Treaties Covering Prisoners of War
The Bush administration laid out its legal reasoning for denying terror war suspects the protections of international humanitarian law but immediately repudiated a key memo arguing that torture might be justified in the fight against al-Qaida.
The release Tuesday of hundreds of pages of internal memos by the White House was meant to blunt criticism that President Bush had laid the groundwork for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by condoning torture. The president insisted Tuesday: "I have never ordered torture."

George Bush's war imperils a cherished political tradition
There is a growing sense that Americans have become victims of September 11 in a way that has blinkered their democratic instincts.
So now the hard questions are being put in a pre-September 11 context. Would Americans ordinarily tolerate a president who lies and exaggerates? A leader who uses fear to manipulate his people to his own ends? A president whose staff blow the deep cover of a CIA agent as political payback? A president whose Administration channels billions of dollars to crony corporations on false pretexts? A president who deems torture acceptable?
Would they accept a president who seems to agree with his advisers that he is above the law?

George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard for War Crimes against humanity and the planet.
The indictment is to be held in Christchurch Cathedral Square on AUGUST 7, 2004 and around the world

Harvard Law Professors Urge Congress to Review Interrogation Policy and Hold Executive Branch Accountable
A group of more than 450 professors of law, international relations, and public policy - led by Harvard Law School faculty members - today sent a letter calling on Congress to hold accountable, through impeachment and removal if appropriate, civilian officials from the top of the Executive Branch on down for policies developed at high levels that have facilitated the recent abuses at Abu Ghraib. The letter also calls on Congress to take primary responsibility for any policy on coercive interrogation employed by the United States.

There's nothing cheap in Fahrenheit 9/11. This film goes for the jugular.
See also Comment on Fahrenheit 9/11 Review

America than if Saddam had stayed in power'  
"Your government failed you," Mr Clarke told the hearing, turning to the relatives of those who died and who had come to Washington to hear his testimony. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter, because we failed."

"We just felt things were so serious, that America's leadership role in the world has been attenuated to such a terrible degree
by both the style and the substance of the administration's approach" William C Harrop, former US ambassador to Israel
WANTED FOR WAR CRIMES POSTER  Then click on the bottom right corner of picture to print your own large poster

"The Super-Watergate noose is tightening around the neck of the Cheney-Bush Administration, showing that Cheney & Co. are
guilty of crimes far worse than Richard Nixon ever dreamed of."
Look at some of the developments of the past 48 hours:

"Torture is only the tip of the iceberg," said Roger Normand, an international lawyer who directs the Center. "From unlawful killings, mass arrests, and collective punishment to outright theft and pillage, the U.S. is violating almost every law intended to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation."

....We are not talking the partisan frame-up of the Clinton impeachment era. We are talking about serious crimes and possible violations of the US Constitution that threaten the way the administration conducts our national business. These writers have been hearing behind the scenes rumbling about ticking time bombs that could bring down Bush before or (like Nixon) just after the presidential elections.

"This manipulation may serve the Administration's political interests," Waxman wrote in his May 17 letter to Powell, "but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report."

Topic: Commander-In-Thief Bush Must Step Down
George W. Bush told us that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together. They weren't. He repeatedly implied that Iraq had had something to do with 9/11. It hadn't. He claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons of mass destruction. He didn't. As our allies watched in horror and disgust, Bush conned us into a one-sided war of aggression that killed and maimed thousands of innocent people, destroyed billions of dollars in Iraqi infrastructure, cost tens of billions of dollars, cost the lives of American soldiers, and transformed our international image as the world's shining beacon of freedom into that of a marauding police state. Presidents Nixon and Clinton rightly faced impeachment for comparatively trivial offenses; if we hope to restore our nation's honor, George W. Bush too must face a president's gravest political sanction.

Everyone likes to say, "Hitler did this," and "Hitler did that." But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the death camps to WWII, was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who, because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.

President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."

We have paid a heavy price for the Bush Administration's unnecessary and illegal invasion of Iraq: more than 800 American soldiers dead; more than 4,500 wounded or maimed; and $120 billion wasted on a war and occupation that has sullied our country's image in the world, undercut our moral authority and poisoned Arab and Muslim minds against us for decades to come. We will pay an even heavier price if we "stay the course," as the Administration and many Democrats urge. If, as war supporters claim, our goals in Iraq (now that we've lost the rationale of hunting down weapons of mass destruction) are stability and democracy, we are proceeding in exactly the wrong way. In the eyes of most Iraqis, American forces have long since ceased to be nation-builders and instead are occupying forces that knock down their homes, bomb their mosques and abuse and humiliate their fellow citizens. The occupation, like other occupations throughout history, has generated a growing popular resistance that cannot be defeated militarily. It is time to change course.

