In particular, HRW singled out “four key leaders” in the torture program. Besides former President George W. Bush, the report indicts former Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. But others remain possible targets of investigation and prosecution. According to the report:

Such an investigation should also include examination of the roles played by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as the lawyers who crafted the legal “justifications” for torture, including Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

But the key passage in the HRW report concerns the backing for international prosecutions, under the principle in international law of “universal jurisdiction,” which was used back in 1998 by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to indict former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for genocide and murder.

Unless and until the US government pursues credible criminal investigations of the role of senior officials in the mistreatment of detainees since September 11, 2001, exercise universal jurisdiction or other forms of jurisdiction as provided under international and domestic law to prosecute US officials alleged to be involved in criminal offenses against detainees in violation of international law. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in an important section of the report, HRW details the failures and successes of pursuing such international prosecutions in the face of U.S. prosecutors’ failure to act and investigate or indict high administration officials for war crimes. This is even more important when one considers that the Obama administration has clearly stated its intention to not investigate or prosecute such crimes, going after a handful of lower-level interrogators for crimes not covered by the Bush administration’s so-called “legal” approvals for torture provided by the infamous Yoo/Bybee/Levin/Bradbury memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel.

Nor has Congress shown even a smidgen of appetite for pursuing further accountability: not one Congressman or Senator has stepped forward as yet to endorse HRW’s new call. Instead, they demonstrated their obsequiousness by approving Obama’s nomination of General David Petraeus as new CIA director 94-0, despite the fact that Petraeus has been implicated in the organization of counter-terror death squads in Iraq, and was in charge of training Iraqi security forces who repeatedly were documented as engaging in widespread torture. It was during Petraeus’s tenure as chief of such training for the coalition forces, that the U.S. implemented the notorious Fragmentary Order (FRAGO) 242, which commanded U.S. forces not to intervene in cases of Iraqi governmental torture should they come across such it (which they often did). No one during Petraeus’s testimony in his nomination hearings even questioned him about this.

Why this report now?

I asked Andrea Prasow, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch, why this report was issued now, noting that some on the left had already questioned the timing of HRW’s action.

“Because it really needed to be done,” Prasow explained. She noted the recent admissions by former President Bush and Vice President Cheney that they had approved waterboarding. Furthermore, “following the killing of [Osama] Bin Laden, we saw the immediate response by some that torture and the enhanced interrogation techniques led to the capture of Bin Laden. And it became a part of normal debate about torture. It shows how fragile is the current commitment not to torture.”

Prasow also noted the recent closure of the Durham investigation, which resulted in the decision to criminally investigate the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody, while 99 other cases referred to his office were closed. I asked her whether she felt, as I do, that the announcement of the two investigations were meant to forestall attempts by European (especially Spanish) prosecutors to pursue “universal jurisdiction” prosecutions of U.S. officials for torture.

“I don’t see how there’s a defensible justification that the investigations Durham announced can do that,” Prasow said. “It’s pretty clear that there should be an investigation into the deaths of these detainees,” she added, “but it’s so clear the investigation is very limited. The scope of the investigation is the most important part. Even if Durham had investigated the 100 or so cases that exceeded the legal authorities, it wouldn’t be sufficient. What about the people who wrote the legal memos? Who told them to write the memos?” she said, emphasizing the fact that Durham’s investigation was limited by Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to only CIA crimes, and only those that supposedly exceeded the criteria for “enhanced interrogation” laid out in a number of administration legal memos. The torture, Prasow noted, was “throughout the military” as well, including “hundreds or thousands” tortured at sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Prasow noted that the Obama administration has made it policy to block attempts by torture victims to get compensation for torture, asserting a policy of protecting “state secrets” to shut down court cases. “But there are other ways of providing redress,” she said, adding that “providing redress is part of international laws.” The HRW report itself states, “Consistent with its obligations under the Convention against Torture, the US government should ensure that victims of torture obtain redress, which may include providing victims with compensation where warranted outside of the judicial context.”

The new HRW report comes on the heels of a controversy roiling around a proposed United Kingdom governmental inquiry into torture. A number of British human rights and legal agencies have said they would boycott the UK proceedings as a “whitewash.” As Andy Worthington put it the other day:

As a result of pandering to the Americans’ wishes, the terms of reference are “so restrictive,” as the Guardian described it, that JUSTICE, the UK section of the International Commission of Jurists, warned that the inquiry “was likely to fail to comply with UK and international laws governing investigations into torture.” Eric Metcalfe, JUSTICE’s director of human rights policy, said that the rules “mean that the inquiry is unlikely to get to the truth behind the allegations and, even if it does, we may never know for sure. However diligent and committed Sir Peter [Gibson] and his team may be, the government has given itself the final word on what can be made public.”

Andrea Prasow echoed Metcalfe’s fears, saying HRW had “some concerns about how much information [in the UK inquiry] was going to be kept secret. I think transparency, making it as public as possible, is most important.”

The fight for transparency also makes HRW’s call for prosecutions of high government officials, along with “an independent, nonpartisan commission, along the lines of the 9-11 Commission, [that] should be established to examine the actions of the executive branch, the CIA, the military, and Congress, with regard to Bush administration policies and practices that led to detainee abuse,” very timely. In a column the other day at Secrecy News — Pentagon Tightens Grip on Unclassified Information — Steven Aftergood reported on a Department of Defense proposed new rule regarding classification. While the Obama administration is supposedly on record for greater governmental transparency, the new rule imposes “new safeguard requirements on ‘prior designations indicating controlled access and dissemination (e.g., For Official Use Only, Sensitive But Unclassified, Limited Distribution, Proprietary, Originator Controlled, Law Enforcement Sensitive).’”

According to Aftergood, “By ‘grandfathering’ those old, obsolete markings in a new regulation for defense contractors, the DoD rule would effectively reactivate them and qualify them for continued protection under the new Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) regime, thereby defeating the new policy.” Even worse (if possible), “the proposed rule says that any unclassified information that has not been specifically approved for public release must be safeguarded. It establishes secrecy, not openness, as the presumptive status and default mode for most unclassified information.”

Much of what we know about the Bush-era torture program is due to the work of the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, who have used the Freedom of Information Act to gather hundreds of documents, if not thousands, that document the paper trail surrounding the crimes of the Bush administration. Reporters and investigators like Jane Mayer, Philippe Sands, Alfred McCoy, and Jason Leopold have also contributed much to our understanding of what occurred during the Bush years. The work of investigators going back years demonstrates that U.S. research into and propagation of torture around the world goes back decades.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has also produced an impressive, if still partially redacted, investigation (large PDF) into detainee abuse by the Department of Defense. Their report, for instance, concluded regarding torture at Guantanamo that “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.”

When one puts together the accelerated emphasis on “state secrets”; the Obama political program of “not looking back” in regards to U.S. war crimes (while supposedly pursuing accountability for torture and war crimes committed by other countries); the political passivity, if not cowardice of Congress; the fact that Obama “has not been transparent on the rendition issue, not even saying what its policy is,” according to Andrea Prasow; and finally the lies and propaganda spewed forth by the former Administration’s key figures and their proxies, one can only agree with HRW that enough is enough. The time for investigations and prosecutions into torture and rendition is now.

And if they won’t listen in Washington, D.C., perhaps they will in Madrid. Or some other intrepid prosecutor in — who knows? — Brazil or Argentina or Chile will pay back America, as a matter of poetic but also real justice for the crimes endured by their societies when the U.S. helped organize torture and terror in their countries only a generation ago. There were no U.S. investigations into actions of government figures then, and now we are faced with another set of atrocities produced by our own government. If we do not act now, what will our children face?

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected arguments by Obama Justice Department appointees that releasing the transcript would discourage future vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigations because their words could become “fodder for The Daily Show.”

At a federal court hearing in July, Jeffrey Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that the transcript of Cheney’s 2004 interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA leak should remain secret for as long as ten more years to protect Cheney from any political embarrassment that would result from the transcript being released.

“Any attempt to predict the harm that disclosure of these records could have … is therefore inherently, incurably speculative,” Sullivan wrote in his ruling. “Accordingly, the Court concludes that DOJ has failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that the records were properly withheld.”

