New Quaker Notebook

Today the Bush Crimes Commission is making available in DVD format its May 3 panel discussion on "Speaking the Unspeakable: Is the Bush Regime Guilty of War Crimes?"¹ The panel for this two-hour discussion features: Brig Gen Janis Karpinski (ret), former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in charge of Abu Ghraib and 17 other prison facilities in Iraq; Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who was fired for exposing the US and British governments complicity in torture and illegal detention in the US backed government of Uzbekistan; Larry Everest, author of Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the US Global Agenda; and Daniel Ellsberg, author and former Defense Department official who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

You can purchase the DVD at the Bush Crimes Commission website or for $20 (price includes shipping) via www.nion.us/NSOC/sign.htm (or make your check payable to Not In Our Name and mail to Not In Our Name, 305 West Broadway #199, New York, NY 10013).

Also in the works is a DVD series detailing the testimony presented at the 5 days of hearings before the Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Regime.

J'acuse!

According to the TPMmuckraker yesterday, Rep John Conyers' update to the Democrats' December 2005 report, A Constitution in Crisis [PDF] is going to be released this week in a document running "several hundred pages long, with over a thousand footnotes." The new report alleges serious misconduct and pervasive illegal behavior by the Bush administration. In his executive summary of the report Conyers said today:

"The misconduct I have found is not only serious, but widespread. The laws implicated by the Administration's actions include federal laws against making false statements to Congress; federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; federal laws concerning retaliating against witnesses and other government employees; Executive Orders concerning leaking and other misuse of intelligence; federal regulations and ethical requirements governing conflicts of interest; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; communications privacy laws; the National Security Act; and the Fourth Amendment. All told, some 26 separate laws and regulations have been implicated by the actions of various individuals within the Bush Administration. Significantly, none of the misconduct I have identified has been independently reviewed by the Executive Branch, Congress, or the Courts."

By the time impeachment hearings ever get going, the laundry list of illegal activity by the Busheviks is going to be much longer, I think—if a War Crimes Tribunal doesn't get them first.¹

Look back

Detainee Abuse Charges Feared
Shield Sought From '96 War Crimes Act

An obscure law approved by a Republican-controlled Congress a decade ago has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes, and prosecuted at some point in US courts.

Senior officials have responded by drafting legislation that would grant US personnel involved in the terrorism fight new protections against prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996. That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if US-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.

In light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the international Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees in the terrorism fight, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has spoken privately with Republican lawmakers about the need for such "protections," according to someone who heard his remarks last week.

[ READ MORE » ]

Morality is not on our side

There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.

This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.

[ READ MORE » ]

Reading the Constitution in Crisis

Bush War Crimes Preliminaries

J'acuse!

Look back

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