Karadzic Arrested

And it's about time, too.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of massacres making him one of the world's top war crimes fugitives, was arrested Monday evening in a raid that ended a near 13-year manhunt, the country's president and the U.N. tribunal said.

Karadzic is the suspected mastermind of mass killings that the U.N. war crimes tribunal described as "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history." They include the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Europe's worst slaughter since World War II.

"This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade. It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law," said Serge Brammertz, the tribunal's head prosecutor.

President Boris Tadic's office said Karadzic has been taken before the investigative judge of Serbia's war crimes court _ a legal procedure that indicates he could soon be extradited to the U.N. court at The Hague, Netherlands.

If Karadzic is transferred to there, he would be the 44th Serb suspect extradited to the tribunal. The others include former President Slobodan Milosevic, who was ousted in 2000 and died in 2006 while on trial on war crimes charges.

Something about capturing, trying, and carrying out sentence on war criminals makes me smile. Don't know why...

UPDATE: Let's not forget that Ratko Mladic is still out there:

Prosecutors in The Hague and officials of the European Union have long suspected that he was, in fact, hiding in Serbia, and in recent years have pressed officials in Belgrade to hand him over. The failure to arrest Mr. Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the still fugitive Bosnian Serb general also indicted on war crimes, has stood as a block to greater Serbian ties to the European Union after the wars in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

“This is a historic event,” said Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the agreements in Dayton, Ohio, to end the war in Bosnia in 1995. “Of the three most evil men of the Balkans, Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, I thought Karadzic was the worst. The reason was that Karadzic was a real racist believer. Karadzic really enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims, whereas Milosevic was an opportunist.”

--WS

MG Taguba accuses administration officials of war crimes

The General who investigated Abu Ghraib has openly accused the bu$h administration of complicity in war crimes and called for those responsible to be held accountable. The remarks come in a new report compiled by the group Physicians for Human Rights is the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date.

It is also chilling, infuriating, maddening, embarrassing, humiliating, and a whole lot more negative emotions.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The medial evidence supports the claims made by detainees, and puts the lie to aWol bu$h's insistence that "we don't torture." None of the torture victims the report addresses were ever charged with any crime. But they were detained for years, tortured, threatened, beaten, sexually humiliated and in at least one case, forced to drink urine.

Taguba, who conducted the 2004 investigation that documented and brought to light the abuses at Abu Ghraib is, to the best of my knowledge, the highest ranking military officer to have accused the administration of war crimes "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.


Experts from Physicians for Human Rights, who have long experience studying the effects of torture, spent two days with each of the eleven former captives assessed, and conducted intensive exams and interviews. Tests were administered to detect exaggeration. In two of the cases, medical records were available for review by the physicians.

The report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," concurs with a five-part McClatchy investigation of Guantanamo published this week. Among its findings were that abuses occurred — primarily at prisons in Afghanistan where detainees were held en route to Guantanamo — and that many of the prisoners were wrongly detained.

Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld didn't specifically approve of the worst abuses, but neither he nor the White House enforced strict limits on how detainees would be treated.

There was no "bright line of abuse which could not be transgressed," former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate committee.

Leonard Rubenstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, said there was a direct connection between the Pentagon decisions and the abuses his group uncovered. "The result was a horrific stew of pain, degradation and ... suffering," he said.

MG Taguba is one flag-rank officer for whom we both have deep and abiding respect - as do our military veteran spouses. He was one of the very first to stand up and do the right thing, even though it cost him a third star and sent him to base operations to do his retirement packet before he intended to.

We need his voice, along with the voices of Generals Batiste, Eaton, Zinni and Clark. These are men who wore stars on their shoulders and who don't flinch from a fight and who don't buckle under to pressure from a draft-dodging punk, nor a warmongering fuck.

Citizen's Arrest

In order for there to be an actual arrest, you'd have to get past his bodyguard, Pam Atlas. A pie in the face would be nice, too.

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen's arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening.

George Monbiot, the journalist and activist, is planning the action because he believes Mr Bolton is a "war criminal".

He said he was surprised that Mr Bolton would be allowed to "swim through the politest of polite soirees – which is of course Hay."

Mr Bolton, who was the American ambassador to the UN from August 2005 to January 2006, is due to talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival at 6.30pm on international relations.

