Yep! Yep! Yep! (with plenty below the fold...)

"The Daily Beast's Scott Horton reports that a judge in Spain decided today that an investigation of Bush officials involved in torture policy will go forward and can lead to prosecution.

In a ruling in Madrid today, Judge Baltasar Garzón has announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration's torture policy makers now will proceed into a formal criminal investigation. The ruling came as a jolt following the recommendation of Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido against proceeding with a criminal inquiry, reported in The Daily Beast on April 16.

Judge Garzón previously initiated and handled investigations involving Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Argentine "Dirty War" strategist Adolfo Scilingo and Guatemalan strongman José Efraín Ríos-Montt, often over the objections of the Spanish attorney general. His case against Pinochet gained international attention when the Chilean general was apprehended in England on a Spanish arrest warrant. Scilingo was extradited to Spain and is now serving a sentence of 30 years for his role in the torture and murder of some thirty persons, several of whom were Spanish citizens.

Garzón's ruling today marks a decision to begin a formal criminal inquiry into the allegations of torture and inhumane treatment he has been collecting for several years now."

Previously at ePluribus Media:

And the Prophetic Author Award Goes to...

Philippe Sands:

About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture.

If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book's author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen's Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands's book, "Torture Team," offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as "a British lawyer" who "wrote an extremely dishonest book."

Last week, Sands's accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects. Among those whom the court singled out was Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Sands, previously, was involved in prosecuting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, as was the Spanish judge presiding over the Bush torture case.

Just some added info for your research purposes taken from a bunch of previous posts on this topic in my archives: 

Abu Ghraib: The Unrated Story

Sy Hersh has talked a bit about abuses at Abu Ghraib, but this time he gets the story from the General that investigatd the abuse, and General Taguba says that the investigation was blocked from going up the chain of command:

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld's office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included:

Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.

Taguba said, "You didn't need to 'see' anything--just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value."

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba's report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their "extremely sensitive nature.") Taguba said that he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee." The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. "It's bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women's panties," Taguba said.

Via Salon, and don't bother to click through if you don't have the stomach for this stuff, and needless to say NOT SAFE FOR WORK:

279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.

snip

(ed. note-CM1: Do not watch or click through on any of the links in this part of the diary if you can't stomach torture, abuse, death, sexual abuse and degradation, etc. and NOT SAFE FOR WORK!)

The 10 galleries of photo and video evidence appear chronologically in the left column, followed by an additional Salon report on prosecutions for abuse and an overview of Pentagon investigations and other resources.

Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army's own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army's own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib's notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there. The annotated archive also includes new details about the role of the CIA, military intelligence and the CID itself in abuse captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.

News you will never see from American news reporters on American Networks:

(Do not watch if you can't stomach torture, abuse, death, sexual abuse and degradation, etc. and NOT SAFE FOR WORK!)

On Wednesday 16 February 2006, Australian public broadcaster SBS current affairs program DATELINE telecast a segment featuring 60 new photos of the torture inflicted on prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These photos were secured by court order - the ACLU figures prominently in the report - but these photos haven't yet been shown in the media anywhere in the United States.

These files are all hosted on a server located in the United States to speed access for US viewers. If you do know how to use BitTorrent, please download the appropriate BitTorrent file and use that.

HIGH torrent: Link,

MEDIUM torrent: Link,

LOW torrent: Link

High download: Link, Mirror

Medium download: Link, Mirror

Low download: Link, Mirror

(END OF NOT SAFE FOR WORK material... Until the next leaks.)

And just to be clear as to the extent of many of the crimes...

Waterboarding was way down the list of disgusting and criminal acts that prisoners were subjected to:

But The Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the documents actually "contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to [Mohamed's] captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured." In fact, it was British officials, not the Americans, who pressured Foreign Secretary David Miliband "to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution." According to the Telegraph's sources, the documents describe particularly gruesome interrogation tactics:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: "British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn't do anything about it."

"It is very clear who stands to be embarrassed by this and who is being protected by this secrecy. It is not the Americans, it is Labour ministers," former shadow home secretary David Davis said. But one unnamed U.S. House Judiciary Committee member told the Telegraph that if President Obama "doesn't act we could hold a hearing or write to subpoena the documents. We need to know what's in those documents."

And the British are just as complicit in these sick criminal acts perpetrated by many in the Bush administration. Will there be any real justice in the USA ever again?

There is a basic fact that we can not ignore and that is...

Torture Is Illegal

And these are all criminals:

ABC News reported tonight that President Bush's most senior and trusted advisers met in "dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House" beginning in 2002 to approve the use of "combined" interrogation techniques (the joint use of harsh interrogation techniques). Those tactics included whether detainees "would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding."

Members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee -- Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft -- approved the use of these techniques. "Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved." According to ABC's report, Ashcroft indicated he was troubled by the meetings:

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Those people need to be locked up...

