“On March 18, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned as Deputy Legal Adviser to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the British equivalent of the U.S. State Department.

“‘I regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal, and I therefore did not feel able to continue in my post,’ she said later. Ms. Wilmshurst discussed her resignation while appearing before the current British inquiry into the Iraq War — the Chilcot Inquiry.

“In an office of 35 or so lawyers, she may have been the only one to resign. However, she testified that her perspective was shared unanimously among all the FCO Legal Advisers, including the head of the office, Sir Michael Wood.

“Sir Michael himself told the Chilcot Inquiry: ‘I considered that the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law. In my opinion, that use of force had not been authorized by the Security Council, and had no other legal basis in international law.’

“In sum: every lawyer charged with advising the British government on the legality of the Iraq invasion believed it was illegal.”

And, of course, we already knew this. And, of course, we did not need to know it. We just need to read the U.N. Charter to know that aggressive wars are illegal. Dyer spends most of the rest of his article pointing out that even a hobbled toothless inquiry treating public documents as untouchable because “classified” and leading to no law enforcement actions is a giant leap forward from anything happening in the United States, the nation chiefly responsible for the crime under “investigation.”

The Chilcot inquiry may ask to meet with former U.S. officials, as noted by UPI, which also reports on the latest smoking gun tossed high onto the pile of thousands of smoking guns:

“Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says he will check records of his pre-Iraq invasion phone calls with then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“Straw made the promise Monday to Britain’s Iraq Inquiry panel after allegations emerged that Powell told him in the weeks prior to the 2001 Iraq invasion that President George W. Bush would invade the country even if Saddam Hussein complied with nuclear arms inspectors, The Times of London reported.

“The newspaper said the calls became an issue after Straw defended his decision to dismiss the advice of his chief legal adviser that the war would be unlawful.

“Inquiry panel member Lawrence Freedman, hinting that the panel may have documents showing Bush planned to attack Iraq even if U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix found that Saddam was complying with U.N. resolution 1441, asked Straw, ‘Was there any point where Powell said to you that even if Iraq complied, President Bush had already made a decision to go to war?’

“The Times said Straw, now Britain’s justice secretary, replied, ‘Certainly not to the best of my recollection. I would have to check the record of my many conversations I had with Secretary Powell.’”

But that is not how Straw replied. And there was more than a hint here that the questioner already knew the answer. This “inquiry” is being conducted by panelists in possession of numerous documents, both public and still private, that they are forbidden to discuss. The Downing Street Minutes and every other piece of documentation long since confirming for the public the truth into which this show is “inquiring” are deemed “classified” and unmentionable by the Chilcoteers. So, what would it look like to question Straw about a document proving Powell had told him (as the entire world outside of U.S. television viewers knows by now the United States told the United Kingdom) that Bush was going to war regardless of Iraq’s behavior?

Here’s Chris Floyd’s account:

“And so, to close out its first phase, the Chilcot Inquiry recalled Straw — who had already given one sweaty, white-knuckle performance on the witness stand a few weeks ago. With the implacable politesse of the true British mandarin, panelist Sir Lawrence Freedman seized the opportunity to suggest to the right honorable minister that the right honorable minister might, perhaps, be lying through his right honorable teeth in denying that Colin Powell had informed him quite clearly that the Americans were going to war, come hell or high water, in March 2003. As the Guardian notes, Freedman’s questions make it clear that [he] has obviously seen some very interesting paperwork. Here is the exchange, from the Guardian:

“Freedman asked: Can you start by confirming that you knew that military action was planned by the US for the middle of March come what may? You were copied in, presumably, to reports of conversations between the prime minister and the president?

“Straw replied: Yes, I don’t think there was any key document that I should have seen that I didn’t.

“Freedman: Was there any point where [Colin] Powell said to you that even if Iraq complied, president Bush had already made a decision that he intended to go to war?

“Straw replied: Certainly not to the best of my recollection.

“Freedman went on: I was going to suggest you might want to look through your conversations and check.

“Mr Straw at last got the hint: I will go through the records because I think you are trying to tell me something.

“Yes, Mr Straw. He is trying to tell you, and the world, that he has the paper in his hand documenting your conversation with Colin Powell: a clear admission of the war crime of military aggression, as it reveals that there was not even a pretense of a legally justifiable casus belli among the American and British leaders — just the cold, pre-determined intention to attack.”

And yet, what the best of our commentators across the Atlantic seem to miss is that the illegality of the war is taken as a point in its favor in the United States. “Proving” its illegality yet again is not really interesting in Washington. The Washington Post deemed it old news prior to ever mentioning it. President Obama openly declared his power to launch illegal wars in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech some weeks back. For us, an inquiry into war lies is a quaint tourist destination, like a European town with pedestrian streets and neighbors who speak to each other. We love visiting such things, but we wouldn’t want to live there.

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

Throughout 2009, the interagency task force President Obama established by executive order on January 22, 2009, has been reviewing the cases of all the detainees being held at Guantánamo in order to determine who should be prosecuted and who should be released.