Sullivan, however, did agree that the Justice Department can keep under wraps, on national security grounds, statements Cheney had made to Fitzgerald about declassification discussions he had with George W. Bush, conversations Cheney had with former CIA Director George Tenet about Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s February 2002 trip to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq was seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium, discussions surrounding the 16 words in Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address that asserted Iraq had attempted to purchase the uranium, talks between Cheney and then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and conversations between Cheney and other Bush officials about how to respond to media inquiries about the Plame Wilson leak.

Court papers filed by Obama’s Justice Department in July revealed that Bush and Cheney were in contact about the scandal, including what is described as “a confidential conversation” and “an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President.”

That court filing also revealed that Fitzgerald questioned Cheney about his participation in the decision to declassify parts of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s alleged WMD. It ultimately fell to Bush to clear selected parts of the NIE so they could be leaked as part of the White House campaign to disparage Wilson.

“Judge Sullivan rightly rejected a Justice Department interpretation of the [Freedom of Information Act] that would have allowed the government to withhold virtually any law enforcement record even where an investigation has long since been concluded,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens For Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW). The case stems from a FOIA lawsuit filed last year by CREW.

“We are disappointed, however, that the judge allowed DOJ to withhold portions of some records because the American people deserve to know the truth about the role the vice president played in exposing Mrs. Wilson’s covert identity. High-level government officials should not be permitted to hide their misconduct from public view,” Sloan added.

A Justice Department spokesman said Sullivan’s ruling is under review. Unless the Obama administration decides to appeal, the public may learn additional details about Cheney’s role in the leak of Plame Wilson’s covert identity by October 9, the deadline Sullivan gave the Justice Department to release a redacted version of Cheney’s interview transcript.

Senior Bush administration officials disclosed Plame Wilson’s identity to several journalists in June and July of 2003 amid White House efforts to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for challenging Bush’s use of bogus intelligence to justify invading Iraq.

Plame Wilson’s CIA employment was revealed in a July 14, 2003, article by the late right-wing columnist Robert Novak, effectively destroying her career. Two months later, a CIA complaint to the Justice Department sparked a criminal probe into the identity of the leakers.

Initially, Bush professed not to know anything about the matter, and several of his senior aides, including political adviser Karl Rove and the vice president’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, followed suit.

However, it later became clear that Rove and Libby had a hand in the Plame leak and that Bush and Cheney had helped organize a campaign to disparage Wilson by giving critical information to friendly journalists.

On June 24, 2004, Bush was interviewed by Fitzgerald for 70 minutes about the Plame leak. The only other member of the Bush team in the room during the meeting was Jim Sharp, the private lawyer that Bush hired, according to a press briefing by then-press secretary Scott McClellan.

“The President … was pleased to do his part to help the investigation move forward,” McClellan said. “No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the President of the United States.”

A couple of weeks earlier, Cheney had been interviewed by Fitzgerald. Cheney retained a private attorney, Terrence O’Donnell, to represent him in the matter.

Fitzgerald’s criminal investigation led to Libby’s indictment in October 2005 and his subsequent conviction in March 2007 on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, which Bush later commuted.

During closing arguments at Libby’s trial, Cheney was implicated in the leak, as Fitzgerald acknowledged that Cheney was intimately involved in the scandal and may have told Libby to leak Plame’s status to the media.

Fitzgerald told jurors that his investigation into the true nature of the vice president’s involvement was impeded because Libby obstructed justice.

Libby’s attorney, Theodore Wells, told jurors during his closing arguments that Fitzgerald had been trying to build a case of conspiracy against the vice president and Libby, and that the prosecution believed Libby may have lied to federal investigators and to a grand jury to protect Cheney.

“Now, I think the government, through its questions, really tried to put a cloud over Vice President Cheney,” Wells said.

Rebutting Wells, Fitzgerald told jurors: “You know what? [Wells] said something here that we’re trying to put a cloud on the vice president. We’ll talk straight. There is a cloud over the vice president. He sent Libby off to [meet with New York Times reporter] Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel. At that meeting – the two-hour meeting – the defendant talked about the wife [Plame]. We didn’t put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant obstructed justice and lied about what happened.”

Moreover, copies of Cheney’s handwritten notes also appeared to implicate Bush in the leak case.

Cheney’s notes, which were introduced as evidence during Libby’s trial, called into question the truthfulness of Bush’s vehement denials about having prior knowledge of the sub rosa campaign against Wilson.

In an October 2003 note to then-press secretary McClellan, Cheney demanded that the press office add Libby to a list of White House officials being cleared of any role in the Plame leak.

“Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others,” Cheney wrote. However, the note revealed that Cheney had originally written “this Pres” before crossing that out and using the passive tense “that was.”

In other words, the original version suggested that Bush had asked Libby “to stick his head in the meat grinder,” an apparent reference to dealing with the Washington press corps.

Last year, Congressman Henry Waxman, then the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, revealed in a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey that, according to FBI transcripts given to Waxman’s committee, Libby told federal investigators that Cheney might have told him to leak Plame’s CIA ties to reporters.

“In his interview with the FBI, Mr. Libby stated that it was ‘possible’ that Vice President Cheney instructed him to disseminate information about Ambassador Wilson’s wife to the press. This is a significant revelation and, if true, a serious matter. It cannot be responsibly investigated without access to the Vice President’s FBI interview,” Waxman wrote.

Their letter to the president is particularly self-serving for three of the directors (Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and George Tenet), who would presumably be the subject of any investigation, and simply self-aggrandizing for the others (John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger), whose stewardship of the CIA since the early 1970s has contributed to the Agency’s loss of influence and credibility.

The key to managing a complex organization such as the CIA is based on the integrity and competence of the director and his senior management. These traits were certainly lacking during the two decades these “magnificent seven” were at the helm.

The letter itself represents a stunning display of irrelevance and wrong-headedness. The former directors argue, for example, that any reopened investigation would damage the intelligence community’s ability to obtain cooperation of foreign intelligence agencies.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Foreign intelligence agencies have been holding back their liaison activities and their cooperation with the CIA because of the crimes associated with secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. It is quite unbelievable that CIA leaders decided to compromise the governments and intelligence services of the European community by locating secret prisons and using logistical facilities within their borders. It is very unlikely that any member of the European Union will cooperate with such CIA activities in the future.

The seven directors argue predictably that career prosecutors have already investigated the relevant cases where “Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities,” but with the exception of a prosecution of a CIA contractor there was a determination that prosecutions were not warranted. They do not mention that a political appointee in the Bush administration, Paul McNulty, was responsible for these decisions and they do not refer to the unconscionable politicization of the Bush administration’s Justice Department.

Finally, the letter argues that any criminal investigation would “seriously damage the willingness” of intelligence officers to “take risks to protect the country.”

This is arrant nonsense! One of the reasons why the CIA had to resort to independent contractors, particularly former military officers and enlisted men, to staff secret prisons and conduct torture and abuse was because of the opposition of professional intelligence officers to the policies of the Bush administration. An investigation would not compromise the national security interests of the United States, although it would cause grave embarrassment to those who carried out these policies and would perhaps guarantee that these actions would never again be permitted.

It is also worthwhile to examine those individuals who signed the letter to the president.  Jim Schlesinger abolished the Office of National Estimates, the most prestigious Agency department for intelligence analysis, because of its independence and created a group of National Intelligence Officers who would be more responsive to the policy demands of the White House and the National Security Council.

Upon arrival at the CIA in 1973, he assembled the CIA’s Soviet analysts and told them to “stop fucking Richard Nixon.” Judge William Webster obstructed the Walsh investigation of Iran-Contra, particularly the case against a high-ranking operations officer who was responsible for illegal arms deliveries to the Contras. The officer was indicted by a Grand Jury for making false statements and obstructing the investigations of the CIA’s Inspector General as well as the work of the Tower Commission, but the case was dismissed after Webster refused to release necessary documents.

Jim Woolsey and John Deutch were short-lived directors who weakened the Agency’s role in collecting intelligence and conducting analysis in the key fields of arms control and international terrorism. Woolsey’s unwillingness to punish any of the eleven senior officers who were responsible for allowing Aldrich Ames, the notorious long-spy for the Soviet Union, to move into sensitive clandestine positions over a ten-year period led the Clinton administration to force his resignation.

