Will Bush and Gonzales get away with it?

[kskiska]

The pilot and Vietnam POW -- a staunch Republican -- who pushed through the War Crimes Act of 1996 is appalled that the Bush administration, facing possible prosecution for war crimes, is devising a legal escape hatch.

By Michael Scherer

Aug. 02, 2006 | Retired Navy pilot Mike Cronin knows enough about torture to know it doesn't work. After being shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, he spent six years enduring interrogations in the Hanoi Hilton, the notorious holding block for American prisoners of war. His neck and ankles were bound together with rope, causing him to lose consciousness. The nerves and bones in his wrists were crushed. His shoulder was ripped out of its socket. He was forced to talk, but he never gave the North Vietnamese the information they wanted.

"I told lies," explained Cronin, 65, in a telephone interview from Cape Cod, Mass., where he is spending the summer. "When you put people in that position, the information you get is not reliable."

After the war ended, Cronin returned home to become a commercial pilot for American Airlines -- and a deep believer in the laws of war. He came to see the Geneva Conventions, which bar torture and "humiliating and degrading treatment," as a bedrock of the international military code. He was amazed to discover that as late as the 1990s, there was no law enabling U.S. courts to try violators of the Geneva Conventions. "I was shocked," he said. "I just thought that was wrong."

So Cronin changed the legal landscape. Thanks to his persistent lobbying, Congress passed the War Crimes Act of 1996 with overwhelming bipartisan support. For the first time, U.S. courts were granted authority to convict any foreigner who commits a war crime against an American, or any American who commits a war crime at all. At the time, nobody could have predicted that a decade later a U.S. administration, with the explicit consent of the president and the attorney general, would be accused of systematic war crimes.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2006/08/02/cronin/

[msongs]

1. exactly WHO do you think is gonna stop it?? nt

[Lindacooks]

3. Well, voting a straight Dem ticket in November is a good start.

We can't do anything until we regain control of Congress.

[MichiganVote]

2. Yes

[Amonester]

4. K&R

And I want to thank you for this post!!

If they're not judged at The Hague, let's make sure it's somewhere else (and that the final verdict will be quite the same).

[Demeter]

5. It Won't Be a LEGAL Escape Hatch

so no, they won't get away with it, unless they do a Ken Lay.