The Battle to Save Iraq's Children

Doctors issue plea to Tony Blair to end the scandal of medical shortages in the war zone

By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor

Published: 19 January 2007

The desperate plight of children who are dying in Iraqi hospitals for the lack of simple equipment that in some cases can cost as little as 95p is revealed today in a letter signed by nearly 100 eminent doctors.

They are backed by a group of international lawyers, who say the conditions in hospitals revealed in their letter amount to a breach of the Geneva conventions that require Britain and the US as occupying forces to protect human life.

In a direct appeal to Tony Blair, the doctors describe desperate shortages causing "hundreds" of children to die in hospitals. The signatories include Iraqi doctors, British doctors who have worked in Iraqi hospitals, and leading UK consultants and GPs.

"Sick or injured children who could otherwise be treated by simple means are left to die in hundreds because they do not have access to basic medicines or other resources," the doctors say. "Children who have lost hands, feet and limbs are left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress are left untreated," they add.

They say babies are being ventilated with a plastic tube in their noses and dying for want of an oxygen mask, while other babies are dying because of the lack of a phial of vitamin K or sterile needles, all costing about 95p. Hospitals have little hope of stopping fatal infections spreading from baby to baby because of the lack of surgical gloves, which cost about 3.5p a pair.

Among those who have signed the letter are Chris Burns-Cox, a consultant physician at Gloucester Royal Hospital; Dr Maggie Wright, the director of intensive care at James Page University Hospital; Professor Debbie Lawlor, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London; Professor George Davey Smith, professor of clinical epidemiology at Bristol university; Dr Philip Wilson, senior clinical research fellow at Glasgow University; and Dr Heba al-Naseri, who has experienced the conditions in Iraqi hospitals. Dr al-Naseri, who has worked at Diwaniyah Maternity Hospital and the Diwaniyah University Hospital, describes in harrowing detail what the conditions were like for a newborn baby - one of the lucky ones who survived - called Amin.

"Amin had to be fed powdered milk, diluted with tap water. There wasn't enough money to buy expensive formula milk or bottled water - their price had risen above the increase in wages since 2003. The problems with the intermittent electricity and gas supply meant regular boiled water could not be guaranteed. With the dormant waste and sewage disposal systems, drinking-water is more likely to be contaminated," he said.

Cases the doctors highlight include a child who died because the doctor only had a sterile needle for an adult and could not find a needle small enough to fit the vein, and another child who died because the doctors had no oxygen mask that fitted.

The doctors say the UK, as one of the occupying powers under UN resolution 1483, has to comply with the Geneva and Hague conventions that require the UK and the US to "maintain order and to look after the medical needs of the population". But, the doctors say: "This they failed to do and the knock-on effect of this failure is affecting Iraqi children's hospitals with increasing ferocity."

They call on the UK to account properly for the $33bn (£16.7bn) in the development fund for Iraq which should have supplied the means for hospitals to treat children properly. They say more than half of the money - $14bn - is believed to have vanished through corruption, theft and payments to mercenaries.

They say that all revenues from Iraq's oil exports should now pass directly to the Iraqi people and that illegal contracts entered into by the Coalition Provisional Authority be revoked.

Their letter was supported by experts in international law, including Harvey Goldstein, professor of social statistics at the University of Bristol, and Bill Bowring, a barrister and professor of law at Birkbeck College.

Nicholas Wood, an architect who helped to organise the protest, said they had evidence on film of dead babies being dumped in cardboard boxes. "In one hospital, there were three babies to an incubator. The incubators are 36 years old and are held together by tape and a bit of wire. They are wrecks. They cost about £5,000 each, but that is nothing to compared to the cost of a missile," he said.

The letter was sent to Downing Street via Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, by his predecessor, Clare Short.

A system in meltdown

* Save the Children estimate that 59 in 1,000 newborn babies are dying in Iraq, one of the highest mortality rates in the world. Thousands of infants are dying because of the lack of basic cheap equipment. In Diwaniyah hospital, south of Baghdad, one doctor had to try to ventilate a baby with a plastic tube in its nose because he lacked an oxygen mask costing just 95p. The baby died.

* In the same hospital, a baby with a rare illness causing internal bleeding died due to lack of a phial of vitamin K, which would have cost less than £1.

* One doctor in a Baghdad hospital recently tried to save the life of a child with a drip, but he lacked a sterile needle for a child and the child died. The lack of rubber surgical gloves, which cost 3.5p a pair, has hugely increased the risk of infections.

* Premature babies are crammed three to an incubator, when an incubator can be found. An incubator costs about £5,000.

* Only 50 per cent of the pre-war total of doctors remain in Iraq. The US clearout of Ba'ath party members sympathetic to Saddam Hussein after the invasion has led to a breakdown of health administration.

* The British doctors are calling for guarantees of safety to be given to all medical staff in Iraq by the US and British forces. Above all there is a need to stop the militias killing doctors and nurses.

* Hospitals have been bombed and ambulances shot at. Helicopters could be laid on by the US and UK to ferry cases to Jordan, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia for treatment of acute trauma and disease.

* Doctors are calling on Britain and America to restore at least $2bn (£1bn) of $14bn that has gone missing since the invasion. Part of this sum, lost in corruption or to militias, was earmarked for hospitals.

* Up to 260,000 children may have died since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

U.S. Troops Break Geneva Conventions Again

Don't these stunned f***** make you proud to be an Amerikan?

---

December 14, 2006

U.S. Troops Raid Hospital Again

Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily

FALLUJAH, Dec. 14 (IPS) - Iraqi doctors and medical staff are outraged over yet another U.S. military raid at Fallujah General Hospital.