Deutch’s security breaches at the CIA included the compromise of the most sensitive clandestine operations of the directorate of operations.  Deutch had introduced sensitive intelligence to his home computer that had been used for accessing pornographic sites, but he blamed others in the household for the compromise.

Tenet, Goss, and Hayden were directly involved in the decision-making that led to the creation of secret prisons in Europe, Southwest Asia, and the Far East; the use of torture and abuse; and the rendition of individuals who were guilty of no crimes against the United States. Tenet, moreover, was directly responsible for the false intelligence given to the White House to support the use of force authorization against Iraq in 2002 as well as the phony speech given by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in 2003.

Goss worked assiduously to cover-up the 9/11 accountability report of the CIA’s Inspector General. His handpicked executive secretary, the third highest position at the CIA, was Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who is currently serving a jail sentence for steering Agency contracts to a lifelong friend who bribed former congressman Randall “Duke” Cunningham.

Hayden entered the CIA under a cloud because, as director of the National Security Agency, he approved the warrantless eavesdropping program that began after 9/11.  And he left the CIA under a cloud this year because of his success in compromising the work of the Office of the Inspector General.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder must ignore the efforts of the former CIA directors and many others to find the truths that would be part of any investigation of activities that went beyond any legal authority. Twenty-five years ago, CIA director William Casey tried to cover-up crimes that were committed in the remote El Salvadoran village of El Mozote. Eventually the Salvadoran government established a Truth Commission to investigate the crimes that had been dismissed by the Reagan administration.

Today, the United States needs to create a Truth Commission to understand the crimes that were committed over the past decade.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

George Tenet is one of seven former CIA directors who sent a letter to President Obama Friday urging him to stop a Justice Department review into torture.

Seven former directors of the CIA sent a letter to President Barack Obama Friday asking him to take the unprecedented step of personally blocking a Justice Department “review” of cases where agency officers and contractors allegedly exceeded legal guidelines during the interrogations of “war on terror” detainees.

The ex-directors claim the investigation authorized last month by Attorney General Eric Holder into will “only help Al Qaeda elude US intelligence and plan future operations” and “will continue to make it harder for intelligence officers to maintain the momentum of operations that have saved lives and helped protect America from further attacks.”

Those statements are nearly identical to warnings made by Republican lawmakers in recent weeks, which have been disputed by veteran interrogators and a former Bush administration official as a clear-cut attempt to shield top Bush officials who came up with the torture policies, in violation of anti-torture laws, from scrutiny.

Three of the former directors—George Tenet, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss—were personally involved in the policy discussions and decisions during George W. Bush’s tenure that lead to the implementation of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” According to recently released documents, CIA headquarters in Langley micromanaged the torture of at least one high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah, in 2002 when Tenet was CIA director.

Another former director who signed the letter, James Schlesinger, conducted an investigation into the abuse and torture of prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The other three former directors are John Deutch, R. James Woolsey, both of who served in the Clinton administration and William Webster, a former federal judge who served as CIA director in the administration of George H.W. Bush and is currently chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Tenet also served as CIA director during the last three years of the Clinton administration.

Repeatedly invoking 9/11 in their letter, the former CIA directors asked Obama to exercise [his] authority to reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.”

Their request comes weeks after former Vice President Dick Cheney, during an interview with Fox News, said Obama, as the “chief law enforcement officer of the administration,” had the authority to thwart the Justice Department investigation.

“I think if you look at the Constitution, the President of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The Attorney General’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet. The President’s the one who bears this responsibility.

“And for him to say, ‘gee, I didn’t have anything to do with it,’ especially after he sat in the Oval Office and said this wouldn’t happen, then Holder decides he’s going to do it.”

But Cheney and the former CIA directors have taken an expansive view of the Constitution, specifically Article II, which says, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”

In common practice and understanding, however, the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. The attorney general “evolved over the years into chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government,” according to the Department of Justice’s website.

During the Bush administration, the Department of Justice was politicized and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used the agency to advance the policies of the Bush administration, an episode noted by no less than four investigations conducted by Justice Department watchdogs.

Furthermore, contrary to what Cheney claims, Obama never said there wouldn’t be an investigation into torture. What he said, and what his political appointees have echoed to the dismay of civil liberties groups and some Democrats, is that he had hoped to “look forward” not “backwards” and that those CIA interrogators “who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.” He also added that the decision was ultimately up to Holder.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said if there is a problem with Holder’s investigation its “focus is too narrow.”

“There is abundant evidence that torture was authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration, and the Justice Department’s investigation should be broad enough to encompass Bush administration lawyers and senior officials – including the CIA officials – who authorized torture,” he said.

But that is highly unlikely and in that sense, the probe is reminiscent of the investigations into Abu Ghraib, in which low-level MPs were court-martialed and imprisoned for acts that supposedly had not been sanctioned by their superiors, who included, among others, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, made it clear Friday that the investigation authorized by Holder is simply a “preliminary review” and “that review will be narrowly-focused.”

“The Attorney General’s decision to order a preliminary review into this matter was made in line with his duty to examine the facts and to follow the law,” Miller said. “As he has made clear, the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

Last month, Holder instructed Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham to undertake a “preliminary” inquiry into whether some interrogators exceeded the parameters that the Bush administration placed on the treatment of “war on terror” detainees.

With Cheney’s strong support, interrogators were permitted to engage in a variety of torture techniques, including the drowning sensation of waterboarding, but some interrogators allegedly engaged in practices outside those guidelines.

Durham is also investigating crimes related to the destruction of CIA torture tapes, a dozen of which show two high-value detainees being subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Holder’s decision came on the day the CIA released a declassified version of an inspector general’s report on the agency’s interrogation and detention program.

The May 2004 report prepared by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson said interrogators staged mock executions, revved a power drill and brandished a revolver during interrogations and threatened to kill the family of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and rape the wife of another high-value detainee, Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri.

Threatening prisoners in custody of the U.S. government with imminent death is a violation of the Convention Against Torture.

Helgerson also investigated the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, but the details of those cases were redacted.

The ex-CIA directors claim, like other critics of the probe, that career federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia had already spent considerable time probing cases Helgerson referred to the Justice Department and “determined that one prosecution (of a CIA contractor) was warranted. A conviction was later obtained. They determined that prosecutions were not warranted in the other cases.”

“The CIA, at its own initiative, forwarded fewer than 20 instances where Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities…,” the CIA directors’ letter says. “In a number of these cases the CIA subsequently took administrative disciplinary steps against the individuals involved.”

Jane Mayer, in her book The Dark Side, said there was a mountain of evidence to support prosecutions and a belief by some “insiders that [Helgerson's investigation] would end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.”

But top Justice Department officials, including former head of the criminal division Michael Chertoff, his deputy Alice Fisher and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, allowed the cases to languish and may have even scuttled the probes to protect the Bush White House.

McNulty resigned in disgrace two years ago and is under scrutiny by a special prosecutor investigating the firings of nine US attorneys. McNulty faces obstruction of justice and perjury charges related to his February 2007 testimony to Congress about the ordeal.

The former CIA directors said the Holder’s “decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute.”

“Moreover, there is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused,” they wrote.

But according to a report in Saturday’s Washington Post, that’s exactly what appears to be happening.

“The Justice Department’s review of detainee abuse by the CIA will focus on a very small number of cases, including at least one in which an Afghan prisoner died at a secret facility, according to two sources briefed on the matter,” the Post reported.

“Although earlier reports indicated that Durham would look into 10 cases, a source said recently the number is much smaller,” according to the Post. In all, 24 alleged abuse cases were earlier referred to federal prosecutors by the CIA inspector general, of which 22 were declined, according to a letter in February 2008 from a Justice Department legislative liaison.”

The Post, citing unnamed sources, also said that a report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on legal advice related to interrogations attorneys in the agency’s Office of Legal Counsel gave to the Bush administration “does not point to problems with attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia… but it does explore differences of opinion within the working group that examined the detainee allegations over how to proceed on the few cases that were ‘close calls.’

