Making A Case For Bushco Prosecution

[pocketfullofshells]

That is simply ridiculous, you obviously don't have any comprehention, in your liberal mind at what our enemy truly wants do you? They could care less if we executed Bush!

They want the West to fall! Plain and simple...

They may not care, but I think alot of americans would like to see him do some jail time still. I know I would.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

So now they become suicide bombers out of desperation?

Hardly. That's where religious-fundamentalists step-in.

Ask the folks at any Family Planning clinic.

​

 

[Sihouette]

As we've seen with the Gaza situation, religion is just an excuse to smokescreen economic agendas. No self-respecting jew would sully his moral purity by slaughtering innocents on the Sabbath.

Christian morals were amongst the lies told to justify the invasion to Iraq. Christian morals are the farthest thing away from the real reason for being there.

And if you don't know that real reason by now, you never will..

 

[Mr. Shaman]

As we've seen with the Gaza situation, religion is just an excuse to smokescreen economic agendas. No self-respecting jew would sully his moral purity by slaughtering innocents on the Sabbath.

Yeah....only terrorists would do such-a-thing.

​

 

[BigRob]

Sih, the area where GITMO is falls under no court jurisdiction, that is why they brought them there.

There also is no appeals court that has jurisdiction in that area.

Aside from that, you are arguing that since Congress has the power to erect forts that they by extension have the power to legislate over those areas. This is simply not the case.

So, again, US courts do not have jurisdiction in this instance. They will if the detainees are brought into the US, but as it stands they do not.

As for your American Studies class, your teacher must not have been very good it would seem.

 

[Sihouette]

Sih, the area where GITMO is falls under no court jurisdiction, that is why they brought them there. ~BigRob

Ah, you are wrong my friend. Read Article I Section 8 of the Constitution again.

The Congress shall have Power:...

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

I'm assuming military personelle, or some form of military ops (connected to the illegal war) worked at Gitmo? If the answer is yes, then Congress has jurisdiction over the activities there. Congress has jurisdiction over all military outposts, of which Gitmo is one. Yes, they do. If the military was there, doing the business of the US armed forces of any or many descriptions, then Congress has the say. And if Congress finds the reasons given to go to war were falsified, your friends are in a pickle. They could be in a pickle anyway since Congress may decide certain things that went on at Gitmo fell outside of the (falsely coerced) language of the altered statutes on torture.

ANY military or quasi-military outpost whatsoever falls under Congress's custody. If you're arguing that your little group of terrorists can remake the rules as they go, you're in for a big argument. Their coups will be stopped. The Constitution sits above all three forms of government, friend. As much as you'd like to wish, the CIA doesn't constitute an unreacheable fourth form.

Those days are over.

To listen to your argument, the minute a uniformed officer or soldier steps off American soil, he no longer has to abide by the rules of the military, governed by Congress. Good luck with that argument BTW. You will be facing off with some people whose tolerance for bending the rules to the breaking point has itself reached the breaking point..

 

[BigRob]

Ah, you are wrong my friend. Read Article I Section 8 of the Constitution again.


I'm assuming military personelle, or some form of military ops (connected to the illegal war) worked at Gitmo? If the answer is yes, then Congress has jurisdiction over the activities there. Congress has jurisdiction over all military outposts, of which Gitmo is one. Yes, they do. If the military was there, doing the business of the US armed forces of any or many descriptions, then Congress has the say. And if Congress finds the reasons given to go to war were falsified, your friends are in a pickle. They could be in a pickle anyway since Congress may decide certain things that went on at Gitmo fell outside of the (falsely coerced) language of the altered statutes on torture.

Again, the branch of the government that would actually do this, the Judiciary Branch, does not have any jurisdiction. If they did, it would already be being done.

Further, you argue that Congress has the ability to make rules over government of the Army. This hardly translates to the legal authority to put the Executive Branch on trial, as you are trying to advocate. Your legal reasoning is unfounded and non-existent.

To listen to your argument, the minute a uniformed officer or soldier steps off American soil, he no longer has to abide by the rules of the military, governed by Congress. Good luck with that argument BTW. You will be facing off with some people whose tolerance for bending the rules to the breaking point has itself reached the breaking point..

Those soldiers would abide by the Uniform Code of Justice. As much as you are trying to stretch this and that to make some case, you simply have no legal authority to do anything you are advocating.