The raid followed a roadside bombing Dec. 7 where four Iraqi policemen were killed and two civilians injured. The injured were taken to Fallujah General Hospital.

Shortly after this attack, a U.S. Marine who was on a patrol in the city was wounded by a gunshot.

"U.S. soldiers replied to the source of fire then headed straight to the general hospital across the (Euphrates) river hoping that they had shot and injured the sniper," an eyewitness told IPS.

"American soldiers seem to have some imagination to think wounded fighters might go to that so-called hospital," a retired surgeon told IPS. "We know that they do not trust that place because of the continuous raids by the U.S., and lack of everything in that hospital." The hospital is functioning at minimal capacity due to lack of medicines and equipment, the surgeon said.

Eyewitnesses at Fallujah General Hospital said U.S. soldiers raided the hospital "as if it were a military target."

"We panicked at the way they entered, kicking open doors and blasting locked ones," a nurse told IPS. "A doctor tried to tell them he had keys for the locked doors, but they pointed their guns to his face. Then they told us to go out of the building and they kept us under guard in the garden until the early hours of next morning."

The nurse said the soldiers "would not even allow us to get some blankets to keep us warm; the temperature was below five degrees centigrade."

Doctors and medical staff were arrested and insulted, and some were called terrorists, witnesses said. The hospital was then closed, and could no longer offer even minimal treatment.

"We are used to that kind of behaviour from American soldiers," a hospital employee told IPS. "This was the third time I was in handcuffs with my face down. They have been more vicious with medical staff than others because they consider us the first supporters of those they call terrorists."

The U.S. military said that Marines from Regimental Combat Team 5 entered Fallujah General Hospital in order to search for fighters after two Marines were wounded the previous day in the city.

Lt. Col. Bryan Salas, spokesperson for the Multi-National Forces in Iraq, told reporters: "Coalition forces searched the hospital to ensure that it continues to be a safe place for the citizens of Fallujah to receive the medical treatment they deserve."

This hospital has been raided many times before, particularly in the U.S. military assault on the city April and November 2004.

Two years back, on Dec 13, 2004, IPS reported that the U.S. military was impeding Iraqi health workers around and inside Fallujah, and was deliberately targeting ambulances. In November 2005 IPS reported that the U.S. military had raided two hospitals in Ramadi.

Many Iraqi doctors have been arrested by U.S. forces for various periods of time on suspicion of "supporting terrorism" in Iraq. Many have fled the country for fear of repeated arrests or even killings by U.S. soldiers or sectarian militia death squads.

The independent Iraq Medical Association announced last month that of the 34,000 Iraqi physicians registered prior to 2003, over half have fled the country, and that at least 2,000 have been killed.

Article 12 of the first Geneva Convention states: "(Combatants) who are sick and wounded...shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Party to the conflict in whose power they may be..." The article goes on to state that "any attempts on their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited..."

Article 24 of the first Geneva Convention states: "Medical personnel exclusively engaged in...transport or treatment of the wounded or sick...(and) staff exclusively engaged in the administration of medical units and establishments...shall be respected and protected in all circumstances."

Under the fourth Geneva Convention, Article 18 reads: "Civilian hospitals organised to care to the wounded and sick, infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict."

Iraqi Red Crescent accuses U.S. forces of attacks

By Stephanie Nebehay Fri Dec 15, 9:45 AM ET

The Iraqi Red Crescent accused U.S. forces on Friday of carrying out a spate of attacks on its offices over the last three years during operations to flush out suspected militants.

Jamal Al Karbouli, vice-president of the Iraqi Red Crescent, said that in the latest incident, U.S forces had occupied and nearly destroyed its Falluja office, held staff for hours, and burned two cars clearly marked with its neutral symbol.

The only Iraqi aid agency working in all 18 provinces, its 1,000 staff and 200,000 volunteers already face extremely difficult conditions because of the growing sectarian violence, he said.

"The main difficulties we are facing, first of all, is the presence of MNF, the multinational forces, which sometimes gives us a hard time. They are attacking some offices and detaining some volunteers," Karbouli told a news conference in Geneva.

"The last example was about seven days ago in Falluja. We had our offices attacked by American forces, they detained the volunteers and staff more than two hours and they burned the cars and even the building which belonged to us," he added.

Karbouli said U.S. forces had "attacked" its Baghdad headquarters a number of times since the overthrow of former President Saddam Hussein in 2003. In most of the incidents, the Americans claimed to have received "information."

"Four to five times they have attacked the headquarters, they break doors and windows, just to see. And they didn't find anything and they left," he said.

"We don't know the reason behind it, is it to scare us or decrease our work or another reason, as they mention, fear of terrorists? We don't know."

"The Iraqi Red Crescent is the only Iraqi body working all over Iraq. Because of this, they are suspicious," Karbouli said.

U.S. CHECKING ALLEGATIONS

The U.S. military in Iraq said it was checking the allegations but said its forces do not attack sites while conducting searches.

"When we conduct searches, we do not attack the place we are searching. Coalition Forces strive to ensure they are respectful when they conduct interaction with the local population," U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver told Reuters in an e-mail reply.

Karbouli said the agency faced pressure from militant groups in Iraq, where insurgents from the minority Sunni community and militias from the majority Shi'ites are accused of atrocities against civilians.

"They try to work with us many times. We say 'No, we want to keep neutral'," he told reporters.

"Fortunately we have a good reputation with Iraqis on both sides. Both of them respect us and trust us as a neutral organization," Karbouli said.

The Iraqi Red Crescent is providing vital medicines and other supplies to hospitals and vulnerable civilians, including some of the 100,000 uprooted families who have fled bloodshed. It also distributes messages from detainees to their families.