“In a small number of instances, career lawyers disagreed about whether the evidence was sufficient to seek indictment and ultimately win in court. Some of those issues were assessed — as is normally the case — by political appointees, including Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who was nominated to serve as deputy attorney general in October 2005. There are no allegations that cases were rejected for improper political reasons.”

In an interview two weeks ago with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Helgerson said Holder “had no choice” but to authorize an investigation.

But, “at the end of the day, I think he will find it is not feasible to prosecute anyone who participated in the approved program,” Helgerson said. “I personally would not prosecute. There are a number of complex and mitigating circumstances in all these cases, including the passage of time, the nature of the evidence, and — importantly — the clear absence of any criminal intent.”

The late senator Daniel P. Moynihan created the PIDB in the 1990s to reduce the “torment of secrecy,” which denied important information on national security to the American people. The EAB was designed to deal with the complexities of managing the CIA and to improve the access of intelligence information to the Congress and the American people. Hayden and Rudman have a cold war preoccupation with secrecy and have never been known for improving access. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is responsible for the Hayden appointment; CIA director Leon Panetta appointed Rudman.

As Steven Aftergood, the editor of Secrecy News noted, Hayden is “not well known as a classification critic or a proponent of declassification.” As director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Hayden instituted the warrantless eavesdropping program that violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful seizures and searches.

In defending warrantless eavesdropping at the National Press Club in January 2006, he argued that the Fourth Amendment did not stipulate the importance of “probable cause,” which of course it does. Hayden also conceded that he relied on advice for the program from White House lawyers and never considered consulting the legal staff of NSA.

Soon after arriving at the CIA as director, Hayden began an unprecedented investigation of the Office of the Inspector General, which had been critical of the CIA’s renditions and interrogations programs. Hayden even targeted the statutory inspector general of the CIA, John Helgerson, who had recommended the creation of “accountability boards” for CIA officers, including former director George Tenet, involved in 9/11 intelligence failures.

The failure of the chairmen of the congressional oversight committees to come to Helgerson’s defense made it extremely difficult for the IG to do his job and he announced his retirement seven months ago. The White House and the CIA have still not named a replacement for Helgerson, which is particularly damaging in view of the high-level investigations of CIA detentions and interrogations programs as well as the numerous secret prisons or “black sites” established after 9/11, which would benefit from an aggressive Office of the Inspector General.

In addition to naming Rudman to the EAB, Panetta has made the former senator the director’s special advisor on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s (SSCI) special inquiry of past practices in detentions and interrogations.

Panetta has his own review group within the CIA on these practices, but has prominently placed current members of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in the group. The Rudman appointment and the use of NCS officers does not augur will for genuine openness with the Senate inquiry. The NCS has been a major player in the culture of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction of the 92 torture tapes that has been investigated by the FBI for nearly two years.

By placing Rudman as an intermediary between the SSCI and the CIA’s review group, Panetta has ensured himself that the most damaging information on detentions and interrogations will never see the light of day. Rudman was the most active member of the SSCI in trying to block CIA officials from testifying against the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991.

Rudman actually branded those few individuals willing to come forward as “McCarthyites” in an effort to marginalize their testimony and to make sure additional witnesses would not testify or submit written affidavits against Bob Gates. There is ample evidence, moreover, of Rudman’s strong, even bellicose, partisan politicking over the years.

One of the greatest unknown scandals within the intelligence community is the over-classification of government documents in order to keep important information out of the hands of the American people. It costs billions of dollars for government and industry to classify documents, with several million individuals in the government and private industry having the right to classify information.

Government vaults hold over 1.5 billion pages of classified information that are more than twenty-five years old and, thus, unavailable to scholars and researchers, let along the general public. Documents are typically classified to hide embarrassing political information, not secrets. Greater respect for openness might have prevented the policies that led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the CIA’s network of secret prisons, and the CIA’s detentions and interrogations programs.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

He even cites deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, one of the key ideological drivers for the policy of detention and interrogation, as someone who “doesn’t want to have anything to do with interrogation.”

Ignatius strongly believes that it is time for the CIA to “get on with it,” which was the signature line of former CIA director Richard Helms, who Ignatius considers the “savviest spymaster this country has produced.” Let’s forget that Helms lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973 on the overthrow of the elected government in Chile and that a grand jury was called to see if he should be indicted for perjury.

Let’s forget that the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms, who pleaded nolo contendere, and was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended prison sentence. And let’s forget that Helms was the major supporter of James Jesus Angleton, the crazed head of CIA counterintelligence for 20 years, who believed that the KGB had successfully penetrated the Agency.

We called Angleton “The Ghost” when I was at the CIA because no one had ever seen the man. And it was “The Ghost” who befriended Kim Philby, the Soviet spy from British intelligence, introduced him to high-level CIA officials, and defended him to the end. So much for counterintelligence.

In his efforts to prevent any investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program, Ignatius has also forgotten the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946.  The International Tribunal taught us that crimes committed by individuals for state purposes were the responsibility of those individuals and punishable by state law. And, most importantly, following orders was not a defense. But Ignatius believes that all of the relevant evidence on torture and abuse was seen by “career prosecutors, who decided against bringing cases.” So, let’s forget that the career prosecutors were employed by the politicized Justice Department of the Bush administration and that they reported to a politically-appointed assistant attorney general.

Ignatius believes that investigation and accountability will hurt the Agency. It will actually restore the credibility of the Agency and lead to greater cooperation from important foreign intelligence services, which is essential to combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It was CIA crimes such as secret prisons and extraordinary renditions that hurt the Agency, and led to reticence about sharing intelligence. For example, there is no intelligence service within the European Union that would assist in a rendition by the CIA; no EU country that would permit the CIA to transport a prisoner by aircraft; no EU country that would agree to a secret prison or “black site” within its borders.

Ignatius also reveals that he knows nothing about loyal dissent.  He argues that “questioning presidential orders isn’t really the job” of the CIA leadership, “especially when those orders are backed by Justice Department legal opinions.” This country has fought two unnecessary wars in the past 45 years with the deaths of more than 60,000 American men and women simply because high-level officials failed to expose the deceptions and manipulations of the Johnson and Bush administrations.

In supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ignatius and the Washington Post appear enamored with U.S. military power, with the Post providing few opportunities for contrarian voices to be heard. The mainstream media, particularly the Post, has been far too complacent in holding the Bush and Obama administration’s feet to the fire in the case of these wars.

Finally, Ignatius claims that the CIA resorted to independent contractors for help in “waterboarding” and assassination programs because of a lack of expertise. In fact, the CIA turned to outside help in these egregious areas because it was trying to avoid accountability and there was internal resistance to both programs.  There were many officers in the National Clandestine Service opposed to the renditions and detentions program; the Office of Medical Service had serious problems with the waterboarding program, which is outlined in the 2004 Inspector General Program.

Presumably, there were some greybeards around who mentioned that resorting to Blackwater to run an assassination program resembled the CIA’s contacts with the Mafia in the early 1960s to kill Castro. The CIA assassination program led to the Church Commission hearings in the 1970s, which placed restrictions on covert action programs and created a congressional oversight process that has fallen into disarray.

It is unbelievable that Ignatius could read the chilling and appalling 2004 IG report and not temper some of his views.  His continued support of the CIA points to fanaticism and reminds me of Stalin’s reference to Western journalists who defended Soviet policy—he called them “useful idiots.”

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

In both cases, Ignatius relied on high-level sources from the CIA’s National Clandestine Service to make the best possible case for the Agency. This is neither good reporting nor professional journalism. [See Mr. Goodman's previous columns on David Ignatius' defense of CIA misdeeds here and here.]

Thanks to New York Times reporters, particularly Scott Shane and Mark Mazetti, we are learning more about CIA’s illegal assassination program. Ignatius and the Washington Post either failed to investigate the issue or simply dismissed it based on assurances provided by those at CIA with the most to lose from public exposure. And on Monday, thanks to the work of Attorney General Eric Holder, we should receive additional details of the CIA’s torture program.

Each revelation exposes more about the illegal, immoral, and counter-productive actions of the Bush administration and the CIA over the past eight years. Each revelation demonstrates that CIA has withheld information and sought to cover-up its actions. And each revelation speaks to the need for an accountability investigation that will restore the credibility of the CIA as well as the integrity of American democracy.