There are currently 198 prisoners still being held, 86 of whom — or 43 percent — are from Yemen.

In October, the Task Force reported that 78 prisoners had been cleared for release, including 27 Yemenis, and last month the total number of prisoners cleared had been revised upwards to 116, indicating that 40 to 45 Yemenis had been cleared (the administration did not provide exact figures this time around).

One of these men, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a student seized in a Pakistani guest house whose release had been ordered by a District Court judge in May, after she granted his habeas corpus petition, was released in October, and six more men were released the week before Christmas.

Then, on Christmas Day, a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried but failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit by setting off a bomb concealed in his underwear.

Initial reports suggested that Abdulmutallab had connections with an al-Qaeda-inspired group in Yemen, which included prisoners released from Guantánamo. And that was enough for critics of Obama’s decision to close the prison to demand that no more Yemenis should be released.

Although Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan mounted a solid defense of the administration’s plans last weekend, on Tuesday the White House succumbed to continuing criticism and announced that no more transfers to Yemen would take place until some unspecified point in the future.

The problem with the argument that new information precludes their release is that none of it has anything to do with men who have been held in Guantánamo for the past eight years, entirely out of circulation, and obviously with no links to any terrorist group that has emerged in recent years. Moreover, the Obama administration has been reviewing the cases of the Yemenis in Guantánamo with some diligence, and had no intention of releasing men who might pose a danger. It has also been coordinating its efforts with the Yemeni government.

Furthermore, conclusions are being reached based, at least initially, on a poorly researched ABC News report, which indicated that two former prisoners had assumed leadership positions in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group that claimed responsibility for the failed attack. However, these connections have not been verified, and, moreover, one of the two former prisoners identified by ABC News had actually handed himself in to the Yemeni authorities in February last year, long before Abdulmutallab arrived in Yemen.

Indeed, what’s actually significant about these new developments is how the nationality of these men and who was responsible for releasing them in the first place have been overlooked in all the hysteria. The fact that these men were Saudis, and not Yemenis, has, rather shamefully, been ignored by the lawmakers and pundits calling for an end to the Yemeni transfers. Even more damning is the fact that they — and a handful of other released Saudis who are reportedly associated with terrorism — were released not by President Obama but by George W. Bush, after military review boards in which representatives of the intelligence services concluded that they should not be released, because they still posed a threat to the U.S.

The inescapable conclusion from all this is that the refusal to release any more Yemeni prisoners, whose cases have been studied in depth by numerous government representatives, represents nothing less than a capitulation to the most dismal kind of hysteria.

One of the most astonishing arguments in this entire debate has been that Guantánamo inmates such as these Yemenis, even if they were innocent to begin with, have been radicalized by their false imprisonment and brutal treatment and are now dangers to the U.S. But this kind of thinking must be vigorously countered.

Back in October, when the administration was attempting not to release Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed — despite a judge ordering his release — officials told the New York Times: “Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002 … Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States.”

But as I argued at the time, only at Guantánamo can fear trump justice to such an alarming degree. If the rationale for not releasing any of the Yemenis from Guantánamo was extended to the U.S. prison system, for instance, it would mean that no prisoner would ever be released at the end of their sentence. It would also, of course, lead to no prisoner ever being released from Guantánamo.

If prisoners are not going to be released, despite being cleared by Obama’s own Task Force (and, in some cases, by the U.S. courts), the entire system is revealed as a mockery of justice. And in its capitulation to the unprincipled fearmongering following the failed Christmas bomb plot, it seems to me that the Obama administration has played into the hands of those whose only wish is to keep Guantánamo open forever.

Background

Eighty-six of the remaining 198 prisoners are Yemeni (that’s 43 percent). In common with the rest of the prisoners — and in contrast to the Bush administration’s claims that they were “the worst of the worst” and were all “captured on the battlefield” — they were seized in a variety of locations.

Around 22 were seized in Afghanistan, another 35 were seized crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan in December 2001, 25 were seized between February and September 2002 in house raids in Pakistan (including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the alleged 9/11 plotters), and four were seized in other countries — Egypt, Georgia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Like two of the prisoners seized in Pakistan, including bin al-Shibh, these four were held in a number of secret prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo.

Ascertaining what these men were doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains a challenge. Some, encouraged by fatwas issued in their homeland, had traveled to Afghanistan to help the Taliban establish what was described as a “pure Islamic state.” This involved helping the Taliban defeat their enemies (the Northern Alliance) in an inter-Muslim civil war that began many years before the 9/11 attacks and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Others, however, had traveled for other reasons: to teach the Koran, or to provide humanitarian aid, and, in the cases of those who had traveled to Pakistan, some were students or were visiting in search of cheap medical treatment. Few are accused of any direct involvement in terrorism.