Multinational forces sometimes fail to recognize Iraqi Red Crescent identity cards, making it difficult for its workers to pass through checkpoints and fearful to leave home. "We are facing problems which stop us from work. At some checkpoints I.D.s are not respected," he said.

In the past three years, seven of the agency's staff or volunteers have been killed and about eight detained, either during incidents in their homes or while working, he said.

Prisoners’ Dilemma

December 18, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

Indefinite detention of terrorist suspects poses a challenge to America’s most valuable legal traditions.

by Gerald J. Russello

The recently enacted Military Commissions Act and the Supreme Court Hamdi and Hamdan decisions, which tried to limit the suspension of the protections of habeas corpus, have spurred a new series of debates on the somewhat technical legal area of habeas corpus. The Great Writ, as it was known, stands for a very simple principle: power does not trump. A government may wish to detain someone secretly, perhaps indefinitely, and may believe it has good reasons to do so, but in the Anglo-American legal tradition, that is not good enough. As the Supreme Court stated in 1969, the writ is “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.” The government therefore has to “produce the body for examination,” as the translation of the full Latin tag put it, before a magistrate and justify the reasons for the person’s detention.

The position announced in the MCA and its related statutes may or may not be bad policy for defeating terrorism, but it certainly undermines a key component of free government. Government must in the normal course act in the open and must be held to a standard of reasonableness as to its actions, including being forced to explain why it has decided to detain someone. In the American legal tradition, and more broadly that of the West in general, providing the protections of habeas corpus has been a mark of civilizational achievement and we rightly consider those countries that do not do this to be less developed.

Americans across the political spectrum support the general principle of habeas corpus, but the war on terror has created opposing views about its application. On the one hand, some, mostly conservatives, have supported the government’s authority to hold possible enemy combatants in foreign countries or at home without charge or judicial process. For them, the exigencies of the new threats to our safety justify reconsideration of traditional civil liberties. Others, generally liberals, have sought to extend the Constitution’s guarantee of habeas corpus to anyone brought within the power of the American government, even non-citizens captured in military operations abroad. For this side, the war on terror is analogized to the civil-rights movement and seen as another area for expansion of rights beyond their traditional scope.

While both sides are playing to their respective bases, the dispute is real, and each side has legitimate arguments to which it can turn. It is clear, however, that no one had thought out the situation that has led to the MCA beforehand. This is especially the case for those supporting the war, for whom the conquest would be a “cakewalk” and the possibility of holding persons for over three years in military facilities, if ever considered, was never stated publicly. As a result of its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is now presented with thousands of people of uncertain status who have been transported far from their homes, who have been collected into facilities indefinitely, and who have no real redress in either American courts or through the military justice process. The Hamdan decision does not solve this: the case merely holds that for those people determined by a tribunal to be enemy combatants, habeas protections apply to a degree; however, the government has no obligation to ever determine when someone is an enemy combatant, casting these individuals into jurisprudential no-man’s land. This situation has no real precedent in American history, and one can feel some sympathy for those trying to wrestle with the legal and political issues the war on terror has caused and the strain it has put on constitutional government.

With its actions in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, the United States has entered unknown territory, and is walking the knife edge between retaining the clear characteristics of a free republic and becoming something else. Some people have taken to calling this new entity an empire, but that is true only in certain respects. Because of its refusal to acknowledge any intent to occupy or govern conquered territories as its own possessions, preferring a policy of democratizing “rogue states,” what may be emerging is more of a perpetual war state, preparing for and engaging endless combat against “terror.”

Whatever it is called, one of the features of this emerging entity is the stratification within it of individuals based on their status—from full citizens down to those awaiting “enemy combatant” designations who are basically at the whim of the government. That too is an unfortunate side effect of imperial ambition—and one, perhaps not coincidentally, reflected in the maze of classifications and status designations in the immigration law. In one case, there is a class of guest workers abroad, who are not citizens but are useful for domestic policy; the other is a class of guest detainees serving a similar purpose for foreign policy.

But here is the tricky part: a state action can be “lawless,” in the language of the Supreme Court, only if it violates some law. In American jurisprudence that means statutory law or the Constitution. So if the law does not apply to foreigners, as respectable conservative argument might propose, what is the big deal? The Constitution provides that the right of habeas corpus may be abrogated only “when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the Public Safety may require it.” This language was clearly intended to cover a limited crisis whose end could be determined with some certainty. Rebellion and invasion have commonsense, widely understood meanings. It is obviously far from clear how this limited exception may interact with an endless war on terror, with no clear guideposts or defined enemies. The Constitution does not directly address the question of what to do with these detainees.

Habeas corpus is not a universal right protecting one from being hauled up and locked away. Nor is it some irrevocable principle like the law of gravity. But that is not the end of the story. As conservatives well know, historical experience and development, even with its recognized flaws, is a surer safeguard of liberty than an appeal to vague or expansive “rights” and must be sustained by the customs, conventions, and beliefs of a people. This is where those advocating universal application of habeas fall short: their “rights talk” ignores the flaws of that theory of rights as it has been applied to areas ranging from criminal procedure to religious freedom: endless assertion of right against right (here, the right of habeas corpus against that of national self-defense) makes political life impossible. And their rush to support the Hamdan Court’s reliance on the Geneva Conventions or international law is clearly only a fig leaf for their own preferred outcomes. If the Conventions permitted slavery or torture, they would not be considered so persuasive.

