Your Legacy Mr. President - Chapter One: War Crimes
Bush has said continuously that it is not us who should judge him, but history.
"The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it."
Neither Bush or anyone else has to wait for the judgment of tomorrow. One of the most notorious chapters of the Bush reign, if not THE most notorious, is the order given by Bush and carried out by his loyalists to torment, torture, and nearly kill prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law.
The crimes committed on his order, in our name, have already been judged in the past, when other, morally bankrupt leaders engaged in extreme human rights abuses.
What this president and his cabal have done will haunt this nation until the end of history. Bush need not, however, point to some future historian as deciding the legacy of his administration, because we already know now what his legacy will be and what it already is. We now know without doubt the following:
Sometime soon after September 11, 2001:
1. The President of the United States authorized the top people in his administration to discuss ways to torment, torture, and nearly kill prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law. (See here).
February 7, 2002:
2.The President of the United States signed a memo indicating that Geneva Conventions - in violations of international and domestic law - no longer applied to Gitmo prisoners. (See here).
Spring of 2002:
3. The Vice President of the United States (Dick Cheney), then-National Security Adviser (Condoleezza Rice), then-Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld), then-Secretary of State (Colin Powell), then-Director of the CIA (George Tenet), and then-US Attorney General (John Ashcroft) met with the President's authority to discuss methods torment, torture, and nearly- kill prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law. (See here).
4. Torture, torment and near-killing of prisoners of war begins as official policy at Gitmo (various groups including military Joint Task Force 170 appear to be involved), in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law. (See here).
August 1, 2002:
5. Lawyers Jay Bybee , John Yoo and David Addington issue the infamous memo defining physical pain as "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." (See here).
Just to note: despite the Bybee memo being addressed entirely to CIA activities and "outside the United States," (so not applicable to military activities on US military bases), the memo was issued in any case AFTER Bush had suspended Geneva conventions at Gitmo and AFTER torture techniques were already employed. So even if this document were any form of cover (I am no attorney, but it everyone I talked with agrees it was not), it was still issued AFTER these activities had begun.
September 25, 2002:
6. Senior lawyers to the President (Gonzales) and Vice President (David Addington) of the United States traveled to Gitmo to observe first hand the torment, torture, and near-killing of prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law, which they had described in a second Yoo-Bybee memo (still secret) to begin with. (See here).
'“They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” Dunlavey told me, “and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.” I asked what they had to say. “They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C.,” Dunlavey said. “They came down to observe and talk.” Throughout this whole period, Dunlavey went on, Rumsfeld was “directly and regularly involved.”'
Just to note: the "sources" from DC are likely the principles from the Spring meeting.
November 2002:
7. Major General Geoffrey Miller becomes the torture tzar of Gitmo , from where only a few weeks after his transfer, he writes up recommendations to torment, torture, and nearly-kill prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, is the recipient of the recommendations. (See Here).
Just to note: what I think likely happened. The principles (Rice, Cheney, etc.,) did not want to get their hands dirty or in any way be associated with the torture program. They laundered the orders seemingly through "military recommendations," so that if it was ever found out, a few "bad apples" and maybe one big-bad-apple tree (Miller) would be held accountable. But we now know that Addington visited Gitmo for a demonstration, so Miller could not have been operating solo and off the reservation. I think his recommendation served the purpose of making it seem like the torture methods came from the field, instead of where they really came from - the White House.
--------March 2003, Iraq War Begins--------
August 2003
8. Miller is sent by Rumsfeld to "GITMO-tize" the notorious prison at Abu Ghraib via torment, torture, and near-killing of prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law (See here).
October 2003 - onward
9. According to the Taguba Report (authored by Major General Antonio Taguba in his investigation of the Abu Ghraib crimes):
That between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF).
Just to note: the crimes at Abu Ghraib begin with the arrival of Miller, on orders of Rumsfeld. Gitmo appears to have been a testing facility for what would later emerge all over the world in various prisons. The torture at Gitmo is itself the direct result of Bush suspending Geneva conventions in his February 2002 memo and the subsequent creation of the policy to torment, torture, and near-killing of prisoners of war in violation of Geneva conventions, international law and domestic law by the principles (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.).
Without getting into a very detailed timeline it is already obvious that Bush is directly responsible for the activities at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, which were and are illegal under the Geneva conventions, international law, and domestic law. No amount of "we did it to protect America" crap is going to wipe away the crimes committed by this administration against countless human beings from all over the world.
The irony of course is that shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush said the following:
"These terrorists...we have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies." (Bush, 9/20/01).
The problem with this is rather obvious. Whereas the 9/11 terrorists were absolutely a group of murderers, they were not remotely Nazi-like in their approach. No, the irony is that by formalizing a system in which human beings are tormented, tortured, and nearly-killed (and likely killed too in the process) in secret prisons (and not so secret facilities) all over the world, Bush and his regime are in fact the very thing he has defined above: "They [are] heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century."
This is in fact obvious by simple math, because nearly one million Iraqis dead, thousands of US soldiers killed, tens of thousands of US soldiers wounded severely, and countless thousands of men woman and children detained, tortured and god-knows how many killed, is a far bigger number of victims than the roughly 3k people who died on September 11.
When Bush describes the makeup of such "murderous ideologies" he is actually describing himself and his administration: "By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism."
A simple review of the US policy of "reshaping the Middle East" in comparison to a group of extremists without the backing of a state military-intelligence-financial machine makes it rather clear who is following in the path of "fascism and Nazism." Namely, the Bush administration is who "abandoned every value except the will to power."
But the latter of course, is much better illustrated in other chapters of the Bush legacy and other crimes of the Bush administration, that I will later explore. Surely the suspension of the Bill of Rights, massive corporate corruption married to the administration's political interests and carried out by a compliant and corrupt mechanism of domestic law enforcement is precisely the type of "totalitarianism" Bush is describing, is it not?
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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