Spanish AG: No torture probe of US officials
By PAUL HAVEN
Associated Press

MADRID (AP) — Spain’s attorney general has rejected opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, saying Thursday a U.S. courtroom would be the proper forum.

Candido Conde-Pumpido’s remarks severely dampen the chance of a case moving forward against the Americans, including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Conde-Pumpido said such a trial would have turned Spain’s National Court “into a plaything” to be used for political ends.

“If there is a reason to file a complaint against these people, it should be done before local courts with jurisdiction, in other words in the United States,” he said in a breakfast meeting with journalists.

Spanish law gives its courts jurisdiction beyond national borders in cases of torture, war crimes and other heinous offenses, based on a doctrine known as universal justice, but the government has made clear it wants to rein in the process.

Last month, a group of human rights lawyers asked Judge Baltasar Garzon, famous for indicting ex-Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet in 1998, to consider filing charges against the six Americans. Under Spanish law, the judge then asked prosecutors for a recommendation on whether to open a full-blown probe.

National Court prosecutors have not formally announced their decision, but Conde-Pumpido is the country’s top law-enforcement official and has the ultimate say. While an investigative judge like Garzon is not bound by the prosecutors’ recommendation, it would be highly unusual for a case to proceed without their support.

A senior court official told The Associated Press that a formal announcement would come Friday. He said prosecutors would stop short of an outright call for dismissal of the case, but would raise a series of legal objections that would make it impossible for it to proceed in its current form.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Coming less than three months after the Bush administration left office, the case was the first of several international efforts to indict former administration officials. Human rights groups have also tried to bring suit against Bush officials in a German court.

In addition to Gonzales, the complaint named ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

It alleged that the men — who have become known as “The Bush Six” — cleared the path for torture by claiming in advice and legal opinions that the president could ignore the Geneva Conventions, and by adopting an overly narrow definition of which interrogation techniques constituted torture.

But Conde-Pumpido rejected that argument, saying the case had no merit because the men did not themselves commit the alleged abuses.

“If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out,” Conde-Pumpido said.

Gonzalo Boye, one of the human rights lawyers who brought the case in Spain, said the decision by Conde-Pumpido was politically motivated and set a terrible course for Spanish justice.

“The attorney general speaks of the court being turned into a plaything. Well, I don’t think the attorney general’s office should be turned into a plaything for politicians,” Boye told AP. “It is a terrible precedent if those intellectually responsible for crimes can no longer be held accountable.”

The court official told AP that in addition to raising legal doubts, prosecutors will say that Garzon should be replaced by another judge who is already investigating whether secret CIA flights to or from Guantanamo entered Spanish airspace or landed at Spanish airports.

Such a move would make it difficult for Garzon to try to keep the case alive despite prosecutors’ objections, as he did in the Pinochet case.

Observers say the removal of Garzon would be another serious blow for the hopes of human rights lawyers, who saw him as being sympathetic to their cause.

Most of the American officials named in the case have remained silent since the allegations first surfaced in March. Feith, however, has called Spain’s claim of jurisdiction “a national insult with harmful implications.”

Former President George W. Bush has steadfastly denied the U.S. tortured anyone. The U.S. has acknowledged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described plotter of the Sept. 11 attacks, and a few other prisoners were waterboarded at secret CIA prisons before being taken to Guantanamo. But the Bush administration insisted that all interrogations were lawful.

Associated Press writer Jorge Sainz contributed to this report.

The Bush Six to Be Indicted
Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo.
by Scott Horton
April 13, 2009
The Daily Beast

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

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Secret of the Lusitania: Arms find challenges Allied claims it was solely a passenger ship
By Sam Greenhill
Mail Online

Her sinking with the loss of almost 1,200 lives caused such outrage that it propelled the U.S. into the First World War.

But now divers have revealed a dark secret about the cargo carried by the Lusitania on its final journey in May 1915.

Munitions they found in the hold suggest that the Germans had been right all along in claiming the ship was carrying war materials and was a legitimate military target.

The Cunard vessel, steaming from New York to Liverpool, was sunk eight miles off the Irish coast by a U-boat.

Maintaining that the Lusitania was solely a passenger vessel, the British quickly accused the ‘Pirate Hun’ of
slaughtering civilians.

The disaster was used to whip up anti-German anger, especially in the U.S., where 128 of the 1,198 victims came from.

A hundred of the dead were children, many of them under two.