But in pushing for limitations on habeas corpus, conservatives are ignoring their own best traditions. Conservatives are rightly suspicious of government, or at least they are with respect to the efficient provision of health care or welfare; it has been less so recently on issue of war. But the Hamdi decision perfectly illustrates the reasons for conservative suspicion: there the government wanted to detain a citizen without habeas corpus simply because it determined he was an “enemy combatant.” The Supreme Court, in a set of divided opinions, put a stop to that nonsense, but the fact that the case had to come before the Court at all should serve as a reminder to conservatives that the nature of a centralizing power is to strengthen itself.

The debate over extending habeas protections is echoed in the debate over torture. The debate over torture is basically on utilitarian terms: how many terrorists are worth torturing, and to what degree, in exchange for saving how many lives? A form of this utilitarian calculus is at play as well in the habeas corpus debate. The thinking seems to be that the greater the number of detainees, the less harm will come to us. But this is the wrong approach. The practice of torture is corrupting to us, as well as damaging to those we torture, because the practice degrades us. Once a society starts arguing about when such coercive methods are “appropriate,” it has already begun to condone permitting its own citizens to brutalize and debase themselves as well as harm their victims. Similarly with habeas corpus: while those subject to the MCA are being ill served, getting citizens used to the having large numbers of foreigners held at our mercy is corrosive and corruptive of our liberty. Once a nation grows accustomed to the idea that it may hold some people without trial indefinitely, it is easier to dissolve the characteristic—citizenship—that is marked out as the reason for different treatment.

The habeas corpus debate, much like our debate over the uses of torture, betrays the absolutist mind lurking beneath much of American idealism. According to this mindset, recognized by conservatives such as Robert Nisbet over 40 years ago, the “moral and political aspirations” of foreign policy blind us to realities on the ground. Here a great injustice is being done to many people within the direct power of the United States to help, and all the talk of promoting democracy or defeating the terror masters will not hide that.
_______________________________

Gerald J. Russello is editor of The University Bookman. His book on the thought of Russell Kirk is being published by the University of Missouri Press.

Bush’s Torture/Dictatorship Scandal

American Conservative: Bush’s Torture/Dictatorship Scandal

Here is the full text of my piece on the Military Commissions Act & the torture scandal from the December 18, 2006 issue of the American Conservative.

It is good to the screws tightening on some of these Bush rascals. This scandal could put an end to Bush II.

Bush’s Torture Ticking Time Bomb: Sins of Commission

By James Bovard

Have Republicans become the party of torture, secret prisons, and indefinite detention? In his speech last month on signing the Military Commissions Act, President Bush declared that the bill “sends a clear message… We will never back down from the threats to our freedom.” “Rough interrogation” (a.k.a. torture) in the name of freedom may be Bush’s clearest ideological legacy.

Bush endlessly reminds listeners that “the U.S. does not torture” and that “torture is not an American value.” But “What is torture?” is the Bush version of the Pontius Pilate question. Bush appears to be using the definition of torture crafted by Justice Department official John Yoo: if detainees weren’t maimed or killed, they weren’t tortured. And the Justice Department acts as if, even if detainees are killed during interrogations, it is best to treat the deaths as harmless errors.

The MCA was rushed through Congress in September to overturn a Supreme Court decision that struck down Bush’s military tribunals and scorning of the Geneva Conventions. The new law -far more dangerous than the more controversial Patriot Act- is perhaps the biggest disgrace Congress has enacted since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Stephen Gray, the author of Ghost Plane, notes, “The act grants fewer rights to defendants than the Nazis got at Nuremberg.”

The MCA awarded Bush the power to label anyone on earth an enemy combatant and lock then up in perpetuity, nullifying the habeas corpus provision of the Constitution and “turning back the clock 800 years,” as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said. While only foreigners can be tried before military tribunals, Americans accused of being enemy combatants can be detained indefinitely without charges and without appeal. Even though the Pentagon has effectively admitted that many of the people detained at Guantanamo were wrongfully seized and held, the MCA presumes that the president of the United States is both omniscient and always fair.

Instead of clear standards established by the legislature, the president decrees what methods of brutalizing detainees are allowed, regardless of the Geneva Convention or the U.S. Anti-Torture Act. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin notes, “The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law.” White House press spokesman Tony Snow agreed that the law made Bush the “final arbiter on torture.”

Though U.S. government interrogation methods have been intensely controversial around the world, most congressmen looked the other way and rubber-stamped Bush’s legislative wish list. The Boston Globe reported in September that “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Al.) epitomized the prevailing righteous ignorance when he declared, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” The less they know, the easier it is for Republican congressmen to deny U.S. government wrongdoing.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, civilized nations have frowned on relying on brute force to determine facts in judicial proceedings. But Monty Python appears to be the patron saint of the MCA. “Evidence” gained via coercion is admissible as long as a military judge deigns that the methods used did not rise to torture. Military commissions can accept “evidence” produced by interrogations that violated “cruel, unusual or inhumane treatment” standardsas long as such abuses occurred before Dec. 30, 2005, when Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act. (Bush effectively vetoed this law with a signing statement.) It was nice that Congress formally picked a date for the rebirth of decency, but it doesn’t have sticking power.

The Bush team is exploiting fears on national security to practically guarantee the use of tortured confessions. The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to prohibit defendant Majid Khan, a former Catonsville, Md. resident who was nabbed in Pakistan, from revealing to anyone -even his defense attorney -the interrogation methods he endured. A Justice Department spokeswoman claimed that letting Khan discuss his interrogation with his lawyer “is inadequate to protect unique and potentially highly classified information that is vital to our country’s ability to fight terrorism.” Thus, the feds can use whatever Khan said against him while hiding the methods that made him squeal.

