Open Letter from a Citizen to President-Elect Barack Obama: No Bailouts for Torturers

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/37889

Open Letter from a Citizen to President-Elect Barack Obama: No Bailouts for Torturers
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2008-11-24 18:14.

By Ben Davis

Dear President-Elect Barack Obama:

I am a citizen from Toledo, Ohio a place you have come to know as where Joe the Plumber lives.

Notwithstanding everything advisors are saying to you, I write to urge you with all my heart, mind and soul to criminally prosecute in U.S. domestic courts a small group of U.S. high-level civilians and generals for torture and cruel inhuman and degrading treatment in the past seven years of the War on Terror. I have written a 156 page law review article coming out in the next weeks in the St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary which gives a longer presentation of my reasons. A copy is available at my faculty website.

I originally submitted this to the Washington Post because I suspect that you and the political, business and academic class read it. I want them to also hear this plea, and hope that they read AfterDowningStreet.org.

Long before Abu-Ghraib broke, on January 21, 2004, I stood in the snow in Toledo, Ohio at Owens Community College when President George Bush came to speak. I had a small cardboard sign that said, "Indict Bush War Crimes." For four years in every forum to which I have been allowed access, I have urged criminal prosecution of these people (see my website). I led the effort to have the American Society of International Law pass its historic 2006 Centennial Resolution on the Laws of War and Detainee Treatment - the highest international law organization in the United States.

I urge criminal prosecution of these high-level civilians and generals because their conduct broke U.S. federal law, U.S. international law obligations, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and state laws.

I urge these criminal prosecutions because U.S. soldiers have been convicted for doing the bidding of these persons.

As has been recounted in numerous places, the soldiers who did these horrendous things were told that this torture was approved on high - whether in Gitmo, in Iraq, or in Bagram. We know that this torture was done with the aid of many allies in many countries around the world. Even here in Toledo we know this.

These soldiers were rightly convicted for betraying their oaths but it does not end there. Even after leaving prison, they are serving a life sentence because of those convictions.

Those persons who put in place the policy of cruelty should not be allowed to not face a jury of their peers also for the crimes committed. Allowing them not to face a jury of their peers would mean that the life sentences for these awful acts are only to be born by the low-level non-general officers - the Americans from places like Toledo who make up the backbone of our services.

Sir, when the four top uniformed military lawyers asked the head lawyer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do a full review of the detainee policy, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Myers blocked that effort at the request of then General Counsel William Haynes. That, I submit, is conspiracy to torture and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman by General Myers. It is conspiracy to torture by William Haynes.

Sir, when John Yoo wrote those memos where he made up from thin air definitions of torture, that was not legal analysis, that was conspiracy to commit torture.

Sir, when the National Security Principals sat around and approved specific torture techniques that was conspiracy to torture.

The conduct has been done. The persons I list below are the persons of interest that should be referred for investigation and criminal prosecution. Some may become defendants, all are witnesses to the conduct that is the crime.

If by some happenstance on his last day, President Bush issues a blanket pardon to all these people making it impossible for a U.S. prosecution of these persons, I would ask that you submit their names for a United Nations Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court. Presidential pardons in any country - whether Pinochet in Chile, the generals in Argentina, or George Bush in the United States - are of no consequence for international criminal tribunals. At the same time, I would urge Congress to impeach the former President George Bush under our Constitution.

That will be the best we can do to say to ourselves, to say to any person who has been tortured anywhere in the world, and to say to all people in the Middle East that torture is not the American way.

Now some will say to you that we need to heal. I agree we need to heal. But, in healing we need to make sure that the law applies to the high and mighty as it applies to the two bit crack dealer at 7th and U in Washington D.C.

I will send you a copy of my article when it comes out. I recognize you are busy and would ask that you give it to someone to read.

The list of the persons of interest is as follows:

• President George W. Bush
• Vice President Richard Cheney
• Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey
• Vice President Chief of Staff David Addington
• Former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales
• Former Deputy to the White House Counsel, Timothy E. Flanigan
• Fran Townsend, Former Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism
• L. Paul Bremer III, Former U.S. Administrator of Iraq
• Former Attorney General John Ashcroft
• Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Jack Landsman Goldsmith,
• Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo
• Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, Patrick Philbin
• Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel, Stephen Bradbury
• Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
• Department of State Legal Adviser and former Chief Counsel of the White House National Security Council, John B. Bellinger III
• Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
• Former Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State Lawrence Wilkerson
• National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley
• Secretary of Defense Richard Gates
• Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone
• General Counsel, Department of Defense, William J. Haynes II
• Judge Jay S. Bybee, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel
• Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency George Tenet,
• Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Porter Goss,
• Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael Hayden
• Former Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, A.B. Krongard
• Former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John C. Gannon
• Former Director of the National Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.
• Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency, John L. Helgerson
• Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Rizzo
• Former General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, Scott W. Muller
• Secretary of Homeland Security and former head of the Criminal Division, Department of Justice Michael Chertoff
• Director of National Intelligence John Mike McConnell
• Former Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte
• Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers,
• Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace
• Former General John Abizaid
• Former Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez
• Major General General Barbara Fast
• Major General Walter Wojdakowski
• Former Army Major General Geoffrey Miller
• Former Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski
• U.S. Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency of the United States of America

Sincerely,

Benjamin G. Davis
Citizen
Toledo, Ohio