The legal authority for Bush to do exactly what he has done is well founded and backed by multiple OLC decisions and legal precedence. The fact that you do not like it hardly makes it illegal. Nor does your ridiculous interpretation of the Constitution.

 

[Sihouette]

When all else fails, talk out of both sides of the medusa's head

US President George Bush has said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks.

The comments - among his most explicit so far on the issue - come after a recent opinion poll found that nearly 70% of Americans believed the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks.

Mr Bush did however repeat his belief that the former Iraqi president had ties to al-Qaeda - the group widely regarded as responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.

Critics of the war on Iraq have accused the US administration of deliberately encouraging public confusion to generate support for military action.

Lack of clarity


"We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks," Mr Bush told reporters as he met members of Congress on energy legislation.

Many Americans believe that some of the hijackers were Iraqi - when none were - and that the attacks had been orchestrated by Baghdad, despite any concrete evidence to support that.

This confusion has been partly attributed to, at best a lack of clarity by the administration and at worst, deliberate obfuscation, correspondents say.

As recently as last Sunday, Vice-President Dick Cheney, refused to rule out a link between Iraq and 11 September, saying "'we don't know"...
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3118262.stm

Our CIA apparently couldn't find the connections Bushco's BigOil agenda wanted...

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda..

..The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda...

..The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists...

.. according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties..

..Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA...

..the 9/11 commission...said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq...

.. In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."

So what do you do when the real intelligence doesn't serve you? You make up a kangaroo intelligence club, not officially recognized, and cook up your own "facts" to justify. The existence of this kangaroo unit is in itself, justification to try Bushco for wilfull circumvention of the truth that led to the erroneous declaration of the Iraq war by Congress.

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser. Source for bottom two quotes: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4951

 

[BigRob]

When all else fails, talk out of both sides of the medusa's head

Our CIA apparently couldn't find the connections Bushco's BigOil agenda wanted...


So what do you do when the real intelligence doesn't serve you? You make up a kangaroo intelligence club, not officially recognized, and cook up your own "facts" to justify. The existence of this kangaroo unit is in itself, justification to try Bushco for wilfull circumvention of the truth that led to the erroneous declaration of the Iraq war by Congress.

If this is supposed to be a response to me, you did not address any of the issues. If it was not, then carry on.

 

[Sihouette]

Further, you argue that Congress has the ability to make rules over government of the Army. This hardly translates to the legal authority to put the Executive Branch on trial, as you are trying to advocate. Your legal reasoning is unfounded and non-existent~ BigRob

Hmmmm....let me clarify agains..

The Congress shall have Power:...

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;~ Article I Section 8

If their tribunal determines Bushco lied to justify the war, that "justified" retooling our signature and ratification of the rules of The Geneva Convention concerning torture, they can retroactively dismiss any alterations of the ratification based on a false premise: that war was mandated, thereby enabling them to punish the crimes of torture as applicable to our treaties with the Laws of the Geneva Convention. And it is compulsory for us to do so to protect our own uniformed servicepeople and citizens taken abroad from another government setting up a puppet country (like Gitmo) ruled by fascist laws where anything goes. That's why the Geneva Rules were adopted....duh! For our protection! To make circumventing them illegally "legal" (by inaction) we are de facto placing our citizens in real, grave and exacerbated danger, also considering the fallout from the illegal occupation and war in the first place.

The only thing up for argument at this point is whether or not Bushco can slip off the hook on Ex Post Facto. But as in article 1 of this statute, "innocence" must be the qualifier. And Bushco fails that litmus test by the kangaroo intelligence group they cherry-picked to circumvent real intelligence that didn't give them what they wanted: the BigOil "OK" from Congress to perform a hostile corporate takeover of Iraq's oil on the Public's tab.

If Congress determines wilfull misrepresentation, conspiracy or other crimes that led to their deciding to declare war on false premises, Bushco's lawyers have their work cut out for them. And the only way to find that out is to TRY THE CASE. We must endeavor to err on the side of caution where the rules of the Geneva Convention may some day need to apply to our uniformed personelle or citizens captured.

It is Congress's right to have a tribunal(s) over the matter. Do you deny that? Good. And if those tribunals find foul play, and laws of Nations have been harmed by that foul play, then Congress also has a right to punish those actions. And in this case they not only have a right, but a public duty to do so to protect US military personelle and US citizens abroad. Certainly Bushco doesn't have a problem with any action that protects military personelle and civilians? Good.

