Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international war-crimes trial (Village Voice)

[kpete]

Nat Hentoff
History Will Not Absolve Us
Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international war-crimes trial
by Nat Hentoff
August 28th, 2007 6:30 PM

If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn't let them in.

But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do—on the orders of the president—to "protect American values."

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As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on—at the White House, really—and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they were."


http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0735,hentoff,77643,6.html

[SalmonChantedEvening]

1. Make his fingerprints stick this time.

In the name of human decency PLEASE make this stick. These criminals must go and NOW.

[Solly Mack]

2. It has to be done...

Bush Inc must be held accountable for their war crimes.

And instead of cowardly hoping others do it, America needs to get that ball rolling

[Disturbed]

3. Congress will not comply with this.

Why not? Because Congress is complicit in the War Crimes. Congress was complicit in hiding the actual Torture that went on at Abu Grahib, GITMO & the secret CIA Prisons. This is also why Congress refuses to Impeach Bush &/or Cheney.

[Solly Mack]

4. I know they won't