Action Petition: SS Condi Rice must GO!

Waterboarding = Drowning = Torture = Illegal = Immoral = UN-AMERICAN!

Under no circumstances is the torture of another human being ever acceptable in the United States of America! Never in our names!

Please follow me under the fold, where I ask you to sign the petition demanding the resignation of (starting with) SS Condi Rice today...

Under this Bush war criminal cabal, America has become the very nation for which the Nuremberg Protocols, the Japan War Crimes Tribunals, and the Geneva Conventions General Article III were written in stone, codified as the supreme law of this land, and still live, short of a military coup d'etat by these war criminals still holding the reins of power today! These presumptuous, pompous fools who think they are above the law, and that those laws they hold in utter contempt are "quaint and irrelevent". They are in for the shock of their lives!

They have violated them untold times, and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity in all of our names; and made a mockery of the international laws expressly condemning waterboarding and other such forms of torture as war crimes; and in committing these and other such heinous crimes against humanity, are also by very definition war criminals, as defined under US criminal statutes such as the 1996 War Crimes Act.

For her part in enabling them, for her complicity; for her part in all of the over 935 blatant lies leading up to Bush's war of aggression for a false mission; and for all of her unconscionable, deliberate lies in covering-up the truth and obstructing the Congress' constitutional oversight power, their criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, and about approving extraordinary rendition and torture--for years on end, SOS Rice must go!

Knowing that those who do such things, contrary to the rule of law and common human decency, those that commit such crimes are worthy of death; not only do they give the orders to commit the same things, but have pleasure in them that obey them!

Hiding behind the constitution they despise, while they are stabbing it in the back, slicing its throat; this is what they all do best, but they can't escape the long arm of justice forever. And the beginning of justice starts with our demanding and getting SS Rice to resign her post NOW, before she has a chance to be selected to run on McCain's ticket, which has been rumored in several other venues, in the MSM as well as the blogosphere. This soul-less enemy of the constitution has no business collecting another paycheck from the people, much less breathing the same free air as true patriots who don't order or enable torture--or being a heartbeat away from the presidency!

Fellow kossack Keith Olbermann writes about the Bush criminal conspiracy(his words-not mine) here:
"The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy"

Olbermann: "Bush may not observe the rules, but the country abides by them".

"It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.
All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists"...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...

KO, a trusted user here on Dkos, and the (mostly) revered and trusted moderator on Countdown, calls it "a criminal conspiracy", so that's good enough for me:

Special Comment: Part I

Special Comment: Part II

Professor John C. Yoo, who is really a war criminal enabler passing himself off as an "attorney at law"(but is nothing short of a blood-sucking fraud and counterfeit legal scholar imo), who is the co-author -- along with the help of the Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Michael E. Chertoff -- of the insidious Unitary Executive power-expanding, police-state enabling USA Patriot Act of 2001(& as enhanced in 2003), submitted the two now infamous torture memos giving this president virtual carte blanche to over-step his authority and the Constitution; Yoo himself crossing forever the precipice of common decency by giving Bush legal cover, and turning the US into a war criminal rogue nation.

But they aren't as smart as they think they are, and we're not as stupid as they want us to be!

Here he outlines the permissible assaults in graphic detail, explaining how much torture, and the duration of the same is acceptable(which it seems they never found an "unacceptable" way to inflict injury or pain):

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?

These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies."

But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief.

So according to Yoo, the president, who took an oath to "faithfully execute" the laws, can ignore those laws whenever he personally sees fit, in order to cover his own ass! What a crock!

The dry discussion of U.S. maiming statutes is just one in a series of graphic, extraordinary passages in Yoo's 81-page memo, which was declassified this past week. No maiming is known to have occurred in U.S. interrogations, and the Justice Department disavowed the document without public notice nine months after it was written.

Justice "disavowed" it "nine months after it was written"?  So they ignored it, trying to make it go away, like it never happened. "No maiming is known to have occurred"? No doubt he meant by anyone who mattered, who could do anything to stop them. Un-freakin-believable! They should've arrested him and hauled him away in cuffs right then and there!

In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a "frog crouch."

