For 16 years or more, establishment centrists have been complicit in a historically reckless trend. Come 2017, it may place Donald Trump at a big table, much like the one on The Apprentice, where he'll decide not which B-list celebrity to fire, but which humans to kill,
May 2016 Archives
CIA destruction of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture fails to erase the history of, or culpability for the horrors practiced at Guantanamo. No one will be able to put that particular genie back in the bottle. U.S. and international law provide no statute of limitations on the prosecution of war crimes.
Congress
Can't
Make a War Crime Moral. "The Hague and Geneva Conventions and other international treaties to which the United States is a party ban the crimes that are always part of any war," posted David Swanson at Global Research, including "War Crime #55 -- Torture." (David will be presenting the second edition of his book, War Is a Lie, at multiple engagements in the Bay Area towards the end of this month.) Torture apologist Senator Richard Burr was not alone in trying to keep the Senate torture report from the public, notes Chip Gibbons of BORDC/DDF:
"The Obama Administration and the CIA have both argued in response to the ACLU's lawsuit that the report is a Congressional record, not a federal record subject to FOIA. The Department of Justice has even asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to refrain from commenting on whether they considered the torture report a federal record due to the ACLU's ongoing lawsuit. This is significant, because NARA has the responsibility to preserve the torture report if it is a federal record. NARA also has the authority to determine whether a record is a federal record or not and other agencies, such as the DOJ or CIA, must follow NARA's determination -- not the other way around."
ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi said in a statement that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling against release of the Report "has the disappointing result of keeping the full truth about the CIA torture program from the American public, and we're considering our options for appeal."
The federal court decision is disgraceful, but what we already know, "that captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and the report recorded cases of simulated drowning or 'waterboarding' and sexual abuse, including 'rectal feeding' or 'rectal hydration' without any documented medical need," is more than adequate to prosecute accomplices to the State Torture crimes carried out in our name.
Out of Excuses, President chuckles at criminal legacy of indefinite detention:
"..there's one area where Donald's experience could be invaluable and that is closing Guantanamo, because Trump knows a thing or two about running waterfront properties into the ground." -- Barack Obama, White House Correspondents' Dinner, April 30, 2016
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Events & Calendars
Important Reading
Physicians for Human RightsBroken Laws, Broken Lives
NLG White Paper
ON THE LAW OF TORTURE...
The President's Executioner
Detention and torture in Guantanamo