Blair must answer fully to all the evidence of abuse by British troops

John Howard's Melbourne speech (May 26) ommitted key facts in order to justify Australia's continued participation in one of history's most fraudulent wars.

On May 20, the Israeli Defense Forces brutally killed a number of Palestinian school children and wounded dozens of others peacefully demonstrating at the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The United Nations Security Council quickly passed a resolution condemning the action, urging Israel to stop demolishing Palestinian homes, and calling for an end to violence. While not vetoing the resolution, as it has done on past occasions, the U.S. abstained from the vote.

What is it going to take to get the people to rise up and demand Congress remove George W. Bush and his whole administration from power on charges of and conviction for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors?

The problem is that labeling and demonizing a people as evil is easy.
However, eliminating them after malicious classification is impossible.

The father of orphans and the defender of widows
is God in his holy dwelling.
God gives a home to the forsaken;
he leads forth prisoners to prosperity.
Psalm 67: 6-7
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/052404.htm    Contrast this verse with the actions of Bush and Sharon.

Thousands at the White House will say: "Bush and Rumsfeld - Guilty of War Crimes"
"I plan to be in Washington DC on June 5 at the peace rally. We will be marching from Bush's White House to Rumsfeld's house and I am hoping that everyone who cares about peace in this country will join us."
- Michael Berg

President George Bush's bid to stop international action to combat global warming faces failure this weekend, as he is left more isolated than ever before both at home and abroad.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin - who will effectively decide whether the Kyoto Protocol stands or falls - announced on Friday that his country would "rapidly move towards ratification" in the wake of a complex deal with the European Union.

The diplomat who quit over Nixon's invasion of Cambodia asks Americans on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the "worst regime by far in the history of the republic."       . . . . .
Dear Trustees:
I am respectfully addressing you by your proper if little-used title. The women and men of our diplomatic corps and intelligence community are genuine trustees. With intellect and sensibility, character and courage, you represent America to the world. Equally important, you show the world to America. You hold in trust our role and reputation among nations, and ultimately our fate. Yours is the gravest, noblest responsibility. Never has the conscience you personify been more important.

The Bush Administration has not made it easy on its supporters. David Brooks now admits that he was gripped with a "childish fantasy" about Iraq. Tucker Carlson is "ashamed" and "enraged" at himself. Tom Friedman, admitting to being "a little slow," is finally off the reservation. Die-hard Republican publicist William Kristol admits of Bush, "He did drive us into a ditch." The neocon fantasist and sometime Republican speechwriter Mark Helprin complains on the Wall Street Journal editorial page--the movement's Pravda--of "the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership."        This site is a must see

This is the New York newspaper Village Voice's review of Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" shown at the Cannes film festival. The film is an effective opposition to Bush's Iraq war and chronicles his endless lies to justify endless wars to achieve the new US empire. NZ's national party is enthusiastic for NZ to do our ANZUS duty, and play a small role in helping our "ally" build this empire.

It's time to stop beating around this Bush and start beating up on him -- but good. There is no set of humanitarian or democratic principles by which this administration would not have been removed in any sane society. The last election was questionable at best, and his reckless, dangerous and criminal actions in the ensuing years have shown the whole world he is unfit to govern. The only democratic remedy, impeachment, was set aside early and forcibly by an opposition still afraid of its own shadow. It did make some sense, early on, to argue that, since the Greasy Oil Plutocrats (GOP) controlled both houses, it was a waste of time and energy.

On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move.
It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level"—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

Bush and Blair will share in the historic guilt, Israel will bear for the crimes of Sharon, writes Haim Bresheeth*
Like a ventriloquist dummy speaking the words of its master, we heard the world's most powerful man reciting a script written in Jerusalem by one responsible for bathing the Middle East in blood for decades. This most bizarre spectacle -- Bush unable to answer a simple question, repeating key phrases like a broken automaton -- was then followed by the even more bizarre suggestion by Blair that this was not a departure from what was policy in Washington and London for decades.

