Propelling prisoners' heads into concrete walls by means of towels wrapped around their necks, savage beatings with fists and rifles that left prisoners crippled, hanging prisoners by the arms with their arms strung up behind them, depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, which has been thought the worst torture possible for 500 years, causing prisoners to freeze -- sometimes to death, and waterboarding are but a partial list of the torture methods ordered by America's highest officials. In the "Preliminary Memorandum of the Justice Robert H. Jackson Conference on Federal Prosecutions of War Criminals," law school Dean Lawrence Velvel, the founder of the Jackson Conference, details the full spectrum of tortures performed in wholesale combinations -- not one torture by itself -- on detainees around the world. His Preliminary Memorandum is a precursor to a formal legal complaint to be filed with the Justice Department this spring.
The Preliminary
Memorandum identifies 31 culprits and details the war crimes they
committed, the laws they broke, and the many fulsome warnings they received
regarding their actions from numerous governmental lawyers and officials high
and low, including the Judge Advocate Generals of all the armed services. The
culprits who should be prosecuted include Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Addington,
Tenet, Bybee, Yoo, Haynes, Chertoff and others. Furthermore, the Preliminary Memorandum calls the Bush administration's illegal acts "an attempted
constitutional revolution that succeeded for years." It began six days
after 9/11, when Bush secretly gave the CIA permission to "murder . . .
people all over the world." It continued in a series of secret, wholly
specious legal memos authorizing torture, electronic eavesdropping, wholesale
violations of law, and Presidential usurpation of the role of Congress.
Public pressure eventually forced the administration to declassify a few of the
memos. These purported to authorize war crimes outlawed by the Geneva
Conventions and
