The Legal Case Against Bush, Cheney et al

Is Murder One, Not Just War Crimes
Submitted by mark karlin on Wed, 04/22/2009 - 9:42am. EditorBlog
THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
by Mark Karlin

BuzzFlash fully supports trying Bush, Cheney, and their band of fellow sadists for war crimes, but while they are in the courtroom, let's not forget Murder One. Apparently, many in the mainstream press and blogosphere already have.

The focus right now is on legal memos justifying the horrifying and numbing repetition of torture against "high profile" targets.  We have a short memory in America -- and most of what was in these memos -- except for the diabolical excess of the waterboarding and the medieval torture by insects -- was, as President Obama has said, pretty much already known.

Also known, but not discussed at this time, is that less upper echelon Al-Qaeda figures were murdered as a result of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture jihad (euphemestically called in the mainstream corporate press "harsh" or "enhanced interrogation").

Uh, remember those photos of bludgeoned prisoners in body bags that came out of Abu Ghraib? (And we still have only seen a small portion of the visual evidence.) Those people were murdered as a result of the green light on torture.  Even the Pentagon has declared some of the Guantanamo dead were victims of homicide.  Then there are many "renditioned" individuals who disappeared into torture prisons around the world and have never reappeared.

In 2008, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a man who came over from the dark side to tell the truth, testified before Congress that a minimum of 25 people died in U.S. detention as a result of homicides -- and that the figure was probably higher.

Indeed, other estimates put the figure much, much higher -- and that doesn't include the prisoners who were sent to "black holes" and never reappeared.   It doesn't include the hundreds of Taliban prisoners who were transported to a remote spot in Afghanistan (shortly after the U.S. invasion) and machine gunned to death in container tracks by Afghan soldiers with a green light from Rumsfeld.

The number of people murdered during torture ("harsh interrogation") will likely never be known, but as a governor in Texas, George W. Bush executed the highest number of people for far fewer murders each.  Some of them just killed one person, unlike Bush, Cheney and their crew of arm chair executioners.

If there is an Anne Frank who symbolizes the horrific death that befell those who fell into the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture machine, it is the innocent Afghan whose story of being murdered while mistakenly incarcerated and tortured was compellingly detailed in the 2008 Academy Award winning Alex Gibney documentary "Taxi To the Dark Side."

Some background on "Taxi to the Dark Side" reveals, once again, that we should be concentrating both on War Crimes and Murder One when it comes to pursuing charges against Bush Administration officials:

In December 2002, Dilawar, a young rural Afghan cabdriver, was accused of helping to plan a rocket attack on a U.S. base, clamped into prison at Bagram, and subjected to physical torture so relentless that he died after two days of it. But Dilawar was innocent--and he'd been denounced by the real culprit, who thereby took the heat off himself and won points with U.S. forces by giving them "a bad guy." Dilawar was the first fatal victim of Vice President Dick Cheney's devotion to "working the dark side"--torturing, humiliating, and otherwise abusing prisoners in the "Global War on Terror." His story, developed in horrific detail with testimony from the soldiers who tortured him, and also from two New York Times investigative reporters, becomes a prism for slanting light onto the "dark side" policy and the mindset behind it. The program at Bagram was deemed such a success that it served as the model for Abu Ghraib the following year in Iraq, and both prisons became pipelines to the detainee facility at Guantánamo, Cuba.

And Vincent Bugliosi, the author of a book on how the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election for Bush, penned a "J'Accuse" whose title makes the case that we are asserting on BuzzFlash: "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."

Even for progessives, the news cycle has been shortened to a nano-second; and right now the focus is on the legalese used in the just-released memos to justify torture.  And the Bush defenders are countering with an allegation that the torture of two or three suspects produced important information (which thus far has not been proven by any facts).

But in some ways, the focus on two or three Al Qaeda leaders has taken attention away from an organized system of torture that resulted in untold deaths, also known as murder.
For these murders, George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- who have always had a mean streak of sadism running through their blood, as they micro-managed torture and personally reviewed torture tapes -- should be charged and tried for War Crimes -- and Murder One.

Out of such trials, perhaps the truth will be revealed about the number of detainees who died under "harsh interrogation," as did the innocent taxi driver from rural Afghanistan who was pulverized to death in a matter of just two days at Bagram. 

If we do not bring justice to their deaths, who will?

A very good question. 

If A.G. Holder does not bring justice to bear, the people will have to. Those of us who believe in the American spirit cannot act other-wise.

Amen!

(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.

The Weimar Republic of Amurka

Submitted by mark karlin on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 11:38am. Editorials

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

It's become a bit of a cliché to compare the rise of Cheney-Bush fascism to the ascendancy of the Third Reich, but the analogy does reveal a fundamental truth about power and politics.

Fascists or Bolsheviks (just look at the short-lived Alexander Kerensky republic in Russia that fell to the Soviets in 1917) proceed on a premise that liberals are ambivalent about asserting power -- and take full advantage of that weakness.

Bush may be a tin horn cowboy propped up by Rove and Cheney, but almost all of his power at this time is derived by the unprecedented unitary authority granted to him by a Democratic Congress. In short, an utterly failed president guilty of illegal activity, whose poll numbers are in the dust, is able to make enough Democrats fearful that they give him power when they should be aggressively taking it away from him.

In the narrative of "toughness" that Rove has created for Bush -- and that Cheney has backed up with Franco-like substance -- Bush emerges as a "strong" figure, ironically, only because the timid Democratic leadership is so weak.

We are in a moment of history, when the Democrats should be controlling the debate and have Bush, Cheney, Rove and Gonzales cornered. Instead of impeaching Gonzales, they -- due to a lack of party discipline -- just gave him the power to legally spy on Americans without any real accountability, even after he has confessed to at least two programs of illegal spying.

The right wing depends upon a fundamental weakness in the character of "liberals" to achieve its authoritarian goals.

At this point in time, after having failed to protect us from 9/11 -- despite being warned of terrorist acts by bin Laden about to happen in the U.S. -- and years of a failed war against terrorism that has consumed the financial resources of our nation and all too many lives, the Democrats should be making Bush quiver in his boots about the next terrorist attack and how his ineptitude has allowed it to potentially happen.

Instead, the Democrats fear a guy who spent the first ten minutes after 9/11 reading a story about a pet goat with grade school students until his handlers could figure out what to do with him -- and then he went AWOL, just as he did in terms of avoiding service in Vietnam.

The Weimar Republic fell because the advocates of democracy in Germany were too timid to fight back against the thuggish tactics of Hitler's storm troopers. They passed the "enabling act" after the Reichstag fire (read terrorist act) that gave him virtually omnipotent power to "protect the homeland."

The right wing is right about one thing: the Democrats in Congress don't have the will or the wherewithal to put up a fight for the Constitution. Bullying works against a caucus without a backbone.

Hitler's power was legally granted to him by those who thought that the "homeland" faced grave threats.

The gravest threat, of course, that the German homeland faced was Hitler himself.

That is an analogy to Congress's abject surrender to Bush that is, indeed, worth repeating.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

(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.