War crimes - Spanish court considers trying former US officials

[jaqeboy]

Spanish court considers trying former US officials

  By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press Writer Paul Haven, Associated Press Writer   – Sat Mar 28, 6:46 pm ET

MADRID, – A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer in the case said Saturday.

Human rights lawyers brought the case before leading anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon, who agreed to send it on to prosecutors to decide whether it had merit, Gonzalo Boye, one of the lawyers who brought the charges, told The Associated Press.

The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.
...

[jaqeboy]

A note from Susan Serpa:
=============================
Call your congressperson and leave a weekend voice mail saying  "Shame for letting the Europeans do our dirty laundry on torture! Appoint a special prosecutor!"  Then forward the below descriptions of the tortures through your congressman's email form.  This is the judge who prosecuted Pinochet.

Spanish Court Considers Trying Former US Officials.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090328/ap_on_re_eu/eu_spain_us_torture

Congress switchboard: Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121

LINK TO CONGRESS EMAILS.http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

LINK TO EMAIL WHITE HOUSE.  http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

-------------
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/3/5/705011/-Sen.-Leahy-Tell-the-Truth,-Jack-Bauer-Tortured-the-Wrong-Guys

Sen. Leahy? Tell the "Truth", Jack Bauer Tortured the Wrong Guys
by Ralph Lopez

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."...The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's
Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

It is vitally important to remember that isn't about individual sadistic soldiers.  You will always have those, and isolated incidents. This is about widespread, systematic abuse, and who gave the license to allow it to happen: the Bush administration.

Senator Leahy, please read this New York Times report about the taxi driver who did the dumb thing of driving past Baghram air base with two paying fares a few days after a rocket attack:
....

[jaqeboy]

Further from Susan:
==============================
Folks there should be no mistake, this is big, a European court looking into war crimes means at the very least that many officials, Rumsfeld, Gonzo, maybe even GW himself, cannot fly into any Spanish airport any time soon, or they could find themselves modeling handcuffs.  This is not jail or prosecution, but it is a restriction of movement on previously some of the world's most powerful men which chips away at their prestige and image of untouchableness.  Everything you did and have been doing for years is what led to this moment.  We'll never know the judge's thought process, but surely he is savvy enough to know that the American people themselves were ready for this.  Give yourselves a big pat on the back, then BACK TO WORK!  The newspapers to call and email to scream at to cover this follows. message "Why aren't you covering this our ex-president is a war criminal!"   

You CANNOT hang innocent men by the arms and torture them and get away with it, NOT IN OUR NAMES!

Newspaper    phone    email    reporter/editor/staff index
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Denver Post    (303) 954-1201.    newsroom@denverpost.com    http://www.denverpost.com/ contactus#staff
Los Angeles Times    (213) 237-5000    Roger.Smith@latimes.com    
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Indianapolis Star    1-800-669-7827     

[John Edward Mercier]

Not sure the Secret Service is going to let anybody in their charge get handcuffed or placed in foreign custody.
It may mean a plane carrying the passengers can not get authorization for a landing without an emergency.

[jaqeboy]

Susan Serpa provides this update - Douglas Feith responds in the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123871971773584991.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
What a crock!  Take your alkaseltzer before reading Feith's article below - it's going to turn your stomach!  Then get on the WSJ site and post your comment.

Here's my comment:

Douglas Feith says: "But ours is a country of laws, and no reasonable person doubts that the American legal system has integrity. If President Barack Obama and the prosecutors see a crime to be prosecuted, they can act." Feith is either being very clever or very naive. The US is  supposed to be a nation of laws and, of course, we do have laws, many very good laws. The US Constitution, for example. But sadly, many top attorneys are bent on manipulating - mutilating actually, our laws, and our executive, justice and legislative branches of government weigh politics and "winning" about the Rule of Law.  Otherwise, we would not have violated the 4th, 6th and 8th amendments.  We would not have entered an illegal war based on lies.  By the way, do the WSJ readers know that it is Douglas Feith who is one of those implicated for providing President Bush with legal advice authorizing torture?  Do the WSJ readers know that Bush insider Larry Wilkerson admitted that most of the detainees were known from the on-set to be innocent?  Yes, if we believe ourselves to be a nation of laws, then, yes, let's go ahead and prosecute the guilty - no matter how "inconvenient" that may be politically.