It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions."

The last time I looked, waterboarding seems to "seriously impair" the "bodily function" of breathing by way of "organ failure", as in the LUNGS, which could potentially be fatal, meaning "resulting in death"! Apparently, nobody studies human anatomy or Biology 101 anymore.

Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

In short, Yoo is saying the president can unilaterally suspend the constitution by his own will! But isn't the stated purpose of war supposed to be to ensure that the constitution is supposedly preserved, and with it the blessings of our liberty?

Doesn't it seem just a little bit antithetical to the concept of "defending freedom" when, in order to defend it, you have to kill it first? It's sort of like killing the host to save it from the parasite! If I didn't know better, I'd swear Yoo got his law degree out of a box of Cracker Jacks!

Written opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel have the force of law within the government because its staff is assigned to interpret the meaning of statutory or constitutional language. Yoo's 2003 memo has evoked strong criticism from legal academics, human rights advocates and military-law experts, who say that he was wrong on basic matters of constitutional law and went too far in authorizing harsh and coercive interrogation tactics by the Defense Department.

"Having 81 pages of legal analysis with its footnotes and respectable-sounding language makes the reader lose sight of what this is all about," said Dawn Johnsen, an OLC chief during the Clinton administration who is now a law professor at Indiana University. "He is saying that poking people's eyes out and pouring acid on them is beyond Congress's ability to limit a president. It is an unconscionable document."

Yoo defends the memo as a "near boilerplate" argument in favor of presidential prerogatives, and says its fundamental assertions differ little from those made by previous presidents of both parties. In comments to The Washington Post and other news organizations, Yoo has also criticized the Justice Department for issuing new legal opinions that do not include detailed discussions of specific interrogation tactics, which he views as crucial to defining the boundaries of what is lawful.

"You have to draw the line," Yoo said in an Esquire Magazine interview posted online this past week. "What the government is doing is unpleasant. It's the use of violence. I don't disagree with that. But I also think part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more -- we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague."

So by "drawing the line", Yoo is saying in his official capacity as a principal advisor to the Bush/Cheney adminstration, that it is a "boiler plate argument"-- meaning it's defensible in a court of law (maybe in a kangaroo court under the MCA, or a show trial in the Third Reich)-- that it is perfectly legal for them to "poke people's eyes out and pour acid on them" and that it is "beyond Congress' ability to limit a president".

So in Yoo's own words, it's legal to torture and to suspend the constitutional rights of detainees held in our captivity as long as its in a time of war(which in Bush's case means ipso facto we're always in a perpetual "state of war"), and as long as the Commander-in-Chief gives the orders.

So if the potus is the only one who can legally authorize torture, doesn't it make it just a little difficult for Bush to claim plausible deniability? Hmm. I guess Yoo may be on our side after all. I can hear Bush now, "You're doing a great job Brownie, uh, I mean Yoo". (Well, that is what he said to Brownie the day before he ditched him).

The 2003 memo includes long discussions of the relative illegality of a wide variety of coercive interrogation tactics, including a British technique in which prisoners are forced to stand in a spread-eagle position against a wall and an Israeli technique, called the Shabach, in which a suspect is hooded, strapped to a chair and subjected to powerfully loud music.

Various courts had declared both tactics to be inhumane, but not torture, Yoo noted. This meant that they were illegal under a provision of the Geneva Conventions that the administration said had no relevance to unlawful combatants in its custody.

So the Geneva Conventions aren't totally quaint or irrelevent after all, just when it applies to "inhumane" treatment, or (in their own subjective opinions) torture to "unlawful combatants in its custody". I guess that means the acts of barbarism the Iraqis were dealt at Abu Ghraib aren't covered, just because Yoo & Bush says so?

In another passage, discussing the bounds of Eighth Amendment protections involving confinement conditions, Yoo concluded that "the clothing of a detainee could also be taken away for a period of time without necessarily depriving him of a basic human need." Yoo cited the need to prove "malice or sadism" on the part of an interrogator before he or she could be prosecuted.

The interrogation memo was considered a binding opinion for nine months until December 2003, when OLC chief Jack Goldsmith told the Defense Department to ignore the document's analysis.