Ignatius’ focus is trivial, misguided, and aligned with the perspective of his CIA sources. His expressed concern is that any congressional inquiry or the appointment of a special prosecutor will lead to what he terms “slow rolling” at the CIA. Slow rolling means that Agency officers will “go through the motions…pass cables back and forth; take other jobs outside the danger zone…cover their backsides.” They will “keep their heads down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk.  Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.” This is a recurrent theme, advanced by those seeking to prevent oversight. And it is arrant nonsense. CIA is staffed by professionals who want to conduct their activities in a legal and effective manner.

Both Ignatius and CIA director Panetta have fallen into a trap, failing to understand that accountability would actually boost morale at the CIA. The fact is that previous CIA directors (George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden) had to rely on independent contractors to conduct torture and abuse and to build an assassination program, because too many professional Agency officers refused to take part.

The CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) did not believe that torture and abuse were either necessary or moral, so Tenet turned to two military retirees who were looking for a business opportunity to sell torture and abuse. The fact that neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had any expertise on al Qaeda, or had any knowledge of terrorism meant nothing to CIA officials.

CIA abandoned the worst of its interrogation techniques in 2004, after CIA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report concluding that torture and abuse had not thwarted any “specific imminent attacks” and OMS advised that the risk to the health of the prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit. Actually, FBI officials and military analysts previously had concluded that torture was “less reliable” than traditional psychological methods, and had warned that it would lead to an intolerable political and public backlash.

The additional fact that CIA had no way of determining which detainees had useful information and which had none almost certainly led to the abuse of low-level or even innocent people. Some or many of these detainees probably provided false “confessions” in an effort to stop the torment.

There is now ample public evidence about the CIA’s renditions, detentions, and interrogations program, but there remains much that is unknown. The job of a serious journalist is to pursue the unknown and shed light on areas of possible wrongdoing. A serious journalist would be trying to learn what was on the 100 hours of torture tapes that CIA operations officers destroyed.  A serious journalist would not rely on sources whose clear agenda is the cover up of their own, possibly illegal, actions.

We would be better off as a nation if journalists such as David Ignatius and congressional leaders such as Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) stopped aiding and abetting CIA’s efforts to cover up its past actions and began to press for genuine reform of the institution. CIA necessarily operates on the edge of the law and in secrecy; it therefore requires strong, constant, and effective oversight from the congress and the press if it is to remain within legal bounds.

Thus far, the nation has benefited from the lawsuits of the American Civil Liberties Union, which have forced the release of government torture documents and the CIA’s IG report from 2004 detailing techniques that violated the Justice Department’s requirements. It has also benefitted from reporting by the New York Times and Warren Stroebel of the McClatchy Newspapers and from the investigation by the OIG. At the very least, Senator Feinstein should make sure that the White House and the CIA appoint another statutory inspector general at the CIA to replace John Helgerson, who announced his retirement more than six months ago. After all, our only comprehensive study on torture and abuse was produced under Helgerson’s leadership five years ago.

Ignatius warns repeatedly that the “sunlight of exposure” will blind our shadow warriors.” The reverse is true. The “sunlight of exposure” will restore the effectiveness of CIA’s “shadow warriors” by providing them a clear understanding of the parameters within which they can operate legally. CIA’s “shadow warriors” are both professional and patriotic; they seek to serve their country by protecting the principles on which it is founded—not by flouting them.

Investigation, public exposure, and accountability will ensure that the activities that have created more terrorists have ended.  They also will restore the credibility of our intelligence services, permit foreign intelligence agencies to cooperative effectively with the CIA, and reverse the damage that has been done to U.S. foreign and national security policy.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

The former Bush administration officials rank at the top of the list of the 50 most nortious war criminals living in the U.S.

Compiled below, in hopes that it may be of some assistance to Eric Holder, John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, active citizens, foreign courts, the International Criminal Court, law firms preparing civil suits, and local or state prosecutors with decency and nerve is a list of 50 top living U.S. war criminals. These are men and women who helped to launch wars of aggression or who have been complicit in lesser war crimes. These are not the lowest-ranking employees or troops who managed to stray from official criminal policies. These are the makers of those policies.

The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the United States target civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, use antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, use white phosphorous as a weapon, use depleted uranium weapons, employ a new version of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs, engage in collective punishment of Iraqi civilian populations — including by blocking roads, cutting electricity and water, destroying fuel stations, planting bombs in farm fields, demolishing houses, and plowing down orchards — detain people without charge or legal process without the rights of prisoners of war, imprison children, torture, and murder.

The list below does not include those responsible for war crimes prior to 2001. Nor does it include those currently in power who are making themselves complicit by failing to prosecute or cease commission of these crimes. The list could be greatly expanded. It could also be narrowed. I would argue, however, that it presents a more reasonable starting place than Holder’s reported proposal to investigate only CIA employees who failed to comply with criminal torture policies, of whom there are no doubt more than 50.

Because each of the people on this list should be nonviolently protested everywhere they go (more on that below), I have organized them by location. Please post updates on where they are as comments at http://afterdowningstreet.org/warcriminals

CALIFORNIA

1. John Yoo: Professor of Law at Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley, California, with house at 1241 Grizzly Peak Blvd., Berkeley, (but a lawyer with the Pennsylvania bar from which he should be disbarred and would be if enough people demanded it) counseled the White House on how to get away with war crimes, wrote this memo promoting presidential power to launch aggressive war, and claimed the power to decree that the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming, and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war, and to announce a new definition of torture limiting it to acts causing intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result. Yoo claimed in 2005 that a president has the right to enhance an interrogation by crushing the testicles of someone’s child. Yoo has been confronted in his classroom: video, and defended by the Washington Post, and again confronted in the classroom.

Additional collaborators:
2. Robert J. Delahunty, Yoo colleague, should be disbarred in NY
3. Patrick F. Philbin, Yoo colleague, Deputy, should be disbarred in D.C. and MA

4. Jay Bybee: federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, headquartered in San Francisco, California (but Bybee based in Las Vegas), counseled the White House on how to get away with war crimes, including by helping Yoo draft the memo linked above. He signed not only torture memos but also a memo purporting to legalize illegal and unconstitutional wars. BYBEE SHOULD BE IMPEACHED. He works, among other places, at the James R. Browning Courthouse, 95 7th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, — This is a giant marble building in the center of the city represented in Congress by the Speaker of the House.

5. William J. “Jim” Haynes, II: was General Counsel to the Department of War (“Defense”). He is now Chief Corporate Counsel at the Chevron Corporate Office in San Ramon, California. He counseled the White House on how to get away with war crimes, including by drafting memos for Yoo. Works at Chevron Headquarters, 6001 Bollinger Canyon Road, San Ramon, CA 94583. Member of bar in GA, NC, DC.

More collaborators:
6. Major General (Ret.) Michael E. Dunlavey, (now Judge, Erie County Court, Common Pleas, Erie, PA
7. Diane Beaver, top military lawyer at Gitmo
8. Jack Landman Goldsmith, III, [the illegal transfer memo in March 2004], DoD General Counsel’s Office at Pentagon
9. Ms. Eliana Davidson, International Law Division, Office of the General Counsel, Office of the Secretary of “Defense”

10. Colin Powell: strategic limited partner with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, appears as a speaker in a series of motivational events called Get Motivated, board member of Revolution Health and of the Council on Foreign Relations, took part in White House meetings personally overseeing and approving torture by authorizing the use of specific torture techniques including waterboarding on specific people, lied to the United Nations about the grounds for war in a failed attempt to legalize a war of aggression, and was in fact a leading liar in making the false case for an illegal war of aggression.

Remember: Not every man in a dark suit is a war criminal. Check for blood under their fingernails to confirm identification.

NEW YORK

11. Henry Kissinger: lives in Kent, Connecticut, and works at Kissinger Associates, 350 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y., had a resume envied by other war criminals long before he advised George W. Bush to commit war crimes. Here’s a partial list of his crimes.

12. Nicholas E. Calio: Citigroup’s Executive Vice-President for Global Government Affairs served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies.