Part of the problem is that the Bush administration deliberately confused a war (against the Taliban) with the attempt to destroy al-Qaeda (a terrorist organization), holding everyone seized as “enemy combatants.” Instead, those accused of aiding the Taliban should have been held as prisoners of war, and protected by the Geneva Conventions, and those accused of aiding al-Qaeda should have been held as criminal suspects and put forward for federal court trials, as happened with Ramzi Yousef, the original World Trade Center bomber, the 1998 African embassy bombers, the shoe bomber Richard Reid, and the would-be 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui.

It did not help that the majority of the prisoners (86 percent at least) were seized not by US forces, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head, were widespread, as researchers at the Seton Hall Law School demonstrated in 2006, through an analysis of the Pentagon’s own allegations.

Nor did it help that, despite the US military’s intentions, none of the prisoners received competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions. Held close to the time and place of capture, and used in every war from Vietnam onwards, the tribunals were designed to allow prisoners whose status was in doubt (because they were not wearing uniforms, for example, or did not have a regular command structure) to call witnesses, to establish whether they were combatants or civilians caught by mistake. In the first Gulf War, 1,196 hearings were held, and 886 men were released. In Afghanistan, however, the need for tribunals was dismissed by the administration, with the result that, in the words of Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo in 2002, the prison began filling up with “Mickey Mouse prisoners,” who had no involvement whatsoever with terrorism.

This column was originally published on the website of Nieman Watchdog.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

That AUMF was the handiwork of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and it was rammed through House and Senate with almost no debate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to justify most of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and Bill of Rights that are still haunting America and the world today.

While Congress saw the 2001 AUMF as an authorization to launch an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan  (an attack that quickly toppled the Taliban government, but that famously failed to crush Al Qaeda, thanks to its being called off half a year later so troops could be shifted to a new war in the making against Iraq), Bush and Cheney interpreted it as a “declaration of war” in a “global war on terror,” which they claimed had no border, no end, and which they even tried to claim extended to within the boundaries of the US.

So anxious were Bush and Cheney to be permanent wartime generalissimos, unfettered by Constitutional constraints, that just minutes before the measure went to the Senate for a vote, according to then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, they sought to add the words “in the United States” after the phrase “appropriate force” in the language of the resolution. As Daschle, who wisely refused their request, notes, “This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas—where we all understood he wanted authority to act—but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens.”

The point though, is that the 2001 AUMF was in fact an authorization to use military force to go after terrorism.  It was not an authorization to conduct a full-scale war against another nation, or to become enmeshed in a civil war in another nation, which is what is going on in Afghanistan today. That, in fact, is why even Bush felt he needed a second AUMF to authorize his invasion of Iraq.

President Obama is trying to finesse this by falsely claiming, with a straight face, that Afghanistan is the “epicenter or terrorist activity” in the world. He is deliberately trying—and getting full support from the complicit corporate media—to conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda to justify his absurd claim, too, by also falsely claiming in his speech that several unnamed “terrorists” have been apprehended in the US who were sent here recently from some ill-defined terror central inside of Afghanistan.

The truth is that not one act of terrorism outside of Afghanistan has been attributed to the Taliban of Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban, while admittedly a brutal, reactionary, fundamentalist group of militant Islamists, are not global jihadis bent on wreaking havoc in the Western world or even in the rest of the Islamic world. They are a domestic Afghan military and political movement that is seeking to return to power in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda, the organization that was the target of the Congressional AUMF resolution in 2001, has long since abandoned Afghanistan for safer, greener pastures.

This being the case, Obama’s war in Afghanistan, and especially his decision to intensify it dramatically, is being conducted illegally, without any actual authorization from Congress, as required by the Constitution.

If the president wants to mire the US further and more deeply in a civil war in Afghanistan at this point, aimed at defeating the Taliban in that country, he should at least be required to obtain a new resolution in Congress authorization that action.

As a constitutional lawyer, the president knows that he is acting illegally, which is why he was so careful in his speech to West Point cadets on Tuesday to make the bogus claim that Afghanistan remains the epicenter of terrorism. But governing by lies is no way to govern, and the American people will eventually realize that they have been lied to. Indeed, the fact that a majority of Americans, according to polls, want to see the Afghan War ended, shows that even given the biased pro-war media, most people understand this on some level.

The Bush/Cheney administration did much to undermine and wreck Constitutional government during their eight years in office. Many people had hoped that Obama was serious when he said during his campaign that he wanted to restore Constitutional governance if elected. But by his latest move, putting the US into a full-scale war in Afghanistan on the basis of a lie and without any genuine war resolution from Congress, he has joined his predecessor in further debasing both the Constitution and language itself.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include accusations of serious sexual abuse and torture, including one case in which a 16-year-old Iraqi says he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has likened the alleged abuse to the torture that took place in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which was run by US forces.

According to a report by the Associated Press, the 16-year-old boy claimed “that he was among a group of Iraqis in May 2003 who were taken to the Shatt-al-Arab British camp to help fill sandbags.”