Robert Lansing, the U.S. secretary of state, later wrote that the sinking gave him the ‘conviction we would ultimately become the ally of Britain’.

Americans were even told, falsely, that German children were given a day off school to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania.

The disaster inspired a multitude of recruitment posters demanding vengeance for the victims.

One, famously showing a young mother slipping below the waves with her baby, carried the simple slogan ‘Enlist’.

Two years later, the Americans joined the Allies as an associated power  -  a decision that turned the war decisively against Germany.

The diving team estimates that around four million rounds of U.S.-manufactured Remington .303 bullets lie in the Lusitania’s hold at a depth of 300ft.

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Leading lawyer calls for Rumsfeld prosecution
by John Byrne
Friday, December 12, 2008
rawstory.com

The President of the legal nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, has resumed calls for a formal prosecution of ex-Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld following revelations by a Congressional report that Rumsfeld was to blame for the Pentagon’s policy allowing torture.

In a statement, he said that the report reaffirms findings he spelled out in his book published this September, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution. Ratner’s group was the first to volunteer an attorney to meet with one of the CIA’s “ghost detainees.”

“The Committee’s report reaffirms that high-ranking administration officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, were directly responsible for the abuse and torture of detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Ratner said in a statement to RAW STORY. “The brutal interrogation techniques used on our clients and many others were carried out despite well-documented opposition from military lawyers and others concerned by the illegality and ineffectiveness of the techniques.”

“There is no question that Rumsfeld and the others must be held individually accountable, and it must be before a court of law. There must be consequences for their illegal activities,” he said. “A special prosecutor should be appointed. To do otherwise is to send a message of impunity that will only embolden future administrations to again engage in serious violations of the law.”

A Senate Armed Services report issued Thursday asserted that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate’s findings.

The report determined that placing the blame on “a few bad apples,” as Bush administration officials attempted to do in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, is inappropriate.

The policies were adopted after government assessments determined waterboarding and other torture techniques were “100 percent effective” at breaking the wills of US officers who underwent the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape program.

Ratner says Rumsfeld’s being singled out is no coincidence.

“After reviewing thousands of documents, this bi-partisan committee confirmed that senior officials are directly responsible for ushering in one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history and the loss of our moral authority in the eyes of the world,” Ratner said. “The report re-asserts that the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was the result of deliberate decisions made at the top, with explicit approval given by Rumsfeld and other officials for inhumane treatment of prisoners, and was not merely the work of a few bad apples way down the chain of command.”

He addds that report notes that techniques used by the Pentagon were “based on Communist Chinese methods employed to obtain false confessions for propaganda. Professional interrogators agree that the fastest way to get the best information from a prisoner is through building trust and rapport, not torture. The recognition of the illegality and unreliability of this kind of evidence is critical in the cases of some of our clients, like Mohammed al Qahtani. Time and time again, we have seen that torture simply does not work, and only undermines our commitment to basic human rights.”

“We hope the courts and the next administration take notice and take action,” he concludes.

Original article here.

This is Horseshit
By Cindy Sheehan
August 6, 2008

“It is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be?”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

You know, I don’t care if it’s not proper for a Congressional candidate to say: “horseshit.” I don’t care if it is not a good “tactic” to get kicked out of a Congressional non-impeachment hearing that was just a bunch of horseshit anyway. I don’t care if I get accused of being too “extreme” for bucking the (cyst)em by doing everything from camping in a ditch in Crawford, Tx to non-violent civil disobedience to, lately, running for Congress as (oh no!) an independent.

If people can’t see how this nation is teetering on the precipice of financial ruin and dragging the rest of this planet down with us as we destroy our ecology, too…and if people don’t realize how desperate our situation is, then I must say, that’s horseshit!

I am angry. No, I am incensed that hundreds of thousands of people are dead, dying, wounded, displaced from their homes or being imprisoned and tortured by the sadists that reside or work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the approval of their accomplices down the road in Congress. I am furious that I buried my oldest son when he was 24 years old for the unrepentant lies and the unpunished crimes of the Bush mob. Are you incensed? If not, maybe you should ask yourself: “Why?” Hypothetically: “Why am I not enraged that my country has killed or hurt so many people for absolutely no noble cause in my name and with my tacit approval?”

I am steamed that the working class has to, once again, pay for the excesses of the capitalist criminals that feeds its rapacious appetite with the flesh and blood of our children and won’t rest until it owns every penny in this world and has all the power.

