Robert Redford And Ellen Barkin Join Doug Liman At Sundance Event Shining Spotlight On Bush Torture Record

Robert Redford And Ellen Barkin Join Doug Liman At Sundance Event Shining Spotlight On Bush Torture Record

Live Closing Day Performance Features Leading Writers, Actors And Former Interrogators

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

PARK CITY, UT – Robert Redford and Ellen Barkin today joined director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Fair Game) and an all-star cast at Sundance Film Festival to perform “Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the 'War on Terror.'" The event, presented by the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center and Sundance, featured readings of formerly secret government documents. The production was filmed for a documentary Liman is directing to raise awareness of the scope and human cost of the United States’ post-9/11 torture program.

Redford and Barkin joined actor America Ferrera; writers Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Esmeralda Santiago, George Saunders and Naomi Wolf; documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney; former interrogation insiders Jack Rice and Matthew Alexander; and other surprise guests to perform the readings. The texts are drawn largely from over 150,000 pages of formerly classified government documents obtained by the ACLU in a lawsuit that the New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure”; they include secret legal memos that sought to justify torture, e-mails written by FBI agents who witnessed torture at Guantánamo, interrogation logs, transcripts of military tribunal proceedings and moving statements and affidavits by U.S servicemen and women who objected to the abusive interrogations.

Read on...

What about Bradley Manning and Obama's torture record. Tom

Protest Bush on May 29, 2009

Come and get waterboarded at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre

Rally outside Bush speaking engagement. Friday May 29, 3 PM to 6 PM. Metro Toronto Convention Centre, 255 Front Street West, TO ONT.

Volunteers needed at Toronto Coalition to Stop the War.

Read on...

This will be an interesting protest on Friday. For the past months the Toronto Police have been demonstrating enormous good sense and restraint while policing the Tamil protests in Toronto. Crimbrary hopes they show the same restraint and good sense on Friday. Not one Tamil has been tasered in these past months. One hopes that not one anti-war, anti-war crime, protester gets tasered on Friday. And if one does what will that say about the Toronto police and their attitude towards legitimate anti-war protest? The website at the above link loads slowly. Tom

Bush Law Continued

By David Cole

March 18, 2009

By David Cole

This article appeared in the April 6, 2009 edition of The Nation.
March 18, 2009
Most of us have a favorite image from the inauguration of President Obama. Mine shows soldiers at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base replacing George W. Bush's picture with a portrait of the new president. A day later, Obama ordered that Guantánamo be closed within a year, signaling that his administration would take a stance on terrorism very different from his predecessor's. Since then, however, he has taken several actions suggesting that the differences may be less marked than that first day implied. Certainly there have been significant improvements in US policy, particularly Washington's approach to international law. But disturbingly, the Obama administration has continued the Bush administration's attempts to shield illegal exercises of executive authority from judicial review.

The Obama administration's ambivalent approach was perhaps most evident in its March 13 announcement that it was abandoning the Bush label of "enemy combatant" for those held at Guantánamo. But at the same time, in a legal brief filed in a Guantánamo detention case, the administration advanced a new definition of who may be detained--which was immediately criticized by human rights groups as differing only marginally from that used by President Bush.

Read on...

This is not encouraging. Tom

Canada Should Bar or Prosecute Bush: Lawyer

Foreign Affairs stays silent on upcoming Calgary visit

by Jeremy Klaszus

As George W. Bush's St. Patrick's Day visit to Calgary draws near, the federal government is facing pressure from activists and human rights lawyers to bar the former U.S. president from the country or prosecute him for war crimes and crimes against humanity once he steps on Canadian soil.

Bush is scheduled to speak at the Telus Convention Center March 17, but Vancouver lawyer Gail Davidson says that because Bush has been "credibly accused" of supporting torture in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Canada has a legal obligation to deny him entry under Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The law says foreign nationals who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, including torture, are "inadmissible" to Canada.

Read on...

I vote we let him in and arrest him and ship him to the Hague. Tom

Newly Released Secret Memos Provide the Blueprint for Bush's Police State

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted March 4, 2009.

The memos' authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, should be investigated, prosecuted, and disbarred.

Seven newly released memos from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide "legal" rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.

Who wrote these memos? All but one were crafted in whole or in part by the infamous John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the so-called "torture memos" that redefined torture much more narrowly than the U.S. definition of torture, and counseled the President how to torture and get away with it. In one memo, Yoo said the Justice Department would not enforce U.S. laws against torture, assault, maiming and stalking, in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.

Read on

How a Man Was Thrown into Gitmo and Tortured for Clicking on My Article

By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com. Posted February 26, 2009.

America in the Bush years was so vicious and stupid that it managed to take my freedom of speech and turn it into someone else's living hell.

I like to think that some of the things I write cause discomfort in those readers who deserve to feel it. Ideally, they should squirm, they should flinch, they might even experience fleeting gastrointestinal symptoms. But I have always drawn the line at torture. It may be unpleasant to read some of my writings, especially if they have been assigned by a professor, but it should not result in uncontrollable screaming, genital mutilation or significant blood loss.