In a statement reported by The Independent newspaper, he alleged when he entered a room to get more sandbags he saw two British male soldiers engaged in oral sex. When he tried to leave, he alleges the men started to beat and kick him. When he fell to the floor, he claims one of the men held a blade to his neck while the other soldier stripped him naked. He claims the two British soldiers, one after the other, raped him.

In another claim:

[A] 35-year-old carpenter said he was arrested in April 2006 and taken to the British camp at Shaaibah where he alleges he was subjected to sexual abuse and humiliation by both male and female soldiers.He alleged soldiers used to watch pornographic films and would play loud music when he tried to pray. He also alleged that female soldiers exposed themselves or taunted him sexually. He alleged a soldier in the observation tower used to point the laser spot of his gun at his penis when he was in the toilet.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defense said it was taking the allegations “very seriously.”

“Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves to the highest standards of behavior, displaying integrity and selfless commitment,” the ministry’s statement said. “There have been instances when individuals have behaved badly but only a tiny number have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards. Allegations of this nature are taken very seriously but must not be taken as fact. Formal investigations must be allowed to take their course.”

President Obama has repaired much of the scarred reputation of the United States and restored the hope of Americans and people everywhere who opposed the antidemocratic and authoritarian acts of the Bush administration. In less than a year, he has personally revived the indispensible role of the United States to renew multilateral diplomacy, arms control and disarmament, and human and civil rights.

The Bush administration created a strategic nightmare for U.S. interests at home and abroad over the past eight years. The Iraq War remains the center of this nightmare, and President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney worked assiduously to create and employ a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. Their manipulation of the American people (and the international community) is still not fully understood, but their lies and disinformation became conventional wisdom to the mainstream media, falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and Iraqis to al-Qaeda.

How many Americans gave their lives in Iraq actually believing the propaganda about these links as well as the outright lies and fabrications about Iraq’s enriched uranium, aluminum tubes for nuclear testing, and mobile biological laboratories. The CIA  incorporated these lies into a speech for Secretary of State Colin Powell, which was delivered to the United Nations just several weeks before the start of the Iraq War.

The Bush administration’s misuse of the intelligence community to make a phony case for war was matched by the politicization of virtually every agency in the national security arena. In addition to politicizing intelligence to make the case for war, the Central Intelligence Agency was brought into a world of secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. In an act of raw cynicism, President Bush gave the President’s Freedom Award, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a civilian in the federal government, to CIA director George Tenet, who directed these policies.

The National Security Agency developed an illegal intrusion into the privacy of Americans with a program of warrantless eavesdropping that was far more comprehensive than we were led to believe. (The New York Times covered-up this story for more than a year.) The developer of the policy was NSA director Michael Hayden, who was then confirmed as director of CIA with nary a question from the Congress on his role in warrantless eavesdropping.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the Patriot Act to issue more than 30,000 “national security” letters every year to individuals and businesses, which required telecommunications companies and financial institutions to illegally disclose private information about their customers. The FBI also conducted an aggressive campaign of ethnic profiling against Arabs and Muslims that led nowhere.

The Pentagon played a major role in the campaign of politicization, creating the Office of Special Plans and the Counter Terrorist Evaluation Group to circulate phony and worthless intelligence to make the case for war. The Pentagon also created the Counter Intelligence Field Activity to conduct illegal surveillance against American citizens near U.S military facilities or in attendance at antiwar meetings.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created an illegal fact-gathering operation called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) to collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.”  Readers of “Animal Farm” will not be amused.  President Obama certainly wasn’t; he has ended secret prisons, torture and abuse, and depoliticized the Department of Justice to make sure that renditions (and there have been none since his inauguration) are accompanied by judicial review and that the military respects the sovereignty of American citizens.

President Obama has methodically taken on these departments in an effort to demilitarize national security policy.  The military will find slower growth in its inflated defense budgets, genuine arms control and disarmament with Russia, and a rejection of General Stanley McChrystal’s demands for 40,000-50,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the president recognizes the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Saturday, the president pledged to end President Bill Clinton’s hypocritical policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which increased the hazing of gays in the military and abruptly ended the service of nearly 13,000 fighting men and women.

The CIA has had to accept the release of the Justice Department torture memoranda as well as the investigation of those CIA officers who conducted torture and abuse in excess of Justice Department guidelines. President Obama dismissed the objections of seven former CIA directors to this investigation. The CIA’s strategic intelligence may continue to have shortcomings, but not because the White House is demanding politicization of the intelligence product.

President Obama also inherited the numerous false representations of the Bush era, which damaged U.S. interests. The almost forgotten “axis of evil” speech of January 2002 illustrates the harm that the policies of President Bush did to our vital interests.  In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States and Iran engaged successfully in secret talks to deal with the chaos in Afghanistan in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban.

The Iranians were elated to cooperate with us and to bolster the new Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai. Fortunately for our interests, Iran was holding under house arrest former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the most brutal mujaheddin leaders and a major recipient of U.S. assistance throughout the 1980s. Hekmatyar and his followers represented a major threat to the Karzai government, and we wanted him moved from house arrest to real arrest and eventual transfer to Afghan custody.