13. Michael Mukasey: works in New York, N.Y. Some of his crimes are detailed at DisbarTortureLawyers.com.

TEXAS

14. George W. Bush: lives at 10141 Daria Place, Dallas, Texas. His crimes are described at http://afterdowningstreet.org/bush and at War Criminals Watch and at The 13 people who made torture possible.

15. Karen Hughes: lives in Austin, Texas, served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies.

16. Paul Bremer lives in Chester, Vermont, and also works in Austin, Texas. His crimes are listed at War Criminals Watch.

Yes, a woman can be a war criminal. What? Did you think any of the men above ever risked personally breaking a fingernail?

WASHINGTON, D.C.

17. Dick Cheney: The former vice president lives nextdoor to CIA headquarters at 1126 Chain Bridge Road, McLean, Va. His crimes are documented at http://impeachcheney.org and at The 13 people who made torture possible and at War Criminals Watch.

18. John Rizzo: The General Counsel for the CIA (then and now) works nextdoor to Dick Cheney’s house at the headquarters of the CIA in McLean, Va. His crimes are described in The 13 people who made torture possible.

More collaborators:
19. Robert Eatinger, CIA lawyer
20. Steven Hermes, CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS)
21. Paul Kelbaugh, Deputy Legal Counsel, CTC, CIA

22. Steven Bradbury: also of McLean, Va., is described along with his crimes at SourceWatch, DisbarTortureLawyers.com, and The 13 people who made torture possible.

23. David Addington: was chief of staff to Dick Cheney in Washington, D.C., counseled the White House on how to get away with war crimes, including by helping Yoo draft the memo linked above, and drafted signing statements for Bush declaring the right to violate laws redundantly banning war crimes including torture and the construction of permanent bases in Iraq and efforts to control Iraq’s oil. Lives at 103 W Maple Street, Alexandria, VA 22301-2605 — This is a few blocks from the King Street Metro Stop.

24. Condoleezza Rice: served as Secretary of State in Washington, D.C., and can be found frequenting shoe stores, served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies, took part in White House meetings personally overseeing and approving torture by authorizing the use of specific torture techniques including waterboarding on specific people, lied about mushroom clouds, and was in fact a leading liar in making the false case for an illegal war of aggression.

25. Donald Rumsfeld: lives in Washington, D.C., and at former slave-beating plantation “Mount Misery” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore near St. Michael’s and a home belonging to Dick Cheney, as well as at an estate outside Taos, New Mexico. He took part in White House meetings personally overseeing and approving torture by authorizing the use of specific torture techniques including waterboarding on specific people, and was in fact a leading liar in making the false case for an illegal war of aggression, and pushed for wars of aggression for years as a participant in the Project for the New American Century.

26. George Tenet: Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., took part in White House meetings personally overseeing and approving torture by authorizing the use of specific torture techniques including waterboarding on specific people, oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency as it engaged in illegal renditions, detentions, torture, murder, and coverups of crimes, as well as helping to build a false case for an illegal war of aggression.

27. John Ashcroft: has his own lobbying company through which to profit from his government connections: The Ashcroft Group, LLC, 1399 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 950, Washington, DC 20005, Phone: 202.942.0202, Fax: 202.942.0216, info@ashcroftgroupllc.com took part in White House meetings personally overseeing and approving torture by authorizing the use of specific torture techniques including waterboarding on specific people.

28. Alberto Gonzales: has hired a criminal-defense lawyer George Terwilliger, partner at White & Case, to defend him, while others have created a trust fund to help pay for his legal expenses, meanwhile Gonzales has been unable to find work as a lawyer himself, so his income comes from speaking engagements, then White House counsel, wrote a memo on January 25, 2002. It explained that under the 1996 War Crimes Act, U.S. officials might be prosecuted for violating the Geneva Conventions for actions in Afghanistan (and future parts of the “war on terror”), with penalties up to and including death. He suggested that Bush declare that the Taliban and Al Qaeda weren’t covered by Geneva, to be on the safe side. Bush did so. Gonzo now has a job at Texas Tech, but not teaching law. Help this effort to boot him! Remember that we drove him out of office by almost impeaching him.

29. Paul Wolfowitz: lives in Chevey Chase, Maryland, and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., advocated illegal war of aggression, and pushed for wars of aggression for years as a participant in the Project for a New American Century.

30. Doug Feith: serves on the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., as a Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy, manufactured, cherry picked, and distorted information, and pressured others to do the same, to help build a false case for an illegal war of aggression, and advocated early and openly for an illegal war of aggression against a “non-al qaeda target.” Also works at Hudson Institute, 1015 15th Street, N.W., 6th Floor, Washington, DC 20005, three blocks from the White House.

31. Elliot Abrams: served as Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy in Washington, D.C., and wherever he can do the most damage around the world, was a well-established war criminal even before he pushed for wars of aggression for years as a participant in the Project for a New American Century, helped to build a false case for attacking Iraq, and supported a failed coup attempt in Venezuela.

32. Karl Rove: owns million dollar houses in Washington, D.C., and Florida, and works for Fox News, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal when not testifying to congressional committees or federal prosecutors about his numerous unindicted non-war crimes. He served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies, and took part in exposing an undercover agent as retribution for exposing one of WHIG’s lies.

(According to Star80 at DemocraticUnderground, Rove “can be found stuffing his fat pasty little face with crab meat at Cafe 30A in Santa Rosa Beach FL: http://www.cafethirtya.com – 3899 East County Highway 30A Santa Rosa Beach FL 32459.”)

(Citizens arrest of Rove attempted in Iowa, and in California, and in New York.)

33. I. Lewis Libby: lives in McLean, Virginia, and has been disbarred in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies, took part in exposing an undercover agent as retribution for exposing one of WHIG’s lies, has already been convicted of obstruction of justice for interfering with investigation, and pushed for wars of aggression for years as a participant in the Project for a New American Century.

34. Mary Matalin: married to James Carville, both of them addicted to Washington, D.C., served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies.

35. Stephen Hadley: served as National Security Advisor to the President in Washington, D.C., served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies, and took part in exposing an undercover agent as retribution for exposing one of WHIG’s lies.

36. James R. Wilkinson: worked for Bush as Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications in Washington, D.C., served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies.

37. John Bolton: lives in Bethesda, Maryland, is a member of a Lutheran Church, works for the law firm Kirkland and Ellis LLP, 655 Fifteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005-5793, T: +1 202-879-5000, F: +1 202-879-5200, is associated with the American Enterprise Institute, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Institute of East-West Dynamics, National Rifle Association, US Commission on International Religious Freedom, and the Council for National Policy, helped to launch an illegal war of aggression by disseminating false claims through the State Department while he was under-secretary of state for arms control, and pushed for wars of aggression for years as a participant in the Project for a New American Century.

38. Michael Chertoff: works in Washington, D.C. Some of his crimes are detailed at DisbarTortureLawyers.com.

39. Timothy Flanigan: works in Washington, D.C. Some of his crimes are detailed at DisbarTortureLawyers.com.

40. Alice Fisher: works in Washington, D.C. Some of her crimes are detailed at DisbarTortureLawyers.com.

41. John Bellinger works in Washington, D.C. His crimes are listed at War Criminals Watch.

42. John Negroponte works in Washington, D.C. His crimes are listed at War Criminals Watch.

43. Jonathan Fredman was a top torture lawyer under John Rizzo at the CIA: details.

44. Scott Muller was general counsel at the CIA: details.

45. Kyle D. “Dusty” Foggo was instrumental in setting up illegal secret prisons.

NEBRASKA:

46. Andrew Card works in Omaha, NE. His crimes are listed at War Criminals Watch.

AFGHANISTAN:

47. Stanley McChrystal has been promoted as reward for his war crimes.

UNKNOWN LOCATION:

48. James Mitchell:
From The 13 people who made torture possible:

Even while Addington, Gonzales and the lawyers were beginning to build the legal framework for torture, a couple of military psychologists were laying out the techniques the military would use. James Mitchell, a retired military psychologist, had been a leading expert in the military’s SERE program. In December 2001, with his partner, Bruce Jessen, Mitchell reverse-engineered SERE techniques to be used to interrogate detainees. Then, in the spring of 2002, before OLC gave official legal approval to torture, Mitchell oversaw Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. An FBI agent on the scene describes Mitchell overseeing the use of “borderline torture.” And after OLC approved waterboarding, Mitchell oversaw its use in ways that exceeded the guidelines in the OLC memo. Under Mitchell’s guidance, interrogators used the waterboard with “far greater frequency than initially indicated” — a total of 183 times in a month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times in a month for Abu Zubaydah.

