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Bush and war crimes, by William Pfaff.
Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.
Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
...The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions ... were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed.
Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities.
High U.S. administration figures reportedly lingered - with delectation? - over what exactly was to be done to the unfortunate prisoners - for how long, in what position, with what pain inflicted...
And when all this began to come out, what did the administration have to say? The president said on May 24 that "a few American troops ... disregarded our values." Civilians in the Pentagon, speaking informally to the press, blamed the Abu Ghraib scandals on "a few hillbillies."
. . .This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil.
Meantime, WaPo editorial writer Anne Applebaum says political will is draining from the Hill to fully connect the dots linking the White House to the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and beyond.
To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it...
They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House.
But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.
Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it ... Unfortunately, Congress has no real motive to find the answer either. After a bit of obligatory spluttering, the House has gone silent... Meanwhile, Sen. John Warner's Armed Services Committee, conducting the only active investigation on Capitol Hill, is moving at a leisurely pace...
If the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all. Edmund Burke, a conservative philosopher, wrote, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
The Post house editorial also says torture was the policy of the Bush White House:
SLOWLY, AND IN spite of systematic stonewalling by the Bush administration, it is becoming clearer why a group of military guards at Abu Ghraib prison tortured Iraqis in the ways depicted in those infamous photographs. President Bush and his spokesmen shamefully cling to the myth that the guards were rogues acting on their own. Yet over the past month we have learned that much of what the guards did -- from threatening prisoners with dogs, to stripping them naked, to forcing them to wear women's underwear -- had been practiced at U.S. military prisons elsewhere in the world. Moreover, most of these techniques were sanctioned by senior U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Iraqi theater command under Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.
The Post calls on the Senate to pass an "amendment to the defense authorization bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), [that] would reaffirm the commitment of the United States not to engage in torture, and it would require the defense secretary to provide Congress with guidelines ensuring compliance with this standard."
At the very least. But what about trials of Bush and Rumsfeld on war crimes? How can this just remain a matter for editorial writers?