Following President Bush’s “axis” speech, however, which absurdly linked Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, the Tehran government released Hekmatyar and returned him to Afghanistan, where he resumed his leadership of the Hezb-i-Islami organization that is one of the deadliest insurgent forces in eastern Afghanistan. U.S. troops are taking their highest casualties in eastern Afghanistan since the invasion in eight years ago. President Obama’s new opening with Iran allows the United States to return the bilateral dialogue to the period after 9/11.

In less than a year, President Obama’s actions have significantly reversed the increased anti-Americanism and the decline in American influence that took place in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize will enhance his credibility as well as the credibility of U.S. diplomacy. Troglodyte editorial writers may accuse the Nobel Committee of being “trapped in an adolescent adulation of Mr. Obama” (Financial Times) or describe a “certain cluelessness about America” (Washington Post), but the mere promise of Obama’s international agenda has led intransigent nations that seemed frozen in time to try to join the dialogue that Obama has started.

In the past few months, leaders in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and even Burma have taken steps to enhance their international credentials. On Saturday, Turkey and Armenia, which had been prodded by the Obama administration, restored their diplomatic relations and reopened borders that had been closed since 1993. The Nobel Peace Prize gives moral weight and credibility to those who fight to end oppression and to energize international conciliation.

What in the world do the critics of the prize think that President Obama is trying valiantly to do?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. 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.

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.

In a blog post on his website, Reich wrote:

Universal health care has bedeviled, eluded or defeated every president for the last 75 years. Franklin Roosevelt left it out of Social Security because he was afraid it would be too complicated and attract fierce resistance. Harry Truman fought like hell for it but ultimately lost. Dwight Eisenhower reshaped the public debate over it. John Kennedy was passionate about it. Lyndon Johnson scored the first and last major victory on the road toward achieving it. Richard Nixon devised the essential elements of all future designs for it. Jimmy Carter tried in vain to re-engineer it. The first George Bush toyed with it. Bill Clinton lost it and then never mentioned it again. George W. expanded it significantly, but only for retirees.

All the while, the ideal of universal care has revolved around two poles. In the 1930s, liberals imagined a universal right to health care tied to compulsory insurance, like Social Security. Johnson based Medicare on this idea, and it survives today as the “single-payer model” of universal health care, or “Medicare for all.” The alternative proposal, starting with Eisenhower, was to create a market for health care based on private insurers and employers; he locked in the tax break for employee health benefits. Nixon came up with notions of prepaid, competing H.M.O.’s and urged a requirement that employers cover their employees. Everything since has been a variation on one or both of these competing visions. The plan now emerging from the White House and the Democratic Congress combines an aspect of the first (the public health care option) with several of the second (competing plans and an employer requirement to “pay or play”).

Devising a plan is easy compared with the politics of getting it enacted. Mere mention of national health insurance has always prompted a vigorous response from the ever-vigilant American Medical Association; in the 1930s, the editor of its journal equated national health care with “socialism, communism, inciting to revolution.” Bill Clinton’s plan was buried under an avalanche of hostility that included the now legendary ad featuring the couple Harry and Louise voicing their fears that the Clinton plan would substitute government for individual choice — “they choose, we lose.”

Reich added that it’s crucial that a “new president must move quickly, before opponents have time to stoke public fears.” He said after Johnson’s 1964 landslide the new president “warned his staff to push Medicare immediately because “every day while I’m in office, I’m going to lose votes. I’m going to alienate somebody. We’ve got to get this legislation fast.”

Moreover, “Presidents who have been most successful in moving the country toward universal health coverage have disregarded or overruled their economic advisers.” Still, Reich said Congress could end up being the biggest “obstacle” to enacting reform and that’s why it remains the president’s responsibility to “set broad health reform goals and allow legislators to fill in the details, but be ready to knock heads together to forge a consensus.”

President Obama seems to have anticipated many of these lessons. He’s moved as quickly on the issue as this terrible economy has let him, and he has not been too rattled by naysaying economists (although the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office set him back). But although he outlined his goals but left most details to Congress, the lesson from history is that he may have waited too long to force a deal on that disorderly body (especially disorderly when Democrats are in charge). The question remains whether, in the weeks and months ahead, he can knock Congressional heads together to clinch it, and overcome those who inevitably feed public fears about a “government takeover” of health care and of budget-busting future expenditures. He needs to work fast, and be tough as nails.

But, while the media has focused virtually all its attention on these foreign prisoners held abroad, the government is already imprisoning in the U.S. American citizens awaiting trial on terror-related charges  – and under what their supporters describe as draconian conditions.

These people are being held under a Department of Justice rule known as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), a rule dating from the Bill Clinton era and strengthened during the administration of George W. Bush.