A 'jury of conscience' declared Sunday after scores of witnesses testified before a 'World Tribunal on Iraq' that "the U.S. government is guilty of committing a war of aggression against Iraq." It also held the United States guilty of committing war crimes.

>>> The text below comes from MSNBC's posting here. The Memory Hole has made a FOIA request for this report. For some of the photos that triggered this investigation, see "Photos of Iraqis Being Abused by US Personnel."

The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. "Someone wounded," the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: "Hit him, hit the truck and him." As the helicopter's gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

...The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" that were inflicted on detainees.

Is the Commander In Chief capable of the Job or does he just not give a damm.
If he is such a great leader, how do the troups dare to act in this way.
How could he not know. He is Bush, he has access to all information.
He should not be in power, running the biggest bullying army in the world.

The official word from the Bush administration is that the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is not “systematic,” according to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This type of torture of indigenous and Third World people, however, is well-documented as a pattern and practice of the U.S. military and the CIA.

The Army has conducted more than 20 criminal investigations into misconduct by U.S. captors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
.......To date, the most severe penalties in any of the cases were less-than-honorable discharges for five Army soldiers, military officials said. No one has been sentenced to prison, they said.                           New York Times

COMMENT FROM SISTER LAETITIA BORDES: "I'm filled with sadness. I'm filled with fear. I fear for the people of Iraq, because I feel that John Negroponte certainly is not concerned about the democracy of Iraq. I think that John Negroponte is concerned about his reputation. He is an expert in counter insurgency tactics. We see that in his background. And John Negroponte will stop at nothing. At nothing."

To commit a crime against peace, one must engage in “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war.” Bush is guilty on all these counts. The most damning evidence coming not from the liberal left, but in a series of well-documented books providing revelations by people in his own administration or party. Now, with Woodward’s work, the President is condemned with his own words.

Once there was a time when American conservatives defended their country from government. No more. Today conservatives defend Bush’s warmongering neo-Jacobin government at all costs.

At least 600 Iraqis have died so far, mostly women and children. Ambulances are being shot up, people are being told to flee the city and then stopped in the desert without food or water. These heinous crimes are being committed by the American military, no doubt following orders from Rumsfeld and Bush.

Despite the growing number of reports that depict the fighting as a spontaneous and indigenous revolt against the U.S.-led occupation, the influential neo-cons are calling on Bush to warn Tehran to cease its alleged backing for al-Sadr and other Shia militias or face retaliation, ranging from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to covert action designed to overthrow the government.

Theologian Charges White House - Complicity in 9/11 Attack
There’s nothing the least bit wild-eyed or hysterical about David Ray Griffin. In person, he’s disarmingly calm, and speaks in the unflappably precise and deliberate style of a lifelong academic. Which is exactly what Griffin is. A respected philosopher of religion at the Claremont School of Theology since the 1970s and longtime Santa Barbara resident, Griffin is now raising questions that even President Bush’s harshest critics are afraid to think, let alone ask aloud.
In his latest book, The New Pearl Harbor — released just two weeks ago — Griffin all but accuses the Bush administration of taking a dive on September 11 and giving Al Qaeda terrorists an unobstructed shot at the World Trade Center. According to Griffin, a case can be made that the Bush administration arranged the attack, or allowed it to happen. He is aware that he may be dismissed as a conspiracy nut, but given the “transcendent importance” of the issue, Griffin is willing to assume that risk and has taken to repeating Michael Moore’s line on the subject: “Personally, I’m not into conspiracy theories except those that are true.” I met with Griffin over coffee to discuss his book and the September 11 investigation. The following is an edited account of their conversation.

“After the Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death.”

A year ago, the United States went to war in Iraq because President George W. Bush and his administration convinced Congress and the country that Saddam Hussein was an urgent threat that required immediate military action.
The nation has paid a high price for that decision ever since.

IAmerica under George W. Bush has become a rogue nation, an outlaw that shreds treaties and invades other countries on false pretexts, with no provocation. We refuse to come under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, lest we be judged by the same standard that applies to every other nation. We continue to consume far more than our share of the planet's dwindlng resources, and add far more than our share to the planet's carbon dioxide load, which is heating things up at a rapid rate.

Information Clearing House

LONDON - A strong case arguing the illegality of the invasion of Iraq will be handed soon to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
The report prepared by eight leading international lawyers and professors of law drawn from four countries makes a strong case against the illegality of the way British and U.S. troops fought the war.     Inter Press Service