Returning to the Scene of the Crime: War Crimes in Iraq - by Noam Chomsky

Published on Tuesday, April 4, 2006 by TomDispatch
Returning to the Scene of the Crime: War Crimes in Iraq
by Noam Chomsky

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In 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales passed on to Bush a memorandum on torture by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). As noted by constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson: "According to the OLC, ‘acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture… Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.'" Levinson goes on to say that in the view of Jay Bybee, then head of the OLC, "The infliction of anything less intense than such extreme pain would not, technically speaking, be torture at all. It would merely be inhuman and degrading treatment, a subject of little apparent concern to the Bush administration's lawyers."

Gonzales further advised President Bush to effectively rescind the Geneva Conventions, which, despite being "the supreme law of the land" and the foundation of contemporary international law, contained provisions Gonzales determined to be "quaint" and "obsolete." Rescinding the conventions, he informed Bush, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." Passed in 1996, the act carries severe penalties for "grave breaches" of the conventions: the death penalty, "if death results to the victim" of the breach. Gonzales was later appointed to be attorney general and would probably have been a Supreme Court nominee if Bush's constituency did not regard him as "too liberal."

much more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0404-30.htm

By definition, and scrupulous adherence to legal definitions, this administration is guilty of war crimes. A great post, and a troubling one, for we can't even agree on a toothless censure of Bush for flagrantly breaking the law. Noam Chomsky nails the bigger issue(s). A spine is a terrible thing to waste.

You don't fire someone that swallows like Gonzales does!!!!!