The MCA creates procedural biases akin to a 1938 Moscow show trial. Defense attorneys can “challenge the use of hearsay information obtained through coercive interrogations in distant countries only if they can prove it is unreliable,” the Washington Post noted. But it will be almost impossible to disprove an accusation when a defense lawyer is not allowed to question or perhaps even know who made the charge.

From early 2002, some high-ranking Bush administration officials have apparently feared that they could face prosecution for their interrogation policies. But the MCA retroactively decriminalized tortureat least such actions committed before the end of 2005. The act will make it almost impossible for victims of torture (or their survivors) to bring cases against perpetrators. The closest precedent for this blanket pardon comes not from American justice but from the amnesty laws Latin American regimes enacted to immunize military officials who carried out bloody crackdowns against leftists in the 1970s and 1980s.

Like an old-time southern segregationist campaign, the Republican Party has proceeded to portray any congressmen who failed to vote for the MCA as a “terrorist lover.” House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) claimed that Democrats had “voted in favor of new rights for terrorists,” and House Majority Leader John Boehner declared that Democrats “voted against bringing the most dangerous terrorists to justice.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee denounced incumbent Democrats who voted against suspending habeas corpus for having “sided with trial lawyers and terrorists.” After Bush signed the bill, a Republican National Committee press release was headlined, “Democrats would let terrorists free.”

Throughout the fall campaign, the GOP used the MCA to flaunt its “tough on terrorism” message. At a “Texas Victory Rally” on Oct. 30, Bush declared, “When it came time to vote on whether or not to allow the CIA to continue its program to detain and question captured terrorists, more than 80 percent of House Democrats voted against it.” Bush coached the audience to respond to his questions as if the event were a giant DARE rally. The president asked, “When it comes to questioning terrorists, what’s the Democrat’s answer?” The audience roared, “Just say no!”

Aside from Bush and other Republicans’ dishonest taunts of Democrats, torture was a non-issue in congressional campaigns. The New York Times noted, “In a season of shameless attack ads, torture is still too shameful to be debated.” Few, if any, Democratic candidates had enough confidence in themselves or the voters to highlight the Bush administration’s worst abuse of power.

That doesn’t mean, however, that they won’t use the investigative powers their new majority affords. For though Bush rhetorically takes the high ground on the torture issue, it now appears that the president may personally have blood on his hands. On Nov. 14, the ACLU released a CIA letter confirming the existence of “a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees.” This confirms a May 2004 e-mail from the FBI’s “On Scene Commander” in Baghdad stating that U.S. military officials in Iraq assured him that a secret presidential Executive Order permitted using extreme interrogation techniques considered illegal by the FBI including “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods,” stress positions, and military dogs.

The Justice Department has so far blocked release of the actual document, but a federal judge may force the feds to cough it up. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is also demanding to see the document. If this Bush letter does hit the streets, it may be akin to a 1972 memo from Richard Nixon specifying the exact methods of lock-picking the Watergate burglars should use. Bush’s involvement in the torture scandal may be far deeper than Nixon’s involvement in Watergate.

The Bush secret ruling on interrogation methods may explain the Justice Department’s passivity on torture cases. The CIA Inspector General recommended that the Justice Department prosecute a CIA agent involved in the demise of an Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib. As the New Yorker reported, Manadel al-Jamadi died during an interrogation during which his head was covered in a plastic bag and he was “shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe.” This was one of at least eight cases the CIA referred for prosecution, including cases of homicides during CIA interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the Justice Department refuses to prosecute any of the alleged torturers. The feds cannot prosecute CIA agents without risking public disclosure of the presidential order authorizing the torture of detainees.

As long as the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute federal torturers, Bush can continue denying U.S. torture. People killed during interrogations thus remain the exceptions that prove the rule that the U.S. never tortures. The military classified the deaths of at least 34 detainees as suspected or confirmed homicides; the CIA has released no tally of its morgue entries.

The New Yorker noted, “under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws.” Unfortunately, there is no reason to assume that Bush has not given interrogators a license to kill. Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee early this year that Bush could order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States. When Newsweek contacted the Justice Department to verify this novel legal doctrine, spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos stressed that Bradbury’s comments occurred during an “off-the-record briefing.” Any Bush-ordered killings within the United States would also presumably be off-the-record.

President Bush has been able to seize nearly boundless power because his administration has been able to control what Americans know. But this control is crumbling. Democratic congressional investigations, court cases, and the military tribunals themselves could unearth far more damaging documents and photographs than anything seen thus far.

The MCA is “enabling act” legislation that preserves the appearance of law while empowering the commander in chief to do as he pleases. Bush’s torture policies may signal that he accepts the dicta of Richard Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But the firewall of high approval ratings that buttressed Bush when the first Abu Ghraib photos leaked is gone. The media is exasperated with the administration’s penchant for secrecy. Much of Bush’s conservative intellectual bodyguard has given up the fight. It remains to be seen how much dunking, thumping, and cold water the Bush team can survive.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.

American Conservative

The U.S. Has a History of Using Torture

12-04-06

By Alfred W. McCoy

Mr. McCoy is J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom New York Times’ columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps"--a line that few in the press had reason to challenge.

When I looked at these photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. After more than a decade of studying the Philippine military’s torture techniques for a monograph published by Yale back 1999, I could see the tell-tale signs of the CIA’s psychological methods. For example, that iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows, not the sadism of a few “creeps,” but instead the two key trademark’s of the CIA’s psychological torture. The hood was for sensory disorientation. The arms were extended for self-inflicted pain. It was that simple; it was that obvious.

