Published on BuzzFlash.org (http://buzzflash.com/articles)
The Legal Case Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Et Al., Is Murder One, Not Just
War Crimes
By mark karlin
Created 04/22/2009 - 9:42am
THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
by Mark Karlin
BuzzFlash fully supports trying Bush, Cheney, and their band of fellow sadists
for war crimes, but while they are in the courtroom, let's not forget Murder
One. Apparently, many in the mainstream press and blogosphere already have.
The focus right now is on legal memos justifying the horrifying and numbing
repetition of torture against "high profile" targets. We have a short memory
in America -- and most of what was in these memos -- except for the diabolical
excess of the waterboarding and the medieval torture by insects -- was, as
President Obama has said, pretty much already known.
Also known, but not discussed at this time, is that less upper echelon Al-Qaeda
figures were murdered as a result of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture jihad
(euphemestically called in the mainstream corporate press "harsh" or "enhanced
interrogation").
Uh, remember those photos of bludgeoned prisoners in body bags that came out of
Abu Ghraib? (And we still have only seen a small portion of the visual
evidence.) Those people were murdered as a result of the green light on
torture. Even the Pentagon has declared some of the Guantanamo dead were
victims of homicide. Then there are many "renditioned" individuals who
disappeared into torture prisons around the world and have never reappeared.
In 2008, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a man
who came over from the dark side to tell the truth, testified before Congress
that a minimum of 25 people died in U.S. detention as a result of homicides --
and that the figure was probably higher.
Indeed, other estimates put the figure much, much higher -- and that doesn't
include the prisoners who were sent to "black holes" and never reappeared. It
doesn't include the hundreds of Taliban prisoners who were transported to a
remote spot in Afghanistan (shortly after the U.S. invasion) and machine gunned
to death in container tracks by Afghan soldiers with a green light from
Rumsfeld.
The number of people murdered during torture ("harsh interrogation") will
likely never be known, but as a governor in Texas, George W. Bush executed the
highest number of people for far fewer murders each. Some of them just killed
one person, unlike Bush, Cheney and their crew of arm chair executioners.
If there is an Anne Frank who symbolizes the horrific death that befell those
who fell into the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture machine, it is the innocent
Afghan whose story of being murdered while mistakenly incarcerated and tortured
was compellingly detailed in the 2008 Academy Award winning Alex Gibney
documentary " [0]Taxi To the Dark Side." [0]
Some background on "Taxi to the Dark Side" [0] reveals, once again, that we
should be concentrating both on War Crimes and Murder One when it comes to
pursuing charges against Bush Administration officials:
In December 2002, Dilawar, a young rural Afghan cabdriver, was accused of
helping to plan a rocket attack on a U.S. base, clamped into prison at Bagram,
and subjected to physical torture so relentless that he died after two days of
it. But Dilawar was innocent--and he'd been denounced by the real culprit, who
thereby took the heat off himself and won points with U.S. forces by giving
them "a bad guy." Dilawar was the first fatal victim of Vice President Dick
Cheney's devotion to "working the dark side"--torturing, humiliating, and
otherwise abusing prisoners in the "Global War on Terror." His story, developed
in horrific detail with testimony from the soldiers who tortured him, and also
from two New York Times investigative reporters, becomes a prism for slanting
light onto the "dark side" policy and the mindset behind it. The program at
Bagram was deemed such a success that it served as the model for Abu Ghraib the
following year in Iraq, and both prisons became pipelines to the detainee
facility at Guantánamo, Cuba.
And Vincent Bugliosi, the author of a book [0] on how the Supreme Court stole
the 2000 election for Bush, penned a "J'Accuse" whose title makes the case that
we are asserting on BuzzFlash: "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
[0]."
Even for progessives, the news cycle has been shortened to a nano-second; and
right now the focus is on the legalese used in the just-released memos to
justify torture. And the Bush defenders are countering with an allegation that
the torture of two or three suspects produced important information (which thus
far has not been proven by any facts).
But in some ways, the focus on two or three Al Qaeda leaders has taken
attention away from an organized system of torture that resulted in untold
deaths, also known as murder.
For these murders, George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- who have always had a
mean streak of sadism running through their blood, as they micro-managed
torture and personally reviewed torture tapes -- should be charged and tried
for War Crimes -- and Murder One.
Out of such trials, perhaps the truth will be revealed about the number of
detainees who died under "harsh interrogation," as did the innocent taxi driver
[0] from rural Afghanistan who was pulverized to death in a matter of just two
days at Bagram.
If we do not bring justice to their deaths, who will?
THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
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