[Peace-discuss] Condominium

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I rarely find myself in disagreement with Alex Cockburn, who I've found to be 
one of the most cogent critics of US politics for more than thirty years.  (I 
first began reading him in the Village Voice in the mid-1970s).  But here I 
think he's quite wrong. But I would love it if he were right.  --CGE]

	February 27, 2009
	Payback time looms for George Bush and his gang

~The former president and his henchmen Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld could 
soon find themselves in the dock~

 From dismissal only a few months ago by leading Democrats in Washington as 
unthinkable, it now seems possible that senior officials in the Bush 
administration - maybe even at least one of the top two - will be the target of 
public war crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions, here in the United States.

Overseas is already dangerous terrain. George W Bush's first defence secretary, 
Donald Rumsfeld, fled Paris a couple of years ago to avoid honouring a subpoena 
from French investigators, replicating a similarly hasty exit from the French 
jurisdiction by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

For almost the entire four years of Bush's second term, one of the main 
campaigns of the left was to pressure the Democratic leadership to support 
impeachment proceedings against the Republican president and vice-president.

Officials of an outlaw regime would be in the dock for trashing the US 
constitution Top Democrats such as House majority leader Nancy Pelosi nixed the 
idea. But following regime change in Washington in January, prosecution of 
officials such as Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and attorney general Alberto Gonzales, 
for instituting, supervising or condoning specific war crimes, is now far more 
plausible with them out of power.

Last Wednesday, February 25, Pelosi was asked by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow what her 
reaction would be to any charges levelled at the Republicans who've now 
retreated to private life and are writing their memoirs.

Maddow: "If the US Justice Department's inspector general report that comes out 
this summer suggests that there has been criminal activity at the official level 
on issues like torture, or wireless wiretapping, or rendition, or any of these 
other issues..."

Pelosi: "No one is above the law. I think I have said that."

In active English, Pelosi's pious phraseology about no one being "above the law" 
translates into something like: "These guys are out of power and their 
popularity ratings are in the toilet so it's safe to turn the dogs on them."

A handwritten note from Rumsfeld (centre), instructing troops to use stress 
techniques was discovered at Abu Ghraib

And since Pelosi controls the assignment of hearings to relevant committees in 
the House, this means that she could give the green light to House Justice 
Committee chairman John Conyers to organise hearings. Equipped with a fierce 
director and subpoena power - that is, the ability to compel testimony and 
documents under the threat of criminal sanction - such hearings could form the 
first of what the left regards as necessary show trials.

Officials of an outlaw regime would be in the dock for trashing the US 
constitution and international law regarding treatment of 'enemy combatants' and 
torture of captives either directly by US personnel or indirectly by kidnapping 
those suspected of terrorism and handing them over to allies to be tortured in 
prisons in Egypt or Thailand or eastern Europe.

There is already a significant trail of evidence that links torture

in the US prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib directly to former Defense 
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

According to a sworn statement by Air Force Lt General Randall Schmidt, 
appointed in 2005 to investigate charges by FBI officials that there had been 
widespread abuse at Guantanamo, Rumsfeld gave verbal and subsequently written 
approval to torture suspects, using the notorious techniques of isolation, sleep 
deprivation and psychic degradation.

When the micro-managing defence secretary was apprised by Schmidt of his own 
documented instructions to the torturers in Guantanamo, Rumsfeld said in 
apparent surprise: "Did [I] say 'put a bra and panties on this guy's head and 
make him dance with another man?'"

In the case of Abu Ghraib, there is again a trail of evidence showing it was 
Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual 
phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. One US army 
officer, Janis Karpinski, has described finding in Abu Ghraib a piece of paper 
stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators.

Donald Rumsfeld could be hauled before a Congressional committee

It was a memorandum signed by defence secretary Rumsfeld, authorising techniques 
such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld's 
handwriting, was the terse instruction, "Make sure this happens!!"

In contrast to Pelosi's toughening posture on Capitol Hill, over at the White 
House Obama has been sticking carefully to the line that partisan witch hunts 
are part of the old politics of divisiveness and that it's time to move on.

There is evidence to suggest Rumsfeld decreed and monitored individual phobias, 
such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding

Simultaneously, Obama's justice department lawyers have told judges that the new 
administration will not be moving on from Bush's policies on supposed enemy 
combatants. These will not be afforded international legal protections, whether 
on the field of battle in Afghanistan or, if kidnapped by US personnel, anywhere 
in the world.

This explicit continuity with the lawless Bush years has deeply disappointed 
Obama's supporters on the left and their dismay no doubt has emboldened the 
cautious Pelosi to take the harder stand she adopted last Wednesday.

Six months or a year down the road it would not be astonishing to see more than 
one Congressional committee hauling before them not just Rumsfeld or former 
justice department officials but also corporate titans for cross examination and 
subsequent criminal charges. 'Bipartisanship' is a rhetorical device, not a 
strategy.

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 27, 2009


http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46636,opinion,payback-time-looms-for-george-bush-and-his-cronies-alexander-cockburn