More on Mitchell and Jessen.

49. Tommy Franks: His crimes are listed at War Criminals Watch.

50. Michael Hayden: His crimes are listed at War Criminals Watch.

Heck, let’s make it a full deck of 52, by including Bruce Jessen mentioned above and Erik Prince of Blackwater.

No Justice, No Peace

Judge’s comment on Rove’s citizen arrest in Iowa: “It’s about time.”

We encourage you to nonviolently protest these people and insist that they be given what so many of them have denied others: a fair trial. We encourage you to attempt to make citizen’s arrests, after consulting lawyers and learning how to avoid any unnecessary criminal risk to yourselves. It is possible to confront a war criminal at a public event and announce a “citizen’s arrest!” without actually touching (or handcuffing) the criminal.

You may want to avoid announcing that you’re coming, because the war criminal may choose to escape.

Your team should include one or more people who can produce an excellent video and be extremely fast in editing and posting it online. Your team should ideally include a lawyer. And, of course, people who can read the charges and question the suspect. Everyone on your team should be able to keep a secret while you’re planning your arrest or protest.

Read the war criminal their rights, rights they have denied others:
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

Read the war criminal the charges against them.

Ask the war criminal if they would like to say anything.

Once you have good video footage, your top priority becomes immediately getting it edited (if necessary) and online.

If possible, turn the war criminal over to the police.

Pass out flyers to passersby.

Send statement to the media and/or have the media present.

Consult a lawyer to avoid unnecessary risks of violating laws while enforcing the law. According to Wikipedia, “A citizen’s arrest is an arrest made by a person who is not a sworn law enforcement official. In common law jurisdictions, the practice dates back to medieval England and the English common law, when sheriffs encouraged ordinary citizens to help apprehend law breakers. Despite the title, the arresting person does not usually have to be a citizen of the country where he is acting, as they are usually designated as any person with arrest powers…

Each state with the exception of North Carolina permits citizen arrests if the commission of felony is witnessed by the arresting citizen… The application of state laws varies widely with respect to … felonies not witnessed by the arresting party. American citizens do not carry the authority or enjoy the legal protections of police, and are held to the principle of strict liability before the courts of civil- and criminal law including but not limited to any infringement of another’s rights.

Though North Carolina General Statutes have no provision for citizen’s arrests, detention by private persons is permitted and apply to both civilians and police officers outside their jurisdiction. Detention, being different from an arrest in the fact that a detainee may not be transported without consent, is permitted where probable cause exists that one has committed a felony, breach of peace, physical injury to another person, or theft or destruction of property … A person who makes a citizen’s arrest could risk exposing himself to possible lawsuits or criminal charges (such as charges of impersonating police, false imprisonment, kidnapping, or wrongful arrest) if the wrong person is apprehended or a suspect’s civil rights are violated.”

In the case of the war criminals we propose detaining, they are most if not all public figures and we have all witnessed their felonies, as detailed above.

Be prepared to post your video online in multiple places: Youtube, Google, and After Downing Street.

Known upcoming public appearances of war criminals who should be protested and citizen arrested: List. Map. See also: War Criminals Watch.

For more on holding the biggest criminals accountable, see http://prosecutebushcheney.org

See also: “Crimes and Misdemeanors: Slate’s interactive guide: Who in the Bush administration broke the law, and who could be prosecuted?” by Emily Bazelon, Kara Hadge, Dahlia Lithwick, and Chris Wilson. This guide includes some of those complicit in crimes other than war crimes, such as DOJ hirings and firings, destruction of CIA tapes, and illegal spying. (Of course, Karl Rove shows up in every part of every list.)

David Swanson is the founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and the author of the upcoming book “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union” by Seven Stories Press.  You can pre-order it for a discount price here.

At a federal court hearing Tuesday, Jeffrey Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that the transcript of Cheney’s 2004 interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA leak should remain secret for as long as 10 more years to protect Cheney from any political embarrassment that would result from the transcript being released

Last month, Smith cited the possibility that the transcript’s release might discourage future vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigations because their words could become “fodder for The Daily Show.”

When Smith revived that argument on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan said, “You’re getting back to the Daily Show exemption. You’re not going back there, are you?”

A skeptical Sullivan asked Smith, “How do you distinguish the political fray from the public’s right to know what the government is up to?”

Smith said he was simply arguing that high-level officials like Cheney would be unwilling to speak to criminal investigators if there was a chance that what they said privately would become public. “Presidents don’t really have to cooperate if they really don’t want to,” Smith said.

Last week, Smith argued in court documents that just because Cheney voluntarily agreed to be interviewed by the special prosecutor investigating the leak of Valerie Plame’s covert CIA identity doesn’t mean Cheney “waived any privileges to which he may have been entitled to” since “none of the privileges at issue here was ever his to waive.”

In a footnote contained in a 12-page court filing, Smith wrote, “These privileges belong to the government. The presidential communications privilege belongs to the President; the deliberative process privilege asserted here belongs to the White House; and the law enforcement privilege asserted here belongs to DOJ.

“A government official, even one as senior as the Vice President cannot implicitly waive these governmental privileges by individually submitting to an interview.”

Though Judge Sullivan didn’t issue a ruling in the case, he didn’t appear swayed by the government’s arguments. He said the Justice Department was, in effect, requesting that he “legislate” by issuing some sort of special Freedom of Information Act exemption for vice presidents, which was something “the courts can’t do,” according to a transcript of the hearing.

“What you are asking the court to do is issue a ruling that says every time a special investigator calls a vice president to come down to testify, that information is protected from the public,” Sullivan said.

“No, that’s not it at all,” Smith responded.

Smith said he simply was concerned the transcript would become part of the “political fray” – and that by withholding it for as long as 10 years, its use would be limited to historical purposes.

Time Capsule

That argument brought another incredulous response from Sullivan. “Would there be some impediment to putting this information in a time capsule to be examined by future inhabitants of this world?” Sullivan asked. “Where do I draw the line? This happened five years ago.”

The case stems from a FOIA lawsuit filed last year by the public interest group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is seeking access to Cheney’s interview transcript and now has confronted denials from both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The resistance from the Obama administration has left some of its supporters shaking their heads. Not only does the obstruction go against President Obama’s pledge of government openness, but it is protecting the reputation of former Vice President Cheney, one of Obama’s most vocal critics.

The administration’s position also seems to equate with cheap partisanship a request for information about a major controversy from George W. Bush’s presidency – the leaking of Plame’s covert CIA identity as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was an early Iraq War critic.

In a declaration filed with the court earlier this month, Lanny Breuer, an assistant attorney general for the criminal division, said releasing Cheney’s interview transcript could discourage cooperation from future vice presidents and thus would raise “the specter of the grand jury process” each time there was a demand to investigate “baseless, partisan allegations.”

In last week’s filing, Obama’s Justice Department even took an apparent swipe at the House Oversight Committee, which investigated the Plame leak for the past several years. The filing noted that the Cheney transcript was initially sought by “a congressional subpoena from a committee that appeared to be conducting a contentious investigation of the White House.”

In seeking to block disclosure of the transcript this month, Obama’s Justice Department did reveal some new details about special prosecutor Fitzgerald’s interrogation of Cheney. According to one reference in the court filing, Bush and Cheney were in contact about the scandal, including what is described as “a confidential conversation” and “an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President.”

The filing also made clear that Cheney was at the center of White House machinations rebutting criticism from Wilson, who charged in summer 2003 that the Bush administration had “twisted” intelligence to justify invading Iraq in March 2003. While seeking to discredit Wilson, administration officials disclosed to reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.

Besides the contacts with Bush, the filing referenced Cheney’s questions to the CIA about its decision to send Wilson to Africa in 2002 to investigate – and ultimately refute – suspicions that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger.