Gee whiz,I wonder why. You'd think they might be trying to cover their asses...again!

In his 2007 book "The Terror Presidency," Goldsmith, who now teaches law at Harvard University, said that some of the memos written by Yoo and his colleagues from 2001 to 2003 were "deeply flawed: sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President."

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor who served as constitutional legal counsel for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush said Yoo can be faulted "for not writing more narrowly." It is often better to "brush in hazy gray" rather than "spray paint in black and white," Kmiec said.

http://finepolitics.blogspot.com/...

Sounds like Yoo's contemporaries don't share a very high opinion of his legal acumen: "deeply flawed: sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President."

I don't know, but maybe he did get his law degree out of a Cracker Jacks box after all!

Georgetown law professor and former OLC,  Marty Lederman writes about the lawyers who advised the principals(of Hitler's Reich) who faced the war crimes tribunals for doing the very same thing Yoo advised Bush to do here:

What, if Anything, Does the Nuremberg Precedent Tell Us About the Criminal Culpability of Government Lawyers?
[...]

"And, surely, the most prominent and substantial historical precedent here is the Justice Case in the Nuremberg tribunals, in which the U.S. itself led the prosecution of several Nazi Ministry of Justice officials -- government lawyers -- for their involvement in the execution of the infamous "Nacht und Nebel," or "Night and Fog," decrees.

The Justice Case is often invoked as an historical analogy for the criminal culpability of Bush Administration lawyers. Like many others, therefore, I have been wondering whether that is in fact a fair analogy. What was it, exactly, that the U.S. prosecutors claimed the German lawyers did to deserve criminal punishment?

Was it, for instance (as some have suggested), that the lawyers advised German officials that the "Nacht und Nebel" decrees were lawful under German domestic law, while failing to also tell their government clients that the decrees would nevertheless violate the laws of war and constitute crimes against humanity?

If so, then perhaps the Justice Case might have a lot to say about our current situation, because...
John Yoo, et al., in effect advised the President that he could authorize torture and like conduct under domestic law, and further informed him that he could, at least as a matter of domestic law,  simply ignore the laws of war.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/...

So Yoo, condemned by the words out of his own lips, takes it upon himself to advise the president to march America down heretofore uncharted territory, that he can "authorize torture" and "ignore the rules of war"! Hitler had his "final solution". The Japs had their Bataan Death march. And Bush has his Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

This is but a small sample among the hundreds, if not thousands of captured documents that were used as evidence to prosecute the surviving remnants of the Nazi regime and their enabling lawyers at Nuremberg, I am using to help illustrate the mindset of the German Reich:

TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS BEFORE THE NUERNBERG MILITARY TRIBUNALS UNDER CONTROL COUNCIL LAW NO. 10, Vol. III, Case No. 3, The "Justice Case", United States against Josef Altstoetter, et al. (1947); available at the Mazal Library.
TRANSLATION OF DOCUMENT 1964-PS
1942 REICHSGESETZBLATT, PAGE 535
Decree of the Fuehrer regarding special jurisdiction of Reich Minister of Justice 20 Aug 1942.
"A strong administration of Justice is necessary for the fulfillment of the tasks of the great German Reich. Therefore, I commission and empower the Reich Minister of Justice to establish a National Socialist Administration of Justice and to take all necessary measures in accordance with my directives and instructions made in agreement with the Reich Minister and Chief of the Reich Chancellery and the Leader of the Party-Chancellery. He can thereby deviate from any existing law".
Fuehrer Supreme Headquarters 20 August 1942
The Fuehrer
ADOLF HITLER
Reich Minister and Chief of Reich Chancellery
Dr. Lammers

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Now let's start putting the pieces together, and begin to understand that this criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes goes directly to the top of this Bush/Cheney administration.

There's copious amounts of links proving that everyone in the Bush inner-circle knew then, what we in America were lied to about so many times, that torture was authorized by the president on down, with foreknowledge and premeditation, all the way up & down his chain of command. "Plausible deniability" my ass!

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 9, 2008
[...]

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies"...

http