First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting
to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA
operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised
it to criticize the Bush administration's lie-filled, one-way
propaganda train to the Iraq war).
On this one-way planet of ours, it’s hard sometimes to imagine things any other way, but for a moment let’s try. Imagine, for instance, that in recent years the director of Iranian intelligence oversaw a program of
“extraordinary rendition” aimed at those who were believed to be prepared to commit acts of terror against that country’s fundamentalist regime.
I don't begrudge William Calley his remorse about My Lai, but I'm hesitant to acknowledge his apology for it.
If you
steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out
orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more
defenseless people, something of a higher magnitude is required before
you can have your life back.
A number of disturbing statistics emerged from a recent survey commissioned by Australian Red Cross. More than 40 per cent of Australians believe it is okay to torture captured enemy soldiers.
Yet almost all of the 1030 people interviewed believe those accused of war crimes should be prosecuted, and 90 per cent think the international community needs to strengthen and enforce the rules of war. It appears we have a strong case of "it is bad when others do it but okay for us".
JERUSALEM - The Israeli military has ordered 14 criminal probes into the conduct of soldiers during the war on the Gaza Strip at the turn of the year, the Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday.
It said the military is currently reviewing close to 100 complaints from a number of sources, including from soldiers who took part in the devastating 22-day operation on Gaza, as well as Palestinians and human rights groups.
The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
NEW YORK - A prominent human rights group is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate why the administration of former President George W. Bush blocked three different probes into war crimes in Afghanistan where as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks and then buried in a mass grave by Afghan forces operating jointly with U.S. forces.
Today was supposed to be the day that the Justice Department --
after two delays -- released an unclassified version of the CIA
Inspector General's 2004 Report into the interrogations of "high-value
detainees" in the "War on Terror," which Democrat Congressional
staffers described as the "holy grail," according to Greg Sargent of
the Plum Line,
writing in May, "because it is expected to detail torture in
unprecedent
When a U.S. federal court sentenced Chuckie Taylor, Jr., in 2009 for the crime of torture of his fellow Liberians, the Department of Justice proclaimed,
"Our message to human rights violators, no matter where they are,
remains the same: We will use the full reach of U.S. law, and every
lawful resource at the disposal of our investigators and prosecutors,
to hold you fully accountable for your crimes. ...[T]orture will not be
tolerated here at home or by U.S. nationals abroad."
Will former US Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales and other senior Bush administration officials end up
in jail for crafting the policies that led to the torture of prisoners
at Guantánamo? As of yet, no government prosecutor is targeting them in
the United States. But thousands of miles away, Spanish attorney
Gonzalo Boyé is chasing after Gonzales and five other lawyers, and he
has a chance-perhaps not a large one-of convincing his country's legal
system to charge these former Bush aides with human rights violations.