I'd rather see the actual authorities from the Hague arrest him, but so much for wishes and good intentions.

--WS

I've seen this movie before, and it sucks

It was 2002, and the advances were all pointing to a smash hit - and box office success.

Five years on, it's fucking Ishtar.

Now the saber rattling at Iran is picking up and the threats being offered are more ominous and dire, and yet, it seems to be met with a collective yawn. "Well, yeah. He's nuts. Of course they'll bomb Iran. What're ya gonna do?" (Shrugs shoulders, reaches for Cheetos and turns on American Idol.)

This time there is no Judith Iscariot selling it. Instead, the press just quotes the administration and accepts that they have "evidence" that they haven't produced; as if they can trust the lying bastards to shoot straight.

Fortunately, there is the foreign press and the internet.

Some intelligence and administration officials said Iran seemed to have carefully calibrated its involvement in Iraq over the past year, in contrast to what President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials have publicly portrayed as an intensified Iranian role.

None of the officials interviewed disputed the notion that Iran sought to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq, but in recent weeks the Bush administration has sought to emphasize the threat by citing new evidence. The interrogations of four Iraqi Shiite militia commanders, for example, have provided new details about the extent of training conducted by the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, officials said.

Still, the officials offered an assessment of Iranian involvement that was more complicated and nuanced than public statements by Bush and other officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said at a news conference this week that "what Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen inside Iraq" by providing training and weapons to Shiite fighters.

It remains difficult to draw firm conclusions about the ebb and flow of Iranian arms into Iraq, and the Bush administration has not produced its most recent evidence...

They said last year that they don't trust another administration to "deal with" Iran - and as the rhetoric ramps up and the clock runs down on the Bush maladministration - that comment comes back and echoes in my head.

If they do something rash and stupid - like declare war on Iran - we will have to hold the congress responsible. That means that Nancy and the leadership that refuses to do their duty by impeaching these nutcases will have to be held to account for their complicity in war crimes.

Megan McArdle Tries to Get One Right

Well, at least she's not crazy, right? I know, that's scant praise for The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, but props to her for trying to refute some particularly odiferous bullcrap in italics, below:

Another mistake I think people make when they discuss police brutality, or war crimes, is to attribute them to some characteristic of the population that joins the military or becomes a police officer. One of my commenters says:

I think a lot of folks who join the military (not to mention police officers and prison guards) have authoritarian or sadistic tendencies which in turn increase the probability of war crimes being committed, especially given the stress of being under fire, in a strange land, among hostile locals.
What would you expect from people who sign up for a job where you maim and kill people you don't even know, just because someone else told you to do it?

(sorry if I offend anyone; I know a few of you just signed up for the tuition support or needed the money and got more than you bargained for)

Maybe this is so, but I'm skeptical. I've known a lot of quasi-pacifists with aggressive, domineering personalities and a startling lack of empathy. Give them slightly different political beliefs and an M-16, and I sure wouldn't turn my back on them.

It seems highly probable that there's some selection bias. But a desire to kick some ass is only one reason to become a police officer or a soldier. There's also a desire for justice, an interest in protecting your community, a sense of duty to something larger than yourself, a desire to do something really important with your life, like, say, put it between your beloved home and war's desolation. What do I expect from people like that? Quite a lot, actually.

But as the Milgram experiments show, most people given unlimited power over other human beings tend to abuse that power unless there are adequate institutional safeguards against us. We are natural bullies. And in mobs, we quite often make each other worse. Military culture fights this natural tendency with a pretty rigorous code of conduct--but in the end you've got a bunch of boys out on a corner with big guns. There's only so much that a code of conduct can do.

Those are good points, but they don't go far enough. War crimes don't start at the bottom and work their way up--they start at the top and spread their way down to troops who don't have a clear moral set of standards from which to operate. As in, explaining to the troops that we don't torture, we don't kill civilians, and we won't tolerate anything that violates basic Counterinsurgency Doctrine (COIN) and causes us to lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the people we're trying to help.

So, actually, the reality is this--when the example set by your leaders is to torture people in the name of the United States of America based on some phony-baloney legal justification cooked up by a third-rate team of legal minds, the "war crimes" don't appear as if by magic--they are symptoms of a lack of clear guidance and moral conscience from the people at the top.