You may say, “But Cindy, it is not polite to be angry or to use such strong language in public.” Horseshit! In my opinion, every citizen in this country should rise up in anger and DEMAND that George Bush and Dick Cheney not only be impeached and removed from office, but be tried and convicted for murder and crimes against the peace and humanity!

We should all walk off of our jobs and refuse to work and refuse to be cogs in the wheels of psychotic consumerism until our troops, military contractors and permanent bases are removed from Iraq and Afghanistan. We should, but most of us won’t. We won’t because it may mean that we would lose something of “value.” Material possessions are so transitory, as are our lives. We can leave a lasting impression by our courageous activism and moral sacrifice, or we can leave a pile of rusting metal or rotting wood. I choose the former for myself.

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Talk Show Host Calls for Murder
from 911truth.org

Action Alert from FAIR.org — Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Talk Show Host Calls for Murder
Michael Reagan says activist should be killed for treason

6/24/08

Nationally syndicated conservative radio host Michael Reagan called for the murder of a political activist on June 10. Reagan, a frequent guest on cable news shows and the son of President Ronald Reagan, singled out 9/11 activist Mark Dice by name and called several times for his assassination.

(Click here to listen to a 3 minute audio clip.)

Reagan had learned that political activists had reportedly been sending letters and DVDs to troops in Iraq, advancing the theory that the U.S. government had carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. For promoting this unpopular view, the talkshow host advocated that these activists should be killed as “traitors”:

We ought to find the people who are doing this, take them out and shoot them. Really. You take them out, they are traitors to this country, and shoot them. You have a problem with that? Deal with it. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that’s what they are, and you shoot them dead. I’ll pay for the bullets.

Even more troubling was the call for violence against a specific individual: “How about you take Mark Dice out and put him in the middle of a firing range. Tie him to a post, don’t blindfold him, let it rip and have some fun with Mark Dice.”

Reagan subsequently had Dice on his show (6/16/08) as a guest and stated, “I’m sorry for what I said.” As an explanation, Reagan offered, “Sometimes radio hosts we get fired up and angry and we say things that are actually stupid, and we make mistakes.”

Reagan’s “mistakes,” unfortunately, have repeatedly involved advocating murder to his audience. On August 15, 2006, Reagan called for violently killing babies who were reportedly being named for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah:

Naming their children ‘Hezbollah.’You know what I’d get ‘em for a first birthday? I’d put a grenade up their butts and light it. Happy birthday, baby. Bye bye.

In response to a caller who pointed out that children are not responsible for the names they are given, Reagan repeatedly asserted, “So what’s wrong with killing the mothers and the babies?”

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A Totally Lawless Regime

By Paul Craig Roberts

22/06/08 “ICH” — Think about this question: In the 21st century what regime is more lawless than the Bush Regime?

Everyone is entitled to his own answer. The only answer I can come up with is the Zimbabwe regime of Robert Mugabe. Voted out of power in the last election, the great man hasn’t left. Zimbabweans are going to have to vote again, and the great man has said that any vote that is not for him will be cancelled by a bullet.

Does anyone remember how determined the British and the Americans and everyone else was to turn Rhodesia over to Mugabe in order to save Rhodesia from the evil Ian Smith? What a fool everyone was.

But before we laugh at those fools, we had best laugh at ourselves, or cry.

It is now an incontrovertible fact, known all over the world, that George W. Bush and his regime’s operatives lied through their teeth in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and that the Bush regime is doing the same thing again in hopes of launching an attack on Iran.

There have been a number of memoirs from high ranking Bush appointees who cannot stand all the lies. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, told us that an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda prior to 9/11. There is the leaked Downing Street Memo in which the head of British Intelligence told the British Prime Minister and his cabinet that the Americans have decided to attack Iraq and are creating the “intelligence” to justify the attack.

And now we have the White House’s own spokesman from 2003-2006, Scot McClellen, ratifying what we already knew, that President Bush deceived us and led us into war based entirely on lies and fabrications, and that he, Scott McClellen, was deceived into issuing a false public denial that top Cheney aide Scooter Libby and White House operative Karl Rove were involved in committing a felony under US law by revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame.

As a consequence of Bush’s lies, there are a million dead Iraqis, mostly women and children, and four million displaced Iraqis, 4,100 dead American soldiers and tens of thousands of seriously wounded. No one knows how many dead in Afghanistan. And there is the ongoing Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese that has fallen under the rubric of the “war on terror.”

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