Cheney was asked, too, about his role in arranging a statement by then-CIA Director George Tenet taking responsibility for including a misleading claim about the African uranium in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, and Cheney’s discussions with his chief of staff I. Lewis Libby and other White House officials about how to respond to inquiries regarding the leak of Plame’s identity, the court filing said.

Fitzgerald also questioned Cheney about his participation in the decision to declassify parts of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s alleged WMD. It ultimately fell to Bush to clear selected parts of the NIE so they could be leaked as part of the White House campaign to disparage Wilson.

CREW had represented the Wilson’s in a civil lawsuit against Cheney and other Bush administration officials, which Obama’s Justice Department asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reject. The High Court dismissed the case last month.

Judge Sullivan said if he issues a ruling in favor of CREW, he would allow the government to appeal his decision before ordering the release of the transcript.

Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said the probe will be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which the CIA informs Congress about its covert activities and other matters.

Reyes, in announcing the wide-ranging probe Friday, said he had consulted with the panel’s ranking Republican minority leader, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and other committee members. Reyes said he and concluded that an investigation into “possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1947” were warranted. Under that law, the CIA must keep Congress “fully and currently informed” via classified briefings about its intelligence activities.

“This investigation will focus on the core issue of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed,” Reyes said. “To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during Director Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any past decision or direction to withhold information from the Committee.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that her subcommittee will handle some part of the investigation into the CIA’s assassination program, which may have extended beyond al-Qaeda targets, according to veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker.

“Why was there such a high-level determination to keep it secret? And how may it have changed over all these years? And why was it immediately ended as soon as the current CIA director learned of it?” she said, describing the areas of focus for her subcommittee.

Reyes’ aides said the investigation will also delve into the use of torture by CIA interrogators and contractors against alleged “high-level” detainees, the agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, 12 of which depict acts of torture against two prisoners, and the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program.

These aides added that the probe will also look into claims made by former CIA official Mary O. McCarthy, who accused senior agency officials of lying to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing in 2005 when they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May 14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.

“A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that ‘CIA people had lied’ in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading,” The Washington Post reported.

On the matter of domestic surveillance, Bob Graham, the committee’s former Democratic chairman, said in 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet and National Intelligence Director Michael Hayden (who later headed the CIA) lied to him about the extent of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance and never provided him with a full and complete briefing.

In an interview with ABC’s “Nightline” on Dec. 15, 2005 – after the New York Times disclosed the existence of the warrantless wiretapping program – Graham said he attended meetings in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in 2001 and discussed surveillance activities, but added that neither Cheney nor then-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden spoke about a plan to spy on Americans. (CIA Director George Tenet also took part in the meeting.)

“The issue was whether we could intercept foreign communications when they transited through U.S. communication sites,” Graham said. “The assumption was that if we did that, we would do it pursuant to the law, the law that regulates the surveillance of national security issues. …

“There was no suggestion that we were going to begin eavesdropping on United States citizens without following the full law. There was no reference made to the fact that we were going to use that as the subterfuge to begin unwarranted, illegal — and I think unconstitutional — eavesdropping on American citizens.”

Graham suggested that Cheney and the intelligence officials had lied to him and other members of congressional intelligence panels.

Cheney and other Bush administration officials – aided by Republican lawmakers – responded to Graham’s comments with a fierce counterattack. In another “Nightline” interview on Dec. 18, 2005, Cheney said Graham, as well as other members of Congress knew that the administration intended to spy on the phone calls of some Americans.

“He knew,” Cheney said. “I sat in my office with Gen. Hayden, who was then the head of NSA, who’s now the deputy director of the National Intelligence Directorate, and he [Graham] was briefed as long as he was chairman of the committee, or ranking member of the committee.”

Last week, an unclassified report prepared by inspectors general of five federal agencies said George W. Bush’s surveillance program was far more expansive than his administration had publicly revealed and that much of it was concealed from Congress.

The issue of the CIA’s use of torture and whether the agency fully informed top lawmakers on the Senate and House intelligence committees in 2002 and 2003 about techniques used against “high-level” detainees was called into question a few months back when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed she was never told that the CIA tortured prisoners at secret “black site” prisons using methods such as waterboarding.

But a CIA document turned over in May to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking minority member, that contained the dates and a summary of the briefings given to a select group of congressional leaders, including Pelosi as well as Graham, about “EIT’s” or “enhanced interrogation techniques…employed” against “high-value” detainees.

Republicans seized upon the document as a way of showing that Democrats were complicit in the Bush administration’s torture program by not raising objections to the use of specific interrogation methods when they were briefed.

But the briefing document turned over to Hoekstra was rife with errors. Three of the four dates in which the CIA said it had briefed Graham don’t match his records.

“When I asked the CIA when was I briefed, they gave me four dates, two in April and two in September of ’02. On three of the four occasions, when I consulted my schedule and my notes, it was clear that no briefing had taken place, and the CIA eventually concurred in that. So their record keeping is a little bit suspect,” Graham said.

One of the disputed dates for a briefing on interrogations – in April 2002 – fell in the same month as one of the supposed briefings on surveillance. In both cases, Graham said no briefings took place.

Moreover, Graham said he was not told about the CIA’s torture techniques, which the agency’s records claim were explained to Graham and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama.

The CIA document also alleged that Pelosi was given a full accounting of the torture program, but Pelosi said in May that the CIA briefers obscured the fact that the agency already had begun subjecting prisoners to the near-drowning of waterboarding and was using other torture techniques.

The CIA also erred in 2006 when a four-page memo from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was turned over to Congress several that contained the dates lawmakers were briefed about the surveillance program, briefings that began shortly after President George W. Bush signed a highly classified executive order that removed some legal restrictions against spying on US. citizens.

The memo contained four dates that alleged Graham – along with Pelosi, then ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and their Republican counterparts, Rep. Porter Goss and Shelby – were briefed on Oct. 25, 2001, Nov. 14, 2001, April 10, 2002, and July 8, 2002. A cover letter accompanying Negroponte’s letter said the briefings took place at the White House.

But Graham, who famously keeps a detailed journal of his daily schedule, said he checked those dates against his own records, which revealed no briefings on Oct. 25, 2001 and April 10, 2002. The memo had claimed Graham was the only lawmaker briefed on April 10, 2002. On July 8, 2002, the document said Graham and Shelby were briefed.

“When I got those dates, I went back to my notebooks and checked and found that on most of the dates there were no meetings held,” Graham said in September 2007. “In fact, in several of them, I wasn’t in Washington when the meetings were supposed to have taken place. So I stand by what I said.”

Graham said he did attend briefings on the two other dates but he told the Washington Post “there was no discussion of anything [about spying on Americans' telephone calls] in the meeting with Cheney.”

“I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy,” Graham said.

Briefing lawmakers last month about a covert CIA assassination program that was recently shut down, CIA Director Panetta said it was Cheney who ordered the agency not to inform Congress about the covert activity for eight years, according to several lawmakers, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, and numerous media reports.

Last week, after attempts to get Panetta to change a statement he made in May in which he said it was not the CIA’s “policy or practice to mislead Congress” failed, Reyes and other Democrats on the intelligence committee publicly released a letter they sent the CiA director characterizing his briefing to them.

The letter was sent by Reyes to Hoekstra and other top lawmakers on the intelligence panel. It said CIA officials “affirmatively lied” to the panel, presumably about the assassination program, and misinformed the committee about on numerous occasions about other intelligence matters.

Republicans, including Hoekstra, said Democrats were trying to cover for Pelosi’s accusations that the CIA lied to her. On Friday, Hoekstra said neither he nor his Republican colleagues would support an investigation into the CIA.

“At no time will the Republicans of this committee agree to or take part in congressional Democrats efforts to tear down the CIA to provide cover for Speaker Pelosi,” Hoekstra said in a statement Friday.

However, the committee will also probe accusations that the CIA lied to Congress, as revealed in an agency watchdog report, about the shooting down of an airplane over Peru in 2001 carrying American missionaries. Hoekstra was the lawmaker who accused the CIA of lying to Congress about the incident, a fact that he has since distanced himself from.