We've seen this in the Phillipines at the turn of the century, in Vietnam, and now at Abu Ghraib: when Americans have an ambiguous, morally suspect leadership in a time of war, the men at the bottom of the ladder don't live up to particularly high standards. When they know what their mission really is, they perform exceptionally well and, at least the majority of them, behave admirably.

What's confused here are the trends--no mention is given to the recruiting of felons and no mention is given to the culpability of the civilian leadership to set an example of respecting the rule of law in a time of war. Combining an acceptance of felons in your military with not explaining the basic difference between right and wrong gets you what we have now, which are quite a few instances of "war crimes."

The conclusion though is this--for all of the incidents, we still have a thoroughly professional military where the vast majority of the troops DO NOT engage in war crimes or commit horrible acts of violence against innocent people, and we still have a military that is full of people who would not tolerate that kind of activity. We're slowly losing that, though, and that's what the fight is really about. Saving what's good about our military.

But that was a good try.

Condi Must Go

She is not merely the worst Secretary of State since John Foster Dulles, she is a war criminal, and she has perjured herself before Congress repeatedly.

As the National Security Adviser, she didn't just condone torture - she told the CIA "This is your baby, go do it."

She is a war criminal.

We used to hang people for the sort of crimes we have her dead to rights on.

I don't want revenge, I want JUSTICE, and there is only one path to achieve that end. Bush has to be impeached, because otherwise he retains the power to pardon this whole criminal enterprise.



After you watch the video, go to condimustgo.com and sign the petition. When they hit 100,000 signatures, they will deliver copies to all three of the Senators who would be President.

They worked backwards

They decided to adopt a policy that allowed torture first.

They justified it afterward, purely as a CYA measure.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

"If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that "there'd need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics" before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

...

"With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House," ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. "This is what we suspected all along."

The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.

At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of "principals" fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding. This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.

"No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about," said a second former senior intelligence official. "People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command."

I find it wholly intolerable that none of these people are likely to stand trial or be otherwise held accountable for deliberate actions that have betrayed this country and undermined the rule of law. I maintain that impeachment remains the only avenue to assure justice has a chance of being served. Unless this president is impeached, he retains the power to pardon, and can do so preemptively.

I am not happy at the prospect of an American administration being charged in international courts with crimes against humanity like they are so many tin-pot dictators and bloated, ineffective, slobs; never quite far enough removed from the leisure suits and the comb-overs to be comfortable in their own skins in the outclassed world they floundered and failed in. What a humiliating embarrassment these inept idiots be.

(h/t Cernig)

935 Administration Lies = 3931 Dead Americans

A recently-concluded study by two independent, non-profit journalism organizations, The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, has pinpointed 935 specific instances of the president and members of his administration lying to advance the narrative pushing for a war with Iraq. the study concluded that the lies peddled were "an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

On at least 532 occasions, administration officials stated adamantly and unequivocally that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida. (emphasis added)

The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.

"The cumulative effect of these false statements - amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts - was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war," the study concluded.

So - four Americans who stepped up to serve have died for every lie these feckless bastards told. So far.

Yet Nancy the Nattering Nabob still insists that impeachment is off the table.

So how about the gallows? Can we apply them yet?

Can we impeach Cheney now?

So - the administration has known for a year that all sixteen intelligence agencies have determined that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, but that little bit of inconvenient truth did not deter Cheney from not only advocating for another illegal war, one that would possibly (probably) use nuclear weapons, but he didn't stop there - he also attempted to stifle the report and tried to get the parts they didn't agree with stricken.

Remember how, a couple of months ago, the meme changed? Resident Evil said that the Iranians couldn't be allowed to have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon. In October, aWol gave a dire warning about WW III if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, and the warmongering old prick vowed "serious consequences" if the Iranians didn't (re)abandon their nuclear program. (It's all very cartoonish, in a tragic way. Remember your Looney Tunes? Bugs: "Batten down the hatches!" Buster:"I did! I did batten 'em down!" Bugs: "Well batten 'em down again. We'll teach those hatches!")

Gareth Porter pointed out a month ago that the NIE was being held up. (h/t Kevin Drum)

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Cheney got his knickers in a twist over more than the nuclear part of the NIE. He was also furious that there was no conclusive evidence that the Iranians were meddling in Iraq and arming Shiite militias.

