Criminal Prosecution and Accountability

From Veterans for Peace

Oct 04, 2011 - Iraqi law should not govern a lawsuit brought by the mother of a Pittsburgh-area soldier electrocuted in a barracks shower at an Army base in Iraq, a federal judge has ruled.

Lawyers for Houston-based military contractor KBR Inc. had asked U.S. District Judge Nora Barry Fischer to apply Iraqi law to the ongoing lawsuit in the January 2008 death of Pittsburgh-area Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth. But Fischer agreed with lawyers for the soldier's parents who argued that United States law should hold sway because the base was under American control - and could provide for punitive damages and other advantages to the plaintiffs not recognized by Iraqi law.

By Dave Lindorff

Probably the biggest accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street movement to date has not been the light these courageous and indomitable young activists have shined on the gangsters of Wall Street, as important as that has been. Rather it has been how they have exposed the police of the nation’s financial capital as the centurions of the ruling class, and not the gauzy “people’s heroes” that they have been posing as since some of their number, along with many more firefighters, nobly gave their lives trying to rescue people in the World Trade Center towers on 9-11.

By John Grant

In 1963 author, philosopher and professor Hannah Arendt published her famous book  "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  The book was Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat and war criminal largely responsible for implementing Hitler’s “final solution” that resulted in the systematic murder of millions of Jews. 

In pointing out that the remarkable thing about Eichmann was that he was completely unremarkable, she drove home the point that the Nazi crimes were not committed by fanatics or sociopaths but by “ordinary people who accepted the premisies of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal”. Eichmann was a mild mannered civil servant with a wife and kids who epitomized the virtues of the German middle class.  It was in his dispassionate face at trial that Arendt saw “the banality of evil”.  

Video here.

By: The Canadian Press

Date: Tuesday Sep. 27, 2011 8:45 AM PT

Protesters waved placards, chanted slogans, banged drums and blew whistles outside one of Vancouver's most exclusive clubs where former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney was promoting his new memoir Monday evening.

Peace activists blocked the front and back entrances to the Vancouver Club, calling for Cheney's arrest for war crimes and booing guests as they arrived at the $500-a-ticket dinner.

Cheney is in town to promote his new book "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir."

At one point, protesters got into a brief scuffle with police when nearly 20 people sat down on a sidewalk, blocking the rear driveway leading into the Vancouver Club.

From Alternet:

The crackdown on the Wall Street protesters this weekend seems to have backfired. The campsite-cum-experiment in radical democracy is still there, holding general assemblies just shouting distance from Goldman Sachs and the Wall Street bull. It even appears to be growing.

From the New York Times:

Last week, a girl in the Bronx pulled out a can of pepper spray and used it in a fight with two other girls in her high school, an event that resulted in her arrest, her mother’s arrest and a report on WNBC.

The mother got locked up because she bought the stuff and gave it to her daughter, and the law in New York is strict about who can carry it — no teenagers, no felons — and how it is used. There was a long legislative fight over whether people should be allowed to carry it, and in 1996, New York became the last state to make it legal, over the objections of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who felt the rules were lax.

The law requires the following label to appear on the cans:

“The use of this substance or device for any purpose other than self-defense is a criminal offense under the law.”

Pepper spray is regulated with other dangerous weapons. For anyone interested in the effect it has on people hit with it, there are plenty of videos available online. You can hear agonizing screams, especially when it hits the mucous membranes and soft tissue like the eyes.

By LA Times

Another member of the Army "kill team" accused of killing unarmed Afghan civilians for sport pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday for the murder of a 15-year-old villager in southern Afghanistan.

"You aimed a fully loaded squad automatic weapon at a child that stood 15 feet away," Lt. Col. Kwasi Hawks, who presided over the case at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, said at the conclusion of Pfc. Andrew Holmes' tearful courtroom confession.

"The remorse and regret I feel is the most overwhelming emotion that I have ever endured," Holmes, 21, said of the 2010 incident, according to the Seattle Times.

Five members of the former 5th Stryker Brigade have faced murder charges in connection with what military prosecutors say were staged attacks on Afghan villagers. In the attacks, prosecutors say, U.S. soldiers fired volleys of guns and grenades at innocent people and then planted weapons to make it look as though the victims had shot first.