SAMs are designed to keep dangerous inmates in custody from communicating with other terror suspects on the outside, and to prevent them from ordering violence or harming other inmates. The measures were expanded after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, extending the limit to one year from 120 days and permitting the monitoring of communications between the inmates and their lawyers in certain circumstances.

The DOJ and its Bureau of Prisons say six people – four charged with terror-related crimes — are currently being held under the SAMs rule. But one case appears to be attracting increasing attention.

This is the case of Syed Hashmi, a 29-year-old Pakistani immigrant and U.S. citizen who grew up in Queens, New York, and who has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in New York City for more than two years while he awaits trial on charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda.

Hashmi, a Muslim, is on a 23-hour solitary-confinement lockdown and 24-hour surveillance including when he showers and goes to the bathroom. He was not allowed family visits for months. Now, he can see one person for an hour and a half, every other week. He is permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper per letter. Within his own cell, he is restricted in his movements and he is not allowed to try to talk guards or other inmates.

Hashmi is forbidden any contact — directly or through his attorneys — with the news media. He can read newspapers, but only those portions approved by his jailers — and not until 30 days after publication. He is forbidden to listen to news radio stations or to watch television news channels.

He is also under 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside of his cell. He is allowed one hour of recreation every day — which is periodically denied — and not given fresh air but must exercise alone inside a cage.

One of Hashmi’s Brooklyn College professors, Jeanne Theoharis, who has attended the hearings in his case, told us that Hashmi’s  “mental health appears to be deteriorating.” His attorneys are concerned that his extreme isolation “will cause lasting psychological, emotional, and physical damage” to their client.

Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, was instrumental in organizing a campaign to draw attention to the civil liberties and human rights concerns of Hashmi’s case that enlisted more than 550 signatories to petition the Justice Department protesting the conditions of Hashmi’s confinement and undermining his right to a fair trial. Among them were Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Duncan Kennedy of Harvard; Seyla Benhabib of Yale; and Eric Foner and Saskia Sassen of Columbia.

Prosecutors have said that Hashmi’s friend, Junaid Babar, stayed at his London apartment for two weeks, while Hashmi was studying for a Master’s degree in the U.K. Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in the apartment. Babar later delivered them to the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

When, later in New York, a Grand Jury charged Hashmi with “conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization,” the socks, ponchos, and raincoats became “military gear.”

The government also charges that Hashmi let Babar use his cell phone “to call other conspirators.” Hashmi says he had no idea whom Babar was calling.

Hashmi has denied that he was part of conspiracies to help Al Qaeda, or that he ever gave support to anybody to pass on materials to the terrorist group.

He was initially arrested in London in 2006 as he prepared to board a flight to Pakistan and was then extradited to the U.S. He has been held in New York since the Memorial Day weekend, 2007.

Hashmi has no criminal record and no history of committing acts of violence.

In court in January 2009, Hashmi’s lawyers called the restrictions on Hashmi too severe and asked a federal judge to lift some of them, perhaps allowing Hashmi to have a cellmate or to exercise in fresh air. But the judge denied a motion to consider the psychological impact of solitary confinement and ease the conditions of his detention. Hashmi’s trial is set for November 30, 2009.

Hashmi’s friend Babar has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support of Al Qaeda and has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain, Canada, and at Hashmi’s trial. The Justice Department says Babar is the “centerpiece” of its case against Hashmi. In return, under a plea bargain, Babar will likely get a reduced sentence. If Hashmi is convicted, he may be sentenced to 70 years behind bars.

Much of the evidence against Hashmi is classified. His lawyers have received CIA-level clearance to view it but may not discuss it with Hashmi or with other uncleared experts.

Sean Maher, one of his attorneys, has told the media that he is under “severe limitations on what I can and can’t say.” Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted in 2005 for providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy for releasing a statement by imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to his followers in the outlaw Islamic Group. She is now appealing her conviction. Hashmi’s lawyer is under the same restrictions.

Maher also raised the issue of secrecy in federal court. “One of the paramount issues that this case brings up, without talking about any specifics in this case, is the use of secrecy in modern courtrooms. And in our Article III court, which we’re all trying to get people in Guantanamo to, what is the role of secrecy? And what will secrecy’s role play in these cases that President Obama says he might bring into these courts? “

As U.S. trials of Guantanamo detainees move closer to reality, these questions are likely to attract far wider interest. As Prof. Corey Robin, another of Hashmi’s teachers at Brooklyn College, told us, “The conditions of his confinement have not been changed since President Obama took office. As the nation looks backward to the Bush Administration, it is imperative that we draw attention to abuses – particularly those within our federal prisons and courts – that continue under the Obama Administration.”

Ominously, even with the new US troops, US military commander Admiral Mike Mullen this month has described the situation in Afghanistan as being  “serious and deteriorating.” The Afghani national government—if an organization that is basically confined to the capital city of Kabul and a few other cities can be called a national government, is hopelessly corrupt and ineffective, and a current national election, which US forces sought to “protect” by sending troops to election districts,  appears to have been a disaster, plagued by vote rigging and with low turnout.