Here's Ralph Lopez' comment (not on WSJ, on an activist blog):

Feith now claims he gave the opposite advice, to obey Geneva, not break it.  It is his right to defend himself and present what advice he exactly gave.  His other claim is somewhat more intriguing: that he only gave advice, he didn't issue orders, and you can't try someone for giving advice you don't like.  GREAT!  It follows we need to go straight for Bush!  I only told the guy to aim the gun and pull the trigger.  I didn't actually shoot anyone.  This is the equivalent of the argument he is making.
Now, ready?  Here's the sickening article from one of the very criminals who ravaged the law in order to justify torture.

Spain Has No Right to Try U.S. Officials
What next? Prosecutions for bad advice on global warming?
By DOUGLAS J. FEITH

A lawyer in Spain -- who did his legal studies while serving over seven years in prison for kidnapping and terrorism -- has engineered a complaint accusing the U.S. government of systematically torturing war-on-terrorism detainees. He filed this complaint with Baltasar Garzon, an activist magistrate famous for championing the "universal jurisdiction" of Spanish courts. That magistrate is now asking a Spanish prosecutor to bring criminal charges on this matter against former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, four other former Bush administration lawyers, and me.

The allegation is not that any of us tortured anyone. And it is not that any of us even directed anyone to commit torture. The allegation is that, when we advised President George W. Bush on the Geneva Conventions and detainee interrogations, our interpretations were wrong -- in the view of the disapproving Spaniards. According to the complaint, these wrong interpretations encouraged the president to make decisions that led to torture.

The Spanish magistrate apparently believes that it can be a crime for American officials to offer the wrong kind of advice to a president of the United States and, furthermore, it can be a crime punishable by a Spanish court. This is a national insult with harmful implications.
The general sloppiness of the complaint's factual assertions is clear from its discussion of my work. The entire case against me hinges on my alleged role in arguing that the detainees in Guantanamo Bay should not receive protection under Geneva Article 3 relating to humane treatment. I never made any such argument.

On the contrary, the most significant role I played in the debates about Geneva was in early 2002 when I -- together with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers -- helped persuade Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to take a strongly pro-Geneva position in the first National Security Council meeting on the subject on Feb. 4.

Noting in writing that Geneva is part of U.S. law, I argued it is a good treaty and it is "important that the President appreciate DOD's interest in the Convention." I wrote that "U.S. armed forces are trained to treat captured enemy forces according to the Convention," that Geneva is "morally important, crucial to U.S. morale," and that it is also "practically important, for it makes U.S. forces the gold standard in the world, facilitating our winning cooperation from other countries."

In conclusion, I urged "[h]umane treatment for all detainees" and recommended that the president explain that Geneva "does not squarely address circumstances that we are confronting in this new global war against terrorism, but while we work through the legal questions, we are upholding the principle of universal applicability of the Convention."

I briefed these arguments directly to the president at that Feb. 4 NSC meeting, and his decision on Geneva's applicability to the war against the Taliban was consistent with them.

The allegation that I argued against Article 3 protection was invented by a British lawyer named Philippe Sands and published in an angry, wildly inaccurate book called "Torture Team." Mr. Sands asserts that, in our interview, I admitted making the case against Article 3. He was eventually compelled to publish the interview transcript, however, and it shows that nothing I said supports his allegation, that he grossly misquoted me on a number of points, and that he never asked me a single question about Article 3. Mr. Sands has to this day never accounted for how he could charge me with opposing Article 3 based on an interview in which the term "Article 3" was never even mentioned by me or him. I dissected Mr. Sands's misrepresentations in detail in testimony I gave to the House Judiciary Committee last summer.

