos
Justice Department officials intend to release more secret legal memos that underpinned the Bush administration's approach to national security issues, responding to pressure from Democratic lawmakers and interest groups that have sued for access to the sensitive materials, sources said yesterday.
At his January confirmation hearing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he would direct new leaders of the department's Office of Legal Counsel to review opinions issued in the Bush years to determine whether some of the still-private rulings could be published.
A formal review has not yet begun, but authorities released nine memos on Monday in part because some of them had been sought in a related civil lawsuit involving John C. Yoo. Yoo, a former lawyer at the OLC, authored many controversial legal rulings supporting an expansive view of presidential authority after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001.
No imminent releases of information are planned, a department source said, but the appetite for the opinions is growing among civil liberties groups and legal scholars.
Word that more documents are to be released comes as Senate Democrats prepare to hold a hearing today on a proposal by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) to establish a "truth commission" to get to the bottom of contentious Bush-era national security practices. Leahy has called the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush a "rubber stamp for some of the administration's worst abuses of power."
Two other members of the committee, Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse(D-R.I.), have demanded that Justice Department leaders produce a report prepared by internal ethics watchdogs on the work of three former OLC lawyers including Yoo. The inquiry, which has been underway for more than 4 1/2 years, focuses on whether Yoo and former OLC chief Jay S. Bybee violated professional standards in preparing the national security opinions. The review also examined the work of another former OLC chief, Steven G. Bradbury, but did not make disciplinary recommendations about him, a former Bush lawyer said.
Bush Reversed Wartime Powers
In Final Days
(Washington Times) In Its Final Days, The Bush Administration Issued A Justice Department Opinion Dramatically Reversing Most Of The Legal Arguments That Governed Its War On Terrorism ...
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