The US war in Afghanistan, billed as part of a war on terror begun by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in September 2001, is now eight years old, and while the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan at that time has been ousted from Kabul, its insurgency grows by the day in strength and popular support.

The US, meanwhile, is identified as an occupier and as the sole support of a corrupt regime of drug lords, thieves and charlatans.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It is a replay of what America did in Vietnam.

The roots of the current Afghanistan War lie in the period when the Soviet Union was occupying the country and backing a Communist-led government in the 1970s, and the US was conducting a proxy war against the Soviets, with the CIA training and funding both the Taliban and foreign fighters, mostly Arab, led by the likes of Osama Bin Laden.  In the end, the Taliban, with the help of groups like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, triumphed, pushing the Russians out. But over time, as the Soviet Union crumbled and the US became more focused on the Middle East, successive US administrations became less and less happy with the power arrangement in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, following the US Gulf War in 1990-91, Bin Laden and other Arab fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere began to see the US as an enemy, and the US began to shift its military focus from being based upon anti-Communism to being anti-Arab, or at least anti Arabist, as defined as being opposed to those Arabs who wanted to overthrow the corrupt dictatorial leaderships in the oil states of the Middle East.

When the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration, which had already planned to overthrow the government in Iraq, launched an attack on Afghanistan, claiming that its Taliban government was harboring Al Qaeda, which was blamed for the attacks. The Afghanistan War was on. The Taliban was quickly ousted from Kabul, and Al Qaeda was largely driven into the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, but the war was not won. Indeed, since then, it has gone from bad to worse for the US, as the Taliban has clawed back territory and recovered much of its prior power.

The background of the war in Vietnam  dates from 1954, when Vietnam, after a long struggle, won its independence from its colonial ruler, France. Two years later, the US blocked a UN-supervised national referendum, effectively splitting the country into two parts, a Communist north led by the hero of Vietnam’s independence struggle, Ho Chi Minh, and the south, led by the corrupt former French colonial stooge Ngo Dinh Diem.

With elections off, a small group of partisans, the Viet Cong, began an insurrection against the government in the South in early 1959, which the US became committed to opposing, initially sending in “advisers” to train and direct the South Vietnamese army. That war went from bad to worse, and when, in 1964, it became clear to US police-makers, that the Viet Cong were likely to win, President Lyndon Johnson made a decision to send in massive numbers of US troops and to begin a major bombing campaign against the North Vietnam. From 2000 US troops in Vietnam in 1961, there were 16,500 in 1964, and by mid 1965, 100,000.

That number continued to rise, reaching 200,000 by 1966, and ultimately, at the height of the war, over 500,000. But the Viet Cong, and later, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese troops sent down from the north, were never defeated. Indeed, they continued to grow in number and in their control of the countryside. While they suffered horrific losses because of the superior firepower of US forces, and an American scorched-earth policy in the countryside, the Vietnamese forces continued to gain more and more support from the Vietnamese people. In the end, after suffering over 58,000 dead, the US cried uncle and left Vietnam. By 1975, the puppet regime in Saigon fell, and Vietnam was finally unified again, under Communist rule.

From the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the country, a poor nation of peasant farmers, was presented to the American public as a critical threat to the security of the United States. If Vietnam were to “fall,” Americans were told, the rest of Southeast Asia, like a chain of dominos, would fall—first Cambodia and Laos, then Thailand and Malaysia, then Indonesia, and finally, even Australia would be at risk.  Of course, no such thing happened. The Vietnamese Communists were always, and remained, a nationalist movement, and after winning their multi-generational struggle for independence, focused on developing their country (though they did step in and overthrow a genocidal Communist regime that had taken over in Cambodia, installing a saner government).

It had been a giant scam on the American people from the beginning, and it ended up costing several million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives, and 58,000 American lives, though that scarcely tells the toll, in terms of those crippled mentally and physically, those poisoned by the widespread spraying of toxic defoliants, and the laying of millions of anti-personnel mines that are still killing and maiming people in Indochina today.

Now a new president, Obama, like Johnson before him, is telling Americans that a war half a world away is “necessary for American security.” This is a ludicrous assertion on its face. If Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, and really hardly a country at all, is a threat to US national security, so is Malawi, Burundi and Fiji.

Let’s be rational for a moment. The Taliban, whatever  their irrational Islamic fanaticism and their misogyny, have no interest in America, other than to drive our troops out of their country.  When they were in charge in Kabul back in 2001, they had their hands full just trying to hang on in the face of the war lords and drug kingpins who held (and still hold) sway in various parts of the country, and when they eventually win and drive the US and its NATO allies out of Afghanistan, they will have their hands full again, just clinging to power.

American national security is not to the slightest degree threatened by the Taliban.

Okay, so back in 2001 there was a gang of Arabs in Afghanistan which had since 1990, at least, expressed some hostility towards the US, but that crew, after all, had been set up by the CIA in the first place, and anyway, by 2002 it had been largely shattered and driven out of Afghanistan, and into Pakistan and parts unknown.