September 16, 2011 - The 9/11 industry harvested its biggest riches on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the yet-to-be fully documented coordinated attacks on the United States of America which produced the era of awe and shock, bull-dozed all international norms, and initiated two great wars of the twenty-first century.

 

 
To buy, email.

President-Elect Obama’s advisers feared in 2008 that authorities would “revolt” and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama’s top transition advisers.

Alberto Gonzalez spoke at the Auraria Campus yesterday and was met with serious protest. As Attorney General, Gonzalez signed off on torture and murder, in violation of U.S. and international law. Some 100 people were victims of homicide, according to the Pentagon on their death certificates, in secret American custody (murdered while tortured). Gonzalez is the outlaw “Attorney General” of an outlaw regime. Many of the political scientists at the University of Colorado at Denver wrote an open letter, circulated as a leaflet at the door of the event, which commendably names the legal and moral issues involved (see below). Some 200 people showed up; 5 stood up in black hoods, emulating the prisoners at Abu Ghraib (one of Gonzalez’s “achievements as a public servant”) and were eventually escorted out by the campus police. It is good to see that the campus police and administrators take serious crimes seriously…

We are given figures in the multi multi billions spent on the wars of choice and the so called 'homeland security', but there are huge amounts, in the multi billions, not known or labeled top secret and blacked out in government reports on the rapid growth of intelligence within government and the added private contractors and the costs of that growth. As pointed out in the 'PBS Frontline' report, below, what has it accomplish over all these years, especially as to the main mission after 9/11 and finally getting bin Laden, found through intelligence of a small group and carried out by a small group of 'special forces'.

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Posted By Matt Misterek on The News Tribune

Reason they were talking Saddam, before and Condi on the day of 9/11, in the weeks directly after and reason we left the mission in Afghanistan high and dry to fester and grow with recruitment from the devastation in Iraq an innocent country!!!

BY NAT HENTOFF | 

By executive order on Aug. 4, President Barack Obama refused entry to the United States of war criminals and human-rights violators (jurist.org, Aug. 4). He ignored, as he often does, the deeply documented factual evidence of war crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney administration along with grim proof that the Obama administration also violates our anti-torture laws and the U.N. Convention Against Torture we signed. Take, for example, right now under Obama, "The CIA Secret Sites in Somalia" (the nation.com, July 12).

In what will be an historic 108-page report, "Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees," Human Rights Watch is further accelerating the rising insistence here on accountability from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet for having not only authorized these war crimes, but also failing "to act to stop mistreatment, or punish those responsible after they became aware of serious abuses" (www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0711webwcover.pdf).

Not only has President Obama rejected an independent criminal investigation of these highest-profile officials, but also, adds Human Rights Watch, of Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, David Addington (counsel to Cheney) and, among others, John Yoo, author of the unsparingly cruel, aptly dubbed "torture memos" from the Ashcroft Justice Department that gave "legal cover" to allow torture.

Moreover, as Stephen Rohde, constitutional lawyer and chairman of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, discloses (truthout.org.getting-getting-away-with-torture, July 28), Freedom of Information lawsuits filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have yielded more than 100,000 pages of documents detailing these war crimes.

READ THE REST AT STARDEM.com

By Dave Lindorff

There is a basic concept when it comes to justice that the punishment should fit the crime. It’s a concept that in Law-and-Order America has long vanished. Some states, like California, have done this with brutish “Three-Strikes-You’re-Out” policies that have ended up sentencing young men to life in prison for something like stealing a video, because it was the perpetrator’s third crime. Others, like Florida, have done it by sentencing a pre-teen kid to life in prison for a killing because he was tried as an adult.

Did Tenet Hide Key Info on 9/11?

By Ray McGovern

(Note: some of this commentary was included in David Swanson's blog earlier today)

With few exceptions, like some salacious rumor about the Kennedy family, the mainstream U.S. news media has shown little interest in stories that throw light on history — even recent, very relevant history. So it comes as no surprise that, when a former White House counter-terrorism czar accuses an ex-CIA director of sitting on information that could have prevented a 9/11 attack, the story gets neither ink nor air.