High Crimes and Prosecutions
The announcement that a Special Prosecutor has been appointed to investigate Bush-era crimes was the direct result of the massive, grassroots movement from below. It was the action taken by you and people all around the country that made this possible.
The investigation must and will lead back to the high officials who ordered their subordinates to carry out the most heinous crimes. Now we must keep up the pressure.
As it was stated by the Washington Post lead editorial on Tuesday, August 25:
“The real culprits in this sordid story are those higher-ups, starting with former president George W. Bush and former vice president Richard B. Cheney, who led America down the degrading path of state-sanctioned torture and left the next administration to cope with the fallout.”
What does the report that Attorney General Eric Holder released on Monday, August 24 reveal? That Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld’s torture tactics included:
• Mock executions
• Repeatedly choking detainees carotid artery until unconsciousness
• Threatening sexual attacks against the children and parents of detainees
• Detaining the children of detainees and threatening to kill the children
• “Hard takedowns” meaning repeatedly smashing prisoners into the floor
• Head smashing inmates into walls
• Water dousing, pouring freezing water on naked inmates strapped to plastic sheets followed by holding the still naked inmates in bitterly cold cells for days
• Sleep deprivation lasting for 11 days
• Violent shaking of prisoners
• Waterboarding (mock drowning) 183 times in the case of one detainee
• Hanging prisoners form their wrists for up to three days
• “Scrubbing” the bodies of detainees with metal brushes
More than one hundred prisoners may have died in these torture centers according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson who served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff during the Bush Administration.
The movement is now in high gear for the next phase of this critical struggle to save the Constitution. Every elected official and the mass media must know that the people will not accept finding a few low-level scapegoats to punish.
Members of Congress are echoing this call and we can create an avalanche of public support for the indictment of Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld.
Jerome Nadler, the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee Chairman said yesterday: “The gruesome acts described in today’s report did not happen in a vacuum … it is vital that this special counsel be given a broad mandate to investigate these abuses, to follow the evidence where it leads, and to prosecute where warranted.”
Now that the investigation has begun all efforts to limit it will fail. Each step of the investigation will inevitably point to those who gave the orders in the chain of command. It is Bush and Cheney who gave the orders and it is they who must be held responsible.-Leoncio Martins, Santa Barbara
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Not Enough Waterboarding
So the terrorist who master-minded the destruction of the twin towers was water boarded 183 times! That’s not even once for every person he murdered, and this dysfunctional administration is going after the CIA for THAT?-Arthur Hansl, Santa Barbara