So let the case be tried for the sake of the Citizens of the United States. If they're not guilty they should welcome the case...

 

[Sihouette]

If they're not guilty they should welcome the case...

That needed saying twice I think.

 

[Sihouette]

“The Bush Administration’s approach to power is, at its core, little more than a restatement of Mr. Nixon’s famous rationalization of presidential misdeeds: ‘When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,’” Conyers said in a foreword to a 487-page report entitled "Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush."

“Under this view, laws that forbid torturing or degrading prisoners cannot constrain the President because, if the President ordered such acts as Commander in Chief, ‘that means it’s not illegal.’” Conyers continued. “Under this view, it is not the courts that decide the reach of the law – it is the President – and neither the Judiciary nor Congress can constrain him.”...

...The 487-page report, released Tuesday, documents what Conyers called Bush’s excessive claims of executive power and illegal acts. It is the clearest sign yet that the 111th Congress plans to probe the depths of the Bush administration’s most controversial policies.

The report contains 47 separate recommendations, including calls for a blue-ribbon commission and independent criminal probes. Conyers said the recommendations are not intended as political “payback or revenge,” rather the goal is to “restore the traditional checks and balances of our constitutional system … and to set an appropriate baseline of conduct for future administrations.”

Conyers noted that earlier investigations failed to get to the bottom of many “questions left in the wake of Bush’s Imperial Presidency,” including allegations of torture, “extraordinary rendition” (shipping prisoners to countries known to torture), warrantless domestic surveillance, leaking the CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, and the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys.

Last week, Conyers proposed legislation to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration “under claims of unreviewable war powers,” including torture and warrantless wiretaps...

..“Given that so many significant questions remain unanswered relating to these core constitutional and legal matters, many of which implicate basic premises of our national honor, it seems clear that our country cannot simply move on,” Conyers said.

“As easy or convenient as it would be to turn the page, our Nation’s respect for the rule of law and its role as a moral leader in the world demand that we finally and without obstruction conduct and complete these inquiries. This can and should be done without rancor or partisanship.”~
Source: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/011409b.html

It seems I'm not the only one who is looking beyond anger and thinking about priciples when it comes to this question of prosecution. If we turn our back on the crimes the Bush administration committed, we set a precident for future administrations...including the present one. Should we give Obama the same unlimited power? After all, we are still in a war that started illegally. Should we let Obama sieze the reins and do as he pleases under the broad and sweeping clause of "except in time of war"?

The world is watching and waiting to see if we can bring our own house to order. If we cannot, we will look even weaker than we do already. Looking weak with a weak economy means maybe we should brush up on our chinese or russian soon...

Our solidiers and citizens may now, thanks to the Bushco precident of Gitmo, be taken and tortured if another government uses the same precident excuse of "necessary to forward their agenda". And that is a broad and sweeping precident friends...

Prosecuting is not only called for, it is necessary to preserve our integrity as a nation. If terrorists can infiltrate our highest offices without fear of apprehension, then sky's the limit..

 

[Mr. Shaman]

It seems I'm not the only one who is looking beyond anger and thinking about priciples when it comes to this question of prosecution.

'Tis TRUE!!!!!!!!!!!​

"Mr. President-Elect, you are entirely correct. As you say, "what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

And that means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush Administration's torture of prisoners -- and starting at the top.

Because, Mr. President-Elect, some day there will be another Republican president -- or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force -- and he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush -- or what you did not do -- and he will see precedent."​

 

[Dawkinsrocks]

Bush and Blair should be tried by the UN for war crimes.

The war was illegal, there was no condition in the UN charter stating that war was an appropriate response even if Iraq did have WMD and without them it is clear that they broke international law.

To steal oil at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

The dossier they used to suggest there were WMD had 8,000 pages removed because they bore the names of all the US companies that had supplied materials to Iraq that were being falsely claimed as the ingredients of WMD.

The case is open and shut.

 

[Ejgertz]

Prosecute Bush? What an absolute waste of time and money that would be with everything else that needs to be fixed today. The only reason they would prosecute Bush would be if Obama wasn't getting the job done and they needed to divert attention somewhere else.