After making that argument in an op-ed for the Boston Globe two weeks after CBS published the photos, I began exploring the historical continuity, the connections, between the CIA torture research back in the 1950s and Abu Ghraib in 2004. By using the past to interrogate the present, I published a book titled A Question of Torture last January that tracks the trail of an extraordinary historical and institutional continuity through countless pages of declassified documents. The findings are disturbing and bear directly upon the ongoing bitter debate over torture that culminated in the enactment of the Military Commissions law just last October.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars a year. Many have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr. Frank Olson, who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere.

But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American form of torture: psychological torture. With funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done—drugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none of the above.

For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs. One of Hebb’s subjects, University of California-Berkeley English professor Peter Dale Scott, has described the impact of this experience in his 1992 epic poem, “Listening to the Candle”:

nothing in those weeks added up

yet the very aimlessness

preconditioning my mind…

of sensory deprivation

as a paid volunteer

in the McGill experiment

for the US Air Force

(two CIA reps at the meeting)

my ears sore from their earphones’

amniotic hum my eyes

under two bulging halves of ping pong balls

arms covered to the tips with cardboard tubes

those familiar hallucination

I was the first to report

as for example the string

of cut-out paper men

emerging from a manhole

in the side of a snow-white hill

distinctly two-dimensional

Dr. Hebb himself reported that after just two to three days of such isolation “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.” If you compare a drawing of Dr. Hebb’s student volunteers published in “Scientific American” with later photos of Guantanamo detainees, the similarity is, for good reason, striking.

During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at time—while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began. Again, it you look at those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib you will see repeated use of this method, now called “stress positions.”

After codification in its 1963 KUBARK manual, the CIA spent the next thirty years propagating these torture techniques within the US intelligence community and among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America.

Although the Agency trained military interrogators from across Latin America, our knowledge of the actual torture techniques comes from a single handbook for a Honduran training session, the CIA’s “Human Resources Exploitation Manual — 1983.” To establish control at the outset the questioner should, the CIA instructor tells his Honduran trainees, “manipulate the subject’s environment, to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception.” To effect this psychological disruption, this 1983 handbook specified techniques that seem strikingly similar to those outlined 20 years earlier in the Kubark Manual and those that would be used 20 years later at Abu Ghraib.

After the Cold War

When the Cold War came to a close, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 that banned the infliction of “severe” psychological and physical pain. On the surface, the United States had apparently resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.

Yet when President William Clinton sent this UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration—with four detailed diplomatic “reservations” focused on just one word in the convention’s 26-printed pages. That word was “mental.”

Significantly, these intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain—the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost. Of equal import, this definition was reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention--first in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and then in the War Crimes Act of 1996.

Remember that obscure number--Section 2340—for, as we will see, it is the key to unlocking the meaning of the controversial Military Commissions Law enacted by the US Congress just last September.

In effect, Washington had split the UN Convention down the middle, banning physical torture but exempting psychological abuse. By failing to repudiate the CIA’s use of torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

War on Terror

Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President Bush gave his White House staff wide secret orders, saying, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”

In the months that followed, Administration attorneys translated their president’s otherwise unlawful orders into U.S. policy into three controversial, neo-conservative legal doctrines: (1.) the president is above the law, (2.) torture is legally acceptable, and (3.) the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not US territory.

To focus on the single doctrine most germane to the history of psychological torture, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee found grounds, in his now notorious August 2002 memo, for exculpating any CIA interrogators who tortured, but later claimed their intention was information instead of pain. Moreover, by parsing the UN and US definitions of torture as “severe” physical or mental pain, Bybee concluded that pain equivalent to “organ failure” was legal—effectively allowing torture right up to the point of death.

Less visibly, the administration began building a global gulag for torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, and a half-dozen additional sites worldwide. In February 2002, the White House assured the CIA that the administration’s public pledge to abide by spirit of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to its operatives; and, significantly, it allowed the Agency ten “enhanced” interrogation methods designed by Agency psychologists that included “water boarding.”

Waterboarding

Over the past three years, this term “water boarding” has surfaced periodically in press accounts of CIA interrogation without any real understanding of psychologically devastating impact of this seemingly benign method. It has a venerable lineage, first appearing in a 1541 French judicial handbook, where it was called “Torturae Gallicae Ordinariae” or “Standard Gallic Torture.” But it would now become, under the War on Terror, what CIA director Porter Goss called, in March 2005 congressional testimony, a “professional interrogation technique.”

There are several methods for achieving water boarding’s perverse effect of drowning in open air: most frequently, by making the victim lie prone and then constricting breathing with a wet cloth, a technique favored by both the French Inquisition and the CIA; or, alternatively, by forcing water directly and deeply into the lungs, as French paratroopers did during the Algerian War.

After French soldiers used the technique on Henri Alleg during the Battle for Algiers in 1957, this journalist wrote a moving description that turned the French people against both torture and the Algerian War. “I tried,” Alleg wrote, “by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me.”

Let us think about the deeper meaning of Alleg’s sparse words--“a terrible agony, that of death itself.” As the water blocks air to the lungs, the human organism’s powerful mammalian diving reflex kicks in, and the brain is wracked by horrifically painful panic signals--death, death, death. After a few endless minutes, the victim vomits out the water, the lungs suck air, and panic subsides. And then it happens again, and again, and again--each time inscribing the searing trauma of near death in human memory.

Guantanamo

In late 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to command Guantanamo with wide latitude for interrogation, making this prison an ad hoc behavioral laboratory. Moving beyond the CIA’s original attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans, Guantanamo’s interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploring Arab “cultural sensitivity” to sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs. General Miller also formed Behavioral Science Consultation teams of military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias, such as fear of dark or attachment to mother.

