I will be honest. I have always believed that Shock and Awe, Waterboarding, and many other directives ordered or approved by President Bush made him a war criminal. If he was not President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, he would have been tried at the Hague.
Sadly, I never thought President Bush was calling the shots but simply acquiescing to Vice President Chaney and the Neocons. I really do not think he understood the gravity of what he inflicted on both Americans and Iraqis.
After watching President Bush interviews on various Television networks I am convinced that President Bush had he been tried for war crimes would get off on mental incompetence. The incoherency on expressing the Iraq debacle even after writing an overpriced $35.00 book was astounding.
President Bush should simply have stayed on the farm. Reopening the wounds to try to rewrite history is counterproductive.
My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
Book’s Webpage: http://books.egbertowillies.com – Twitter: http://twitter.com/egbertowillies
WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday joined a growing chorus in the human rights community calling for a special prosecutor to investigate whether former president George W. Bush violated federal statutes prohibiting torture.
In his new memoir and ensuing book tour, Bush has repeatedly admitted that he directly authorized the waterboarding of three terror suspects. Use of the waterboard, which creates the sensation of drowning, has been an iconic and almost universally condemned form of torture since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
Except for a brief period during which a handful of Bush administration lawyers insisted that the exigencies of interrogating terror suspects justified its use, waterboarding has always been considered illegal by the Justice Department. It is also a clear violation of international torture conventions.
The ACLU is urging Attorney General Eric Holder to ask Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate Bush. For nearly three years now, Durham has been acting as a special prosecutor investigating a variety of torture-related matters involving government officials considerably lower on the food chain. Just this Tuesday, it was widely reported that Durham had cleared the CIA’s former top clandestine officer and others in the destruction of agency videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects — but that he would continue pursuing other aspects of his investigation.
"The ACLU acknowledges the significance of this request, but it bears emphasis that the former President’s acknowledgment that he authorized torture is absolutely without parallel in American history," the group wrote in its letter to Holder.
"The admission cannot be ignored. In our system, no one is above the law or beyond its reach, not even a former president. That founding principle of our democracy would mean little if it were ignored with respect to those in whom the public most invests its trust. It would also be profoundly unfair for Mr. Durham to focus his inquiry on low-level officials charged with implementing official policy but to ignore the role of those who authorized or ordered the use of torture."
In his new memoir, "Decision Points," Bush recalls his thought process after CIA director George Tenet asked for permission to waterboard alleged al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in early 2003. Bush’s response: "Damn right."
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In an interview with the Times of London published this week, Bush used that language again, this time with feeling. James Harding described asking Bush if he authorized the use of the waterboard on Mohammed.
"Damn right!" he barks. "We capture the guy, the chief operating officer of al-Qaeda, who kills 3,000 people. We felt he had the information about another attack. He says: ‘I’ll talk to you when I get my lawyer.’ I say: ‘What options are available and legal?’ "
In an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Bush explained himself this way:
We believe America’s going to be attacked again. There’s all kinds of intelligence comin’ in. And– and– one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda… ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He’s got information." I said, "Find out what he knows." And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use ’em."
LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer, but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.
The so-called "Torture Memos" were drafted by officials in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under the strict supervision of the vice president’s office — and were withdrawn within a matter of months when other Bush lawyers found them utterly unjustifiable.
Bush’s Waterboarding Admission Prompts Calls For Criminal Probe