There are a slew of politicians, civil servants, Generals and all of the officers and NCOs in between that need to be locked up. And this needs to happen in bi-partisan manner. Because there are, also, guilty politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Why Do Some Democratic Party Members Refuse to Investigate?

Because some of the investigations would inevitably lead right back to some of their own members having been complicit in criminal actions:

It seems as if the "four" congressional leaders Harman refers to as knowing about the tapes were the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees: Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL), and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA). Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) took Goss' spot as chairman of the House intelligence committee that year when Goss became CIA director. Hoekstra told the AP that he didn't know a thing about either the tapes or their destruction. I'm calling Harman to ask her for her letter to the CIA about the tapes, and will bring it to you if and when I have it.

But the bottom line here is that at least some Congressional leaders knew something about the tapes and something about their destruction, and didn't say anything about either. Harman's silence is especially stunning: she co-chaired a joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks in 2002 that didn't receive that very pertinent information. Why did she remain quiet about potentially criminal behavior? Marty Lederman has some thoughts here:

Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at which point he expresses outrage and incredulity -- but reveals nothing. Really, isn't it about time the Democrats select an effective Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one who will treat this scandal with the seriousness it deserves, and who will shed much-needed light on the CIA program of torture, cruel treatment and obstruction of evidence? ...

Jane Harman also knew of the intention to destroy the tapes, and she at least "urged" the CIA in writing not to do it. (Where were her colleagues?) But when she found out the CIA had destroyed the tapes, where was Harman's press conference? Where were the congressional hearings?

While some are more culpable than others, this does not change the fact that if you enabled the bush administration to cover up their crimes, you became part of the criminal conspiracy.

Glenn Greenwald offered some further observations into this reality:

I continue to be amazed and disturbed by the number of people willing to defend the actions of Rockefeller and his comrades by claiming that these poor, victimized Congressional members just have no ability to do anything when they learn about outright lawbreaking by the administration. As I asked yesterday, why would they even bother to attend briefings if they believed that they were "powerless" to act even upon learning of serious illegalities? Here is the central purpose of the Select Committee on Intelligence -- the primary reason it exists, as stated by the resolution which created the Committee:

It is further the purpose of this resolution to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.

The Intelligence Committees were created as a response to the discovery in the 1970s of illegal conduct by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The core function is to monitor what the intelligence community does and to "assure that such activities" are legal. It is a complete travesty for the senior Democrats on those Committees (and their apologists) to claim that they are powerless to act when learning of lawbreaking. Anyone who thinks that way should not be on the Committee. The idea that they can't do anything once learning of lawbreaking is the very opposite of the Committee's core purpose. But, of course, they were not and are not powerless to act. They simply chose not to act.

In addition to the other mechanisms for action identified here and elsewhere thus far that are available to Senators who learn of patently illegal behavior in a classified setting, key members of the Intelligence Committee could also refuse to cooperate in the enactment of legislation, block nominees, and otherwise thwart the administration's needs until there is some resolution. Such Senators could hold closed door hearings or announce publicly that they have learned of serious lawbreaking by the CIA (without specifying what the lawbreaking is) and demand that the administration agree to a classified setting to resolve those concerns (such as appointing a special counsel with security clearances or empowering a court able to investigate and adjudicate highly classified matters).

But they did none of that. They did the opposite: they continued to cooperate meekly with the administration, pass all of their demanded legislation, and keep quiet. Even for those who say that it's terribly unfair to expect our political leaders to subject themselves to any risk whatsoever in order to put a stop to such gross abuses, they could have acted in ways far short of some sort of melodramatic civil disobedience which would have risked imprisonment (i.e, they would not have had to go as far as actual leaders and patriots who did take risks in order to expose serious governmental wrongdoing).

If someone wants to defend these Democrats' complicit behavior (on the craven ground that what they did was understandable because it was politically wise), then they should make that argument. But nobody should pretend that these Senators and Representatives were "helpless" and had no options for putting a stop to Bush's torture programs and other lawbreaking if they were actually interested in doing so.

Needless to say, if anyone tries to argue that it is politically wise to ignore these crimes... They are no better than the neoconservatives and their GOPeeons that committed the actual crimes.

Just a companion piece for Michael Collins' diary and journal entry:

MURDER TRUMPS TORTURE SAYS BUGLIOSI

Because torture is still a crime in this country. Some added resources, some with action item suggestions, brought to my attention by Liberality:

I can't rehash it all but I encourage you to go to these links and read up on it and call your senators and congress critters and complain long and loud that we want to return to the country we can be proud to call our own once again. Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your representative. We want ethical treatment of EVERYBODY just because that is the RIGHT thing to do.

The One About

Dreams for Today

The Future of Freedom Foundation

All Academic Research

It is our job, it is our duty to make sure that our country lives up to basic standards of decency.