Through this total three-phase attack on sensory receptors, cultural identity, and individual psyche, Guantanamo perfected the CIA’s psychological paradigm. Significantly, after regular inspections of Guantanamo from 2002 the 2004, the Red Cross reported: “The construction of such a system…cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”

Abu Ghraib

These enhanced interrogation policies, originally used only against top Al Qaeda operatives, soon proliferated to involve thousands of ordinary Iraqis when Baghdad erupted in a wave of terror bombings during mid 2003 that launched the resistance to the US occupation. After a visit from the Guantanamo chief General Miller in September 2003, the U.S. commander for Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, issued orders for sophisticated psychological torture.

As you read the following extract from those orders, please look for the defining attributes of psychological torture--specifically, sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and that recent innovation, attacks on Arab cultural sensitivities.

U. Environmental Manipulation: Altering the environment to create moderate discomfort (e.g. adjusting temperatures or introducing an unpleasant smell)…

V. Sleep Adjustment: Adjusting the sleeping times of the detainee (e.g. reversing the sleeping cycles from night to day).

X. Isolation: Isolating the detainee from other detainees ... [for] 30 days.

Y. Presence of Military Working Dogs: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations…

AA. Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock...

CC. Stress Positions: Use of physical posturing (sitting, standing, kneeling, prone, etc.

Indeed, my review of the hundreds of still-classified photos taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib reveals, not random, idiosyncratic acts from separate, sadistic minds, but just three psychological torture techniques repeated over and over ad nauseum: hooding for sensory deprivation; short shackling, long shackling, and enforced standing for self inflicted pain; and dogs, total nudity, and sexual humiliation for that recent innovation, exploitation of Arab cultural sensitivity. It is no accident that Private Lynndie England was photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.

After Abu Ghraib

Let’s look at the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, seeing how America moved by degrees to legalization of these CIA psychological torture techniques. Confronted by public anger over detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, the Bush White House has fought back by defending torture as a presidential prerogative. By contrast, an ad hoc civil society coalition of courts, press, and human rights groups has mobilized to stop the abuse.

In a dramatic denouement of June 2006, the US Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Bush’s military commissions were illegal because they did not meet the requirement, under common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, that Guantanamo detainees be tried with “all the judicial guarantees…recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Then on September 6, in a dramatic bid to legalize his now-illegal policies in the aftermath of the Hamdan decision, President Bush announced he was transferring fourteen top Al Qaeda captives from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay. At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush denied that he had authorized “torture” while simultaneously defending the CIA's use of a tough “alternative set of procedures” to extract “vital information.” To allow what he called the “CIA program” to go forward, President Bush announced that he was sending legislation to Congress that would legalize the same presidential prerogatives in treating detainees that had been challenged by the Supreme Court.

At first, Bush’s bill seemed to arouse strong opposition by three Republican veterans on the Senate Armed Services Committee--Senators Graham, McCain, and Warner. But after tense, daylong negotiations inside Vice President Cheney’s Senate office on September 21, these Republican partisans reached a compromise that sailed through Congress within a week, and without any amendments, to become the Military Commissions Law 2006.

Among its many objectionable features, this law strips detainees of their habeas corpus rights, sanctions endless detention without trial, and allows the use of tortured testimony before Guantanamo’s Military Commissions. Most significantly, this law allows future CIA interrogators ample latitude for use of psychological torture by using, verbatim, the narrow definition of “severe mental pain” the U.S. first adopted back in 1994 when it ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and enacted a complementary Federal law, Section 2340 of the US code, to give force to this treaty.

The current law’s elusive definition of “severe mental pain” is concealed under Para. 950 V, Part B, Sub-Section B on page 70 of the 96-page “Military Commissions Law 2006” that reads: “Severe Mental Pain or Suffering Defined: In this section, this term ‘severe mental pain…’ has the meaning given that term in Sect. 2340 (2) of Title 18 [of the Federal code].”

And what is that definition in section 2340? This is, of course, the same highly limiting definition the US first adopted back in 1994-95 when it ratified the UN Anti-Torture Convention.

Simply put, this legislation’s highly restricted standard for severe mental suffering does not prohibit any aspect of the sophisticated torture techniques that the CIA has refined, over the past half-century, into a total assault on the human psyche.

To make this point clear, let us compare the law’s very narrow, four-part standard for “severe mental suffering” with the CIA’s psychological techniques to see which, if any, of the agency’s actual methods are banned. Under this law, Section 2340, there are only four practices that constitute, in any way, “severe mental pain,” including: drug injection; death threats; threats against another; and extreme physical pain.

In actual practice, this definition does not ban any of the dozens of CIA psychological methods developed over five decades, which include:

--First, self-inflicted pain, via enforced standing and so-called “stress positions” which are cruel contortions enforced by shackling.

--Second, sensory disorientation through temporal and environmental manipulation exemplified sleep deprivation, protracted isolation, and extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, isolation and intensive interrogation.

--Third, attacks on cultural identity through sexual humiliation and use of dogs.

--Fourth, attacks on individual psyche by exploiting fears and phobias.

--Fifth, hybrid methods such as water boarding.

--Sixth and most importantly, creative combinations of all these methods which otherwise might seem, individually, banal if not benign.

If you wish an analogy to make the curious exclusionary logic of this legislation perfectly clear, it would be as if US homicide law had taken a leaf from the popular board game “Clue” and defined murder as only those killings “done by Mrs. White, in the Conservatory, with the Candlestick”—thus, by its omissions, legalizing all murders done by more conventional means such as poison, pistols, rifles, knives, ropes, clubs, or bombs.

