Bush's Waterboarding Admission Prompts Calls For Criminal Probe

WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday joined a growing chorus in the human rights community calling for a special prosecutor to investigate whether former president George W. Bush violated federal statutes prohibiting torture.

In his new memoir and ensuing book tour, Bush has repeatedly admitted that he directly authorized the waterboarding of three terror suspects. Use of the waterboard, which creates the sensation of drowning, has been an iconic and almost universally condemned form of torture since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Except for a brief period during which a handful of Bush administration lawyers insisted that the exigencies of interrogating terror suspects justified its use, waterboarding has always been considered illegal by the Justice Department. It is also a clear violation of international torture conventions.

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George boasts about being a war criminal and the mainstream media yawns. The U.S. has become inured to crimes by the elites going unpunished. Canada too, where the cover-up of war crimes in Afghanistan seems effortless. Tom

Spanish Judge Resumes Torture Case Against Six Senior Bush Lawyers

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted September 9, 2009.

A Spanish newspaper reports that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against attorneys who implemented torture at Guantánamo.

The Spanish newspaper Público reported exclusively on Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for implementing torture at Guantánamo.

Back in March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the six prime architects of the Bush administration's torture policies -- former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who played a major role in the preparation of the OLC's notorious "torture memos"; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy; William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department's former general counsel; Jay S. Bybee, Yoo's superior in the OLC, who signed off on the August 2002 "torture memos"; and David Addington, former Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.

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Bush's Third Term? You're Living It

by David Swanson

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?

There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

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The Final Press Conference: Portrait of a Narcissistic Psychopath

by Jesselyn RadackTue Jan 13, 2009 at 05:37:14 AM PST

Biggest mistake of his presidency, according to Bush:
the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Biggest disappointments of Bush's presidency:
the revelation of torture at Abu Ghraib.
the failure to find WMD in Iraq.

President Bush is incapable of self-reflection, let alone guilt or regret -- a common trait of psychopaths, as is glib and superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, lack of remorse, shallow affect, callousness and lack of empathy, early behavioral problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, and failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. Bush identifies the failure to find WMD in Iraq as "a significant disappointment," but not his decision to invade Iraq in the first place? Seriously?

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Muntadar al-Zaidi Did What We Journalists Should Have Done Long Ago

by Dave Lindorff

When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, he did something that the White House press corps should have done years ago.

Al-Zaidi listened to Bush blather that the half-decade of war he had initiated with the illegal invasion of Iraq had been "necessary for US security, Iraqi stability (sic) and world peace" and something just snapped. The television correspondent, who had been kidnapped and held for a while last year by Shiite militants, pulled off a shoe and threw it at Bush-a serious insult in Iraqi culture-and shouted "This is a farewell kiss, you dog!" When the first shoe missed its target, he grabbed a second shoe and heaved it too, causing the president to duck a second time as al-Zaidi shouted, "This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!"

I'll admit, listening to Bush lie his way through eight years of press conferences, while pre-selected reporters played along and pretended to get his attention so they could ask questions which had been submitted and vetted in advance, I have felt like throwing my shoes at the television set.

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