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.
Members of a tiny Palestinian farming community will be in Quebec Superior Court tomorrow claiming two Canadian construction companies are committing war crimes by building condominiums and roads on the village's land in the West Bank.
It will be the first time that Canada's War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act, passed in 2000, will be used in a civil case.
Notwithstanding commanding support in Congress and with the
American public, the creation of an Accountability Commission is now
being held up by the Obama White House.
Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are
two indisputable facts. Given the mountains of evidence already in the
public domain, any effort to deny or soften that harsh and devastating
reality is either disingenuous, uninformed or a result of the human
instinct to avoid painful truths. But one of the things that allows our
democracy to endure is that time after time, no matter the misdeed, we
have been willing to look ourselves in the mirror, acknowledge our
wrongdoing and hold ourselves accountable.
An "era" used to last, but not so much anymore. We've already heard GOP
Chairman Michael Steele proclaim that "the era of apologizing for
Republican mistakes" was over (when many of us didn't know it had begun), and now it appears that Barack Obama's era of openness has closed, too.
DALLAS - Eighth-grader Steven Rasansky had a front-row seat for a government lesson Monday.
Sitting at his friends' lemonade stand across the street from former President George W. Bush's new home, he watched anti-war protesters and Bush supporters square off with only a city street dividing them.
Front and center in the sweltering 90-degree heat was Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who drew national attention in recent years with her protests near Bush's Crawford ranch as she demanded to speak to him about her son's death in Baghdad.
Yesterday, there was a potentially temporary though still quite
significant victory for those who believe in open government and
transparency: as Jane Hamsher first reported, House leaders and the White House were forced to remove the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment
from the war supplemental spending bill, because widespread opposition
to that amendment among progressive H
How would you feel if you found out that an American school, paid for
with your tax dollars, was bombed and completely destroyed by a US
ally? This happened in Gaza just a few months ago, during Israel's
now-infamous Operation Cast Lead.
In
response to a series of reports by human rights organizations and
international legal scholars documenting serious large-scale violations
of international humanitarian law by Israeli armed forces in its recent
war on the Gaza Strip, 10 U.S. state attorneys general sent a letter
to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defending the Israeli action.