To test my critical, perhaps overly cynical assessment of this new law, let us ask whether this new law bans the most extreme of the CIA’s “enhanced” methods--water boarding. While the White House has refused comment, Vice President Cheney stated recently that using “a dunk in water” to extract information was “a no-brainer for me.” As the administration’s leader on interrogation policy, Cheney’s words make clear, despite White House denials, that water boarding is legal under the new law.

By its omissions, this legislation has effectively legalized the CIA’s right to use methods that the international community, embodied in the Red Cross and the UN Human Rights Committee, considers psychological torture. For the first time in the 200 years since 1791 when United States ratified the Fifth Amendment banning self-incrimination, Congress has passed a law allowing coerced testimony into US courts.

The implications of this Military Commissions Law are profound and will most certainly face legal challenge. Indeed, just a few weeks ago seven retired Federal judges challenged this law before the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, saying that it has “one specific and fundamental flaw”: i.e., it allows the military tribunals to accept evidence obtained by torture. But when this case reaches the Supreme Court, we cannot expect that a more conservative Roberts court will overturn this law with the same ringing rhetoric that we have seen in two recent landmark decisions, Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Conclusion

If this law stands, with its provisions for torture and drumhead justice, then the United States will suffer continuing damage to its moral leadership in the international community. Looking through a glass darkly into the future, Washington may try to return to that convenient contradiction that marked US policy during the Cold War: public compliance with human rights treaties and secret torture in contravention of those same diplomatic conventions.

Yet the world is no longer blind to these once-clandestine CIA methods and this attempt at secrecy will likely produce another scandal similar to Abu Ghraib. But next time our protestations of innocence will ring hollow and the damage to US prestige will be even greater.

Comments (16)

Impeachment Hearings for Bush & Co.? How about War Crimes Tribunals

Nov 27, 2996

By Heather Wokusch


While Bush administration members have made a sport of breaking the law, both domestically and internationally, their intransigence will come back to haunt - one way or another.

The Bush Doctrine of taking "the battle to the enemy," for example, is a direct repudiation of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of international force unless in self-defense (after an armed attack across an international border) or related to a UN Security Council decision. And that explains why Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy makes a point to "protect Americans" from "the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution" by the International Criminal Court "whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept."

The whole idea of the US being able to preemptively attack other nations was penned by White House lawyers two weeks after 9/11; former justice department lawyer John Yoo wrote memos for then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales arguing that "no limits" stood in the way of Bush's ability to take military action and that "the president's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."

But giving someone like Bush "unreviewable" and unlimited military powers is reckless; the man can barely construct a sentence, let alone articulate a humane and effective foreign policy.
Besides, a "no limits" approach to foreign policy can't coexist with rule of law, which explains why just last week, US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff accused the United Nations and other world bodies of using international law "as a rhetorical weapon against us." Chertoff co-authored the infamous Patriot Act but is best known for his stunning incompetence regarding Katrina. If only he had been as eager to protect Americans from hurricanes as he is to protect them from global treaties...

Chertoff's view of international law as a threat to the US is supported by Rumsfeld's 2005 National Defense Strategy, which notes: "Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.

In other words, the Pentagon links "judicial processes" with "terrorism," and sees "judicial processes" as weakening the US "nation state." What kind of nonsense is that?
Now that Rumsfeld has "resigned" and Bush and Co. face their lame-duck years watching the war on terror implode, it's worth considering the aftermath of World War II, when the International Military Tribunal indicted and tried over 20 Nazi leaders for war crimes ranging from waging a war of aggression, killing civilians, mistreating prisoners and plundering property. How eerily familiar those charges seem today.

And how ominous that only weeks ago, German prosecutors began pursuing a criminal investigation into the alleged role of Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and numerous other administration members regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

Rumsfeld will lose his legal immunity when he ceases to be Defense Secretary, a fact which must weigh heavily on Bush and others. Unsurprisingly, the administration has taken pre-emptive action against future war crimes charges, including pushing through the scandalous Military Commissions Act, which provides them retroactive domestic protection from prosecution regarding prisoner abuse cases.

On the world stage, the administration's primary battleground for immunity has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), set up in 2002 to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Roughly 100 countries have ratified the ICC Statute, and over 40 others have signed it, but the Bush administration renounced the treaty on grounds it could lead to "frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions."

The administration has done everything in its power to enervate the ICC, including setting up bilateral "Article 98" agreements which arm-twist other countries into not prosecuting US nationals or foreign nationals working for the US. Over 100 nations, mainly poor and dependent on foreign aid, have signed the agreements, but many others have stood firm and lost US aid as a result, including Brazil, Peru and South Africa.

But such bribery will only go so far. The administration's "no limits" approach to foreign policy has alienated global allies, and in many parts of the world, Bush is regarded as a greater danger to world peace than North Korea's Kim Jong-il or Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Continuing revelations of US war atrocities, such as the recent bombing of a Pakistani religious school in which 82 students died, only serve to fuel global outrage. It's hard to imagine administration members getting much sympathy in an international trial.

Bottom line, as calls for impeachment build at home, Bush might heed advice he once gave to Osama bin Laden: "you can run but you cannot hide."

Action Ideas:

1. A number of web sites provide information about human rights abuses linked to the so-called war on terror:

War Crimes Watch

Human Rights First

School of the Americas Watch

Cage Prisoners

2. As After Downing Street notes, this year a national coalition of organizations is making December 10 ''Human Rights and Impeachment Day.'' For related information on everything from Petitions to Dramatic Play Scripts and Yard Signs, check out the site's event resources.Note: Originally published: November 27, 2006

http://heatherwokusch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=96