As bad as the Spanish complaint is for relying expressly on Mr. Sands's discredited book for facts, it is far worse for the principle it is trying to establish -- that a foreign court should punish former U.S. officials criminally if the judge thinks their official advice to the U.S. president violated international law. Whatever advice any of us offered the president on these debatable issues, it would be an unprecedented outrage to make our participation in government policy making a subject for second-guessing in a foreign criminal court.
From the Nuremburg trials of the Nazi leadership forward, none of the cases in which former government officials have been tried for international crimes are actually precedents for what the Spanish officials are now considering. In countries run by officials who rule by force, commit aggression, perpetrate humanitarian outrages and stand above and out of reach of any domestic law, leaders are sometimes tried by international tribunals. Such countries' sovereignty is not respected because their own domestic laws -- let alone their international legal obligations -- do not bind their leaders.

But ours is a country of laws, and no reasonable person doubts that the American legal system has integrity. If President Barack Obama and the prosecutors see a crime to be prosecuted, they can act. It would be hostile for a foreign official to decide that U.S. sovereignty on this matter should not be respected because the U.S. is like Nazi Germany or Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic.

What if a Spanish magistrate doesn't like the legal analyses prepared by U.S. officials on other subjects, such as nuclear weapons, or the death penalty, or atmospheric pollution, or border security with Mexico? Any of these matters could be the basis for a claim by a creative European jurist that a U.S. official is taking a position contrary to international law as interpreted by right-thinking Europeans.
It seems clear that the goal of this judicial exercise is to carry a political disagreement into criminal courts and thereby to intimidate U.S. officials. If Spanish officials decide to carry the prosecution forward, then Americans who know that their views run contrary to those of various Spanish or other European activists would have to think twice about voicing those views -- or stay out of U.S. government service altogether -- if they want to avoid being threatened with arrest in Europe.

The American people can tolerate this only if they are willing to forfeit the right to make their own laws and policies. This is not a left-versus-right political issue. It is a question of preserving the American constitutional system of government in which U.S. officials are answerable for their opinions and advice to the American people -- but not to foreign criminal courts.

Mr. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy (2001-05), is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins, 2008).

Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
Susan C. Serpa   
www.neimpeach.org

[jaqeboy]

this one ought to have fewer jurisdictional hurdles:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/5100640/Lawsuit-filed-against-Spains-ex-PM-over-Iraq.html
Lawsuit filed against Spain's ex-PM over Iraq

Spain's Supreme Court is to rule whether the former prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, can be prosecuted for the country's involvement in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Last Updated: 4:16PM BST 03 Apr 2009

A private lawsuit is to be presented at the nation's highest court on Friday accusing the former ally of Tony Blair and George W Bush of responsibility for taking the country to war.

The suit, filed by the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and a group called "Trial of Aznar" and signed by 22,000 members of the public, also names the previous administration's ministers of defence and foreign affairs, Federico Trillo and Ana Palacio, as those responsible for supporting the intervention in Iraq.
...

[John Edward Mercier]

Is Spain a member of the UN?

I'm pretty sure member countries of the UN by treaty are required to 'police' UN resolutions.
Its one of the reasons, I... if not most, support the dissolution of the UN.

[jaqeboy]

Just goes to show you it can be done - people can bring their ruler to justice - in their own country. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, et. al. beware!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gyYAKP7-g6qXDaCoQmI2-xBl2J2Q
Fujimori gets 25 years for human rights crimes

LIMA (AFP) — Peru's former strongman Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison, following his conviction for "crimes against humanity" committed during his decade-long iron-fisted rule.

A special court in Lima tried and convicted the former president for his role in crimes committed by an army death squad during his 1990-2000 rule.
...

[jaqeboy]

Wooo Hoooo!!!

Chill the Champagne

The Bush Six to Be Indicted

By Scott Horton

April 14, 2009 "Daily Beast" -- Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo.
...

[akmisrmaadi]

fuck spain and europe

[John Edward Mercier]

Are other countries going along with Spain?
Torture is a human rights violation under International Treaty that the US is party to.