By David Swanson

Attorney General Eric Holder is addressing a war crime without addressing the wars, and is focusing on the lowest ranking participants in that crime without addressing its status as official policy established by higher ups and openly confessed to by a former president and vice president. This is bad applism, the same approach that has held a handful of recruits responsible for Abu Ghraib, claiming to thereby remove bad apples from a good system. But Congress' and the public's approach to the horrors of the past eight years is driven by our own bad applism, by our belief that the departure of Bush and Cheney in itself significantly repaired a system of government that is rotten to the core.

As Holder left an appropriations subcommittee hearing on April 23rd I spoke up loudly from the third row, "We need a special prosecutor for torture, Mr. Attorney General. Americans like the rule of law. The rule of law for everybody."

He replied as he approached me and walked by, surrounded by body guards, "And you will be proud of your government."

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By David Swanson

It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.

There is no doubt that George W. Bush conspired to commit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder. How do I know? He said so.

In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union, Bush said: "All told more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States."

Too vague and wink-wink for you? Try this:

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Support for a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the Bush administration’s use of torture has grown to include a former top FBI interrogator and a career military intelligence officer with more than two decades of experience conducting interrogations.

Jack Cloonan, a former FBI security and counterterrorism expert who was assigned to the agency’s elite Bin Laden Unit, Col. Steve Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the Defense Department’s most effective interrogators, and Matthew Alexander,who was the senior interrogator for the task force in Iraq that tracked down al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, said ignoring clear-cut evidence of interrogation-related crimes would encourage more law-breaking in the future. Alexander uses a pseudonym for security reasons.

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From After Downing Street

Compiled below, in hopes that it may be of some assistance to Eric Holder, John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, active citizens, foreign courts, the International Criminal Court, law firms preparing civil suits, and local or state prosecutors with decency and nerve is a list of 50 top living U.S. war criminals. These are men and women who helped to launch wars of aggression or who have been complicit in lesser war crimes. These are not the lowest-ranking employees or troops who managed to stray from official criminal policies. These are the makers of those policies.

The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the United States target civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, use antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, use white phosphorous as a weapon, use depleted uranium weapons, employ a new version of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs, engage in collective punishment of Iraqi civilian populations -- including by blocking roads, cutting electricity and water, destroying fuel stations, planting bombs in farm fields, demolishing houses, and plowing down orchards -- detain people without charge or legal process without the rights of prisoners of war, imprison children, torture, and murder.

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Ray McGovern is a retired CIA officer. McGovern was employed under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. McGovern was born and raised in the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program.

In this interview McGovern talks with Real News Network CEO Paul Jay about the paper trail on the Iraq war, as revealed in the British "Downing Street Memo".


The Real News Network - August 08, 2009
The Downing Street Memo - Pt.1
McGovern: "It's there in black and white - The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy"

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Last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Eric Holder was a featured speaker at the American Constitution Society's annual convention where he told a packed crowd that the "American people are owe[d] a reckoning" as a result of the "abusive" and "unlawful" policies of the Bush administration.

"Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the Writ of Habeus Corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants, and authorized the use of procedures that both violate international law and the United States Constitution," Holder said in June 2008. "We owe the American people a reckoning."

If recent news reports are accurate, some form of that day of reckoning may soon be upon us as now-Attorney General Holder weighs the possibility of appointing a federal prosecutor to probe the Bush administration's use of torture during the interrogation of detainees captured in the "war on terror."

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Last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Eric Holder was a featured speaker at the American Constitution Society’s annual convention where he told a packed crowd that the “American people are owe[d] a reckoning” as a result of the “abusive” and “unlawful” policies of the Bush administration.

“Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the Writ of Habeus Corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants, and authorized the use of procedures that both violate international law and the United States Constitution,” Holder said in June 2008. “We owe the American people a reckoning.”

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Nationally Renowned Scholars, Writers, Artists, and Advocates Urge Attorney General Holder to Uphold the Rule of Law and Appoint Prosecutor to Investigate Allegations of Torture and Other Serious Crimes

SALT LAKE CITY - Several prominent Americans, including authors, artists, legal experts, and renowned voices of conscience, today transmitted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and other violations of human rights and civil liberties committed by former government officials and others. The signatories to the letter are:

* Daniel Ellsberg (former Marine commander, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, defense specialist, responsible for disclosure of the Pentagon Papers)
* Bruce Fein (specialist in constitutional and international law, former Associate Deputy US Attorney General (during Reagan administration))
* Andy Jacobs (represented Indiana's 10th and 11th Congressional Districts, 1965-1973 and 1975-1997, Korean War veteran)
* Paul Rogat Loeb (author Soul of a Citizen - Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time)
* Graham Nash (singer-songwriter (The Hollies; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young))

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation into the misdeeds of former president George W. Bush and former vice president Richard B. Cheney.

Holder, in turn, has now called on Conyers to open impeachment proceedings against former head of the Office of Legal Council Jay Bybee, now a judge in the Ninth Circuit.

Conyers, in response, has demanded that Holder open a complete investigation of 14 different areas of criminal enterprise and appoint an independent counsel, offering a list of eight possible candidates.

Holder, in reply, has insisted that Conyers reissue all of the subpoenas his committee has failed to enforce over the past two and a half years and use the Capitol Police to enforce them at once.

In response, Conyers' office has issued a new report on the need to weed out corruption and undo politically motivated prosecutions by the U.S. Department of Justice.

This morning, the attorney general remarked at a televised press conference, "Chairman Conyers proposed five months ago to extend to 10 years the statutes of limitations on crimes allegedly committed under the previous administration. Introducing a bill might be a way to begin making that happen. Just an idea. I'm no expert."

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Crossposted from Firedoglake...

James Risen at the New York Times reports on a concerted campaign by U.S. officials during the Bush Administration to impede the investigation into the November 2001 mass killings by suffocation and shooting of up to 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters by U.S.-backed warlord forces at Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan (emphasis added).

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A., and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official....

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant war crime in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month.

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