The current Afghanistan War, which President Obama claims is so necessary to American security, is not against Al Qaeda though; it is against the Taliban, and it simply cannot be won, anymore than the US war against the Vietnamese  could be won.

Today, as in the late 1960s, the Pentagon is telling the president that it needs more troops. There is a military imperative not to lose a war. No general or admiral wants to be the guy in charge when the jig is declared up, and the troops have to be brought home as losers. And so they are asking for more and more troops and weapons, in hopes of hanging on until they get get cashiered out.

Obama, like Johnson before him, will buy into this criminal policy, because he too doesn’t want to “lose” a war before he leaves office.

That should be pretty scary, since I’m sure Obama is hoping that he will be in office not just through 2012, but through 2016. That’s a long time to keep escalating a hopeless and pointless conflict, just to avoid having to say it was a mistake in the first place.

But lest you say that it cannot happen, recall that the first US advisers went to Vietnam in 1959, the big escalation began in 1964, and the US didn’t leave until 1974. That’s 15 years of war and ten years of major warfare.

Because the Bush/Cheney administration was always more interested in invading Iraq than in invading Afghanistan, and pulled out many troops from the latter country in late 2002 to ship them to Iraq, the Afghan War has escalated more slowly than the Vietnam War did. But I’d say that today we are about where we were in Vietnam at the start of 1965. That is, the big lie, and the big escalation in the fighting, are both just getting going.

If the American people don’t rise up and demand an end to this thing right now, we could be in for another 8-10 years of brutal and bloody warfare, and in the end, the United States is, once again, going to lose.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and more recently of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

According to even the Pentagon’s own reckoning, for example, probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number–probably the majority–weren’t even fighting anyone when they were captured. I’m sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people to get the reward money.

Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are learning were used by our side–things that make waterboarding sound like a walk in the park. We’re now getting confirmation of things that we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the worst yet–the threat to kill a captive’s children. And of course there is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up of captives who were simply killed during torture.

We’ve got a litany of horror and abuse here that sounds like the worst kind of stories that used to come out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or the Argentine Junta or Idi Amin’s Uganda. About the only thing missing is word that the military and CIA torturers were eating their victims, or feeding them their own genitals, but who knows? Maybe we’ll get there yet. It’s hard at this point to rule anything out.

What has become of the U.S.? We started out the victims of an attack in 2001, with the whole world rallying to our side, and within a matter of weeks, our government, acting in our name, had secretly embarked on a wholly unnecessary and totally criminal descent into the barbarity of Middle Ages.

And now? The new administration has claimed to have put a stop to the atrocities, but it remains adamant that it is not going to root out the evil that was already done to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

President Barack Obama says he does not want to look back at any crimes that were committed. He wants to go “forward.” This is not the voice of justice, though. This is the voice of political gutlessness and of big power exceptionalism. The same America that demands the prosecution of war criminals in little countries like Cambodia or Serbia or Sudan, considers itself exempt from criminal liability for its own crimes.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he may be ready to appoint a prosecutor to investigate cases where CIA or private contract torturers “overstepped” the rules set by the White House and Justice Department, but he has said he will not allow the investigation to go beyond that to pursue the people who enabled those acts of torture–people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who personally instructed torturers in Afghanistan to “take the gloves off” in one case, or Assistant Attorney Generals John Yoo and Jay Baybee (now a federal judge), who ruled that anything short of the destruction of bodily organs or of a pain level equivalent to death was okay. Nor will he allow any investigation to look at acts of torture that were authorized, like waterboarding, if they had the sanction of the Bush/Cheney White House.

This position taken by the new administration should sicken us all. Worse, it should be broadly condemned, because if the descent into barbarity which occurred with the highest White House sanction is not investigated thoroughly, and punished fully, there is no way we can say it will not happen again. In fact, it’s safe to say that it will happen again, the next time another charlatan gets into office and uses fear to blind the American people to all that is right and decent, and to the importance of maintaining the rule of law.

I know there are terrible things happening right now which demand our attention and action–an escalating, endless war in Afghanistan that increasingly resembles Vietnam in 1966 or 1967, a presidential cave-on on health care reform, a sell-out on real action against climate change, and on and on–but this particular crime–the crime of failing to act to punish violations of the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war, which is being committed today by the Obama administration–is so obscene, so directly in our faces, and is such a stain on the whole nation, that it demands action.

We will probably never know how many innocent lives have been destroyed by America’s eight years of officially sanctioned torture, but we can at least see to it that the people who sanctioned it, and not just those who engaged in it (and that goes right up through the chain of command to the Commander in Chief and to the real power behind the throne, Dick Cheney), are put in the dock like the criminals at Nuremberg, to face the charge of war crimes. and crimes against humanity.

As the citizens of what we call a democracy, we can demand nothing less.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and more recently of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net