Friday, April 11, 2008

The torture team

An article by Philippe Sands in Vanity Fair sets out the evidence that the legal framework set out to justify aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay also caused the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that those responsible are guilty of war crimes. Ironically, the actions the Bush has taken to guarantee immunity from prosecution for these actions makes the case stronger for international war crimes prosecution, meaning that if any of these responsible individuals sets foot outside of the U.S., they could be at risk of seeing justice done.

(Via The Daily Doubter.)

2 comments:

Hume's Ghost said...

That article is excerpted (or adapted - I forget which) from Sands forthcoming book The Torture Team. In his previous book, Lawless World Sands revealed President Bush having toyed with the idea of attempting to create his own Gulf Of Tonkin by tricking Hussein into shooting down a plane painted with UN colors.

This is another case in point of: what would a Republican president possibly have to do to get impeached?

Lying about oral sex: impeachable offense. Trying to fabricate a pretext for a war that has resulted in what is likely to be hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars of lost treasure (as well as numerous other deleterious consequences): Heck, that's barely even newsworthy.

Hume's Ghost said...

Links:

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules--From FDR's Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush's Illegal War

I linked to the hc of Lawless World since its cheaper, but I think the pb has a better (less confusing) subtitle: The Whistle-Blowing Account of How Bush and Blair Are Taking the Law into Their Own Hands