So, congresscritters, especially you, Nancy Pelosi, read the god-damned NIE for yourselves, and then riddle me this:

Is it enough yet? Can we please make with impeaching the warmongering, pathological old prick? We can't risk another year with this psychotic madman at the levers.

Between Iraq and a Hard Place

Yesterday, Resident Evil brought a load of organic fertilizer to the city I call home. And I was so stunned by his craven rewrite of recent history that I posted about it. Twice. (I simply do not possess the ability to let a literary offense go, and he committed a doozy.)

The chickenhawks and war pornographers are even undertaking a $15 million advertising campaign, headed up by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. The ads feature as their star an enlisted soldier who issues an appeal to keep fighting. When asked about the ads and the soldier starring in them, Fleischer did not even know the young mans name. (So that right there tells you all you need to know about what these people really think about the G.I.'s in uniform. To them, they are a means to an end, and nothing more.)

Well, now that tomorrows New York Times is up on the website, I know why the knives are being sharpened for the dolschtosslegende, and I know why the spin is furious enough to separate red cells from plasma.

Tomorrow morning, a new intelligence assessment called “Prospects for Iraq’s Stability” will be released. I would say that it is likely to offer a grim forecast, but that would be too optimistic by at least half.

From the Times:

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report will not be issued until Thursday, and spokesmen for both the White House and the director of national intelligence declined to comment. “The report says that there’s been little political progress to date, and it’s very gloomy on the chances for political progress in the future,” said one Congressional official with knowledge of its contents.

The new report also concludes that the American military has had success in recent months in tamping down sectarian violence in the country, according to officials who have read it.

The report, which was intended to help anticipate events over the next 6 to 12 months, is “more dire in its assessments” than the administration has been in its own internal discussions, according to one senior official who has read it. But the report also warns, as Mr. Bush did on Wednesday, that an early withdrawal would lead to more chaos.

“It doesn’t take a policy position,” one official said. “But it leaves you with the sense that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, but we can’t let up, or it’ll get worse.”

Lovely. We can't stay, and we can't go. We can't sustain the current course of action, and we can't change. Of course, if the little idiot would admit publicly that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and if he had it to do over again, he wouldn't, it would be a cathartic start. But bear in mind, I am more likely to be appointed pope than he is to admit an error.

Someone give me a valium and a stiff drink. That will keep my head from exploding, and I'll think about it tomorrow when I get back to Tara.

Welcome to America, 2.0

[Crossposted from WTWC]

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

Sometimes you have to hang back. You become aware of something, and you go charging hell-bent-for-leather into the topic. And by god – you are preachin’ the gospel. That is what I was doing when I first read the Seymour Hersch article on Saturday evening.

And then it hit me. The reason I was so fucking mad is because what I was writing about is the invalidation of my entire life, spent in service to the Constitution of this nation.

That is the net effect of what is revealed in Seymour Hersch’s article in The New Yorker. Everything my life has stood for up to now is null and void. I’ve suspected for quite some time, but now I know for sure. I feel stateless. You might as well revoke my god-damned citizenship, because I am a woman without a country.

The perfidy of the Bush administration, well documented and so vast as to be overwhelming, has undermined the Honor Code and the confidence of – and in – the officer corps.

At this point, I don’t have to rehash the article. Everyone has read it who is going to. But I am going to excerpt the passage that made me livid and enraged me:

When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

(Let me answer that for you, General. You stand the fuck up for the ideals that your uniform represent, and you stand up for what is right because you are a god damned General, and by definition a leader of men, and when you act like a punk you are a disgrace. You stand the fuck up and you aren’t too chickenshit to even look at some god-damned photographs.)

Here is how I see it. We have destroyed the military and trashed the Honor Code, and as far as I can tell, the chain of command is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions, the Great Writ, and the Constitutional guarantee of Due Process (rooted in the Great Writ “Set forth in the Meadow Runnyemead” – all of which have been sacrificed on the altar of the “Global War On Terror™”

Rumsfeld lied to Congress – under oath. He needs to face the consequences of that action. Plausible deniability my ass. Common sense needs to trump weasel-words in this instance.

If these bastards get away with this – then the American experiment is over. It is that simple, and that much is at stake.