With such stringent journalistic ethics in place, I was shocked to read in the February 14 Daily Mail Online.

Read on...

I hate to say it, again, but Obama isn't walking away from many Bush policies. Beginning to wonder if he will. Tom

Obama to Expand Bush Faith Program

by Carrie Budoff Brown

President Barack Obama, who has been reversing course on a host of Bush administration policies, Thursday will make a bid to expand and strengthen one of the programs most closely associated with his predecessor.

George W. Bush created the White House faith-based grant program, and Obama intends to keep the same structure. But Obama is going a significant step further, with the creation of a new board of advisers whose recommendations will be woven directly into his policy-making apparatus.

Under Bush, a White House-based program to encourage grants to faith-based social service programs began with high hopes and a barrage of publicity. But over time this Bush hallmark suffered amid complaints from many of its backers that it had become marginalized and used for partisan purposes by White House political aides.

Read on...

How is this change? Tom

Bush Booed At Inauguration (VIDEO)

Former President Bush was welcomed to the inaugural podium with boos from the million-person plus crowd. The video below picks up some of the dissenting crowd. If you were watching the ceremony live, the boos were loud and clear throughout the mass of people. Former President Bush was welcomed to the inaugural podium with boos from the million-person plus crowd. The video below picks up some of the dissenting crowd. If you were watching the ceremony live, the boos were loud and clear throughout the mass of people.

Check out the video. Tom

10 Bush pardons to watch for

As the clock ticks down on his presidency, George W. Bush has shown few signs he plans to indulge in the frenzy of last-minute pardons that marked Bill Clinton’s final hours in the Oval Office.

But Bush could quickly leap back into the spotlight in the next two days if he issues a blanket pardon immunizing CIA and military interrogators, as well as their bosses, from criminal prosecution over harsh treatment of prisoners from the war on terror.

“I’m sure he’s under pressure from some people to issue blanket pardons,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told Politico. “I don’t think it’s fevered imagination. I think it’s reasonable speculation.”

Read on...

His own name should be number one on the list. It will be curious to see if there are some last minute pardons. Didn't see Conrad Blacks name on the list. Tom

If Obama Doesn't Prosecute Bush's Torture Team, We'll Pay a Big Price Down the Road

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted November 28, 2008.

Obama isn't likely to pursue torture atrocities during the Bush era, but this is one problem you simply can't wish away.

How did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep and blasted music at them? Were these actions the result of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that's not the case."

-- Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, June 17, 2008
***
It was a short but significant report in Newsweek last week, and it began like this:

Despite the hopes of many human rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. "At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened," said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified for talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved "waterboarding" and other controversial practices.

Read on...

Obama needs to do something about torture and a whole lot of other things. Tom

Bush's Bizarre Pardon List

By Jenny Booth, The Times of London UK. Posted November 25, 2008.

A hip-hop artist and a former Detroit police sergeant are among 16 people to be pardoned or to have their prison sentences commuted by President Bush.

A Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist and a former Detroit police sergeant are among 16 individuals to be pardoned or to have their prison sentences commuted by President Bush.

The new round of White House pardons announced late last night are Mr. Bush's first since March, and come less than two months before the end of his presidency.

Read on...

I've read conflicting reports about whether Conrad Black has asked for clemency or not. I guess the Times of London should know and it looks like Conrad is asking. The pace of pardons and clemency has been slow but Crimbrary predicts an avalanche of both coming soon. Tom

Can George W. Bush 'Self-Pardon' Himself?

By Stephen M Brown, AlterNet. Posted November 24, 2008.

There's no definitive legal consensus on whether a president can pardon himself. But Bush may well give the theorists an answer.

Charlotte Dennett promised that, if she won her race for attorney general of Vermont in the recent election, she would prosecute George W. Bush for the murder of 4,000 American soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians after he left office.

Unfortunately, Dennett did not become Vermont's attorney general. But it is possible (perhaps very possible) that one or more of our other 49 state attorneys general will take up that case after Jan. 20. Hopefully, that AG will appoint -- as Dennett promised to do --famed criminal attorney Vincent Bugliosi (author of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder) as special prosecutor.

Read on...

Wonder how much weight a Bush pardon will carry at the Hague. Tom

Blanket Pardons

by digby

Evidently, there's talk of Bush issuing a blanket pardon to anyone involved in his torture regime before he leaves office and Salon is also reporting that there are some plans afoot in the Obama camp to initiate a broad congressional inquiry into the whole interrogation program, which would be even more amazing.

As to the pardons, there is precedent for a president to pardon whole categories of people --- Carter did it for draft resisters and George Washington did it for those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion. The article discusses some moral distinctions, but it seems clear to me that Bush could do this and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.

Read on...

It would be nice to see the U.S. return the the rule of law. And also nice to see a few Bushies frogmarched to jail. Not to be vengeful but I hope Obama does something. Tom