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Bush officials' 'exposed flanks' fair game for war crimes wolves
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"There is a substantial likelihood we're going to get one or more DAs courageous enough to take on George W. Bush."
- Former L.A. prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi, in a September, 2008 interview with the Huffington Post.
With this week's release of some of the Bush Justice Department memos on torture, the question about whether or not to prosecute officials of that administration has once again come to the fore.
President Obama said Thursday, April 16, 2009,
that CIA officials who used harsh interrogation tactics
during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted.
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Back in August, 2008, Andrew Sullivan, from The Atlantic, told NBC's Chris Matthews that disclosure of the facts surrounding prisoner interrogation "means that Don Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be, at some point, indicted for war crimes."
Spain's attorney general, although discussing the possibility of indicting the "Bush Six" (Alberto Gonzales, Doug Feith, Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington, Justice's John Yoo and Jay Bybee, and Bill Haynes, a lawyer for the Pentagon), decided Friday he would probably not proceed with the cases.
"If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war," Candido Conde-Pumpido, Spain's leading justice official, told reporters in Madrid, "the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out."
Conde-Pumpido said that there is no case, since none of the six men mentioned in the case were ever present during the alleged prisoner abuses.
But former Bush official, Major General Antonio Taguba, speaking at Harvard Law School on Thursday, said that it is a matter of accountability. "Government leaders who chose to accept high level positions of influence ought to hold firm and be accountable," he said.
"Abu Ghraib emerged from a structure developed by senior officials in the Bush White House. It was a morbid consequence of a policy that emanated from the Office of Legal Counsel and the Justice Department."
Some members of Congress, like Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers (D-MI), agree. "Critical questions still remain, including the role and legal culpability of high-ranking officials in the former administration in directing and approving the use of these troubling techniques," Conyers said Thursday in a written statement.
But President Obama had to make promises to the CIA that agency officials would not be held responsible for actions officers took while conducting "harsh interrogation techniques" of prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other secret CIA prisons (which have since been closed).
According to the New York Times, CIA Director Leon Panetta warned agency employees in a letter Thursday that the revelations, instigated by a request from the ACLU, are only the start of the exposure the CIA may face in coming months. "More requests will come," his statement said, "from the public, from Congress, and the Courts — and more information is sure to be released.”
That prospect had one unnamed former Bush official admitting to the NY Times, "The ones most involved in counterterrorism feel that they have very exposed flanks in terms of both their personal and professional futures.”
Forget Spain. Some Bush officials, including the former president and Vice President Cheney, cannot go to two Vermont towns who voted last year to issue indictments calling for their arrests.
Other Examiners have also explored the torture memo story.
Special Report: Obama's First 100 DaysExclusive examiner.com coverage of the Obama administration's promise to bring about change.
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