The year 2006 will be remembered as one in which the American people and the world rose up to challenge the criminal actions and deceit of the Bush Administration. Despite massive evidence that top Administration officials have been complicit in systematic violations of national and international law through aggressive war, illegal occupation, rendition and detention of terror suspects without trial, secret prisons and torture, so far they have not been held accountable. Now a diverse array of forces is contesting Bush Administration impunity for war crimes and trying to reassert the rule of law over the executive branch. Each is operating in different arenas and pursuing different kinds of accountability--from public shaming and political disempowerment to international isolation and even criminal prosecution. While all of these initiatives have been reported in the press, their convergence is one of the great underreported stories of 2006. For example:

•A court in Italy will decide in January whether to try twenty-six suspected American intelligence agents for abducting an Egyptian cleric off the streets of Milan.

• The US Supreme Court issued key decisions that declared Administration actions in Guantánamo in violation of national and international law.

• A US Army lieutenant refused to go to Iraq on the grounds that the war is illegal under US and international law and made plans to use his court-martial to "put the war on trial."

• An international team of lawyers brought a criminal complaint in a German court alleging that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and eleven other top US government officials are guilty of war crimes.

• Senator Patrick Leahy, incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, said he will issue subpoenas if necessary to secure Bush Administration documents that may have authorized torture.

Here are some of the arenas in which accountability for Bush Administration war crimes is being pursued:

Foreign Governments

The exposure of foreign governments' role in Bush Administration "war on terror" abuses has led to condemnation and legal action both against US intelligence operations and the governments that may have participated in their clandestine activities.

The German Parliament is investigating the involvement of German intelligence services in the rendition of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who, according to an ACLU suit in Virginia, was illegally abducted by the CIA in Macedonia in 2003, flown to Afghanistan, abused at a CIA-run secret facility and dumped in Albania five months later. Canada has issued a formal protest to the United States after an official Canadian inquiry established that a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, was seized by US authorities and deported to his native Syria, where he was tortured; the case led to the resignation of the head of Canada's national police, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli. In November, the European Parliament issued an investigative report revealing that eleven European governments knew about secret US jails and that there were 1,245 suspicious CIA flights through Europe.

The rendition issue is beginning to have a political impact. Five days before the general election in the Netherlands in November, the campaign was rocked by news reports that members of the Dutch force in Iraq had tortured dozens of Iraqi prisoners in a US interrogation facility; the election brought large gains to the parties of the left that had raised the issue.

Also in November, a complaint initiated by German human rights lawyers in cooperation with the US Center for Constitutional Rights under the doctrine of "universal jurisdiction" asked the German federal prosecutor to indict Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and other key Bush Administration figures for war crimes. The complaint utilized the recent passage of the US Military Commissions Act as evidence that the Bush Administration intended to immunize itself from any possibility of prosecution, even for the most heinous crimes.

Devastating testimony to an official British inquiry from Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, recently released after efforts by the Foreign Office to suppress it, reveal that the government knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. Prime Minister Tony Blair has yielded to pressure to hold a parliamentary debate on Britain's role in Iraq by the end of January.

Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below, and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan/Holt). He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work. He is a co-founder of WarCrimesWatch.org. Brendan Smith is a legal analyst whose books include Globalization From Below and, with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, of In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan). He is current co-director of Global Labor Strategies and UCLA Law School's Globalization and Labor Standards Project, and has worked previously for Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and a broad range of unions and grassroots groups. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, CBS News.com, YahooNews and the Baltimore Sun. Contact him at smithb28@gmail.com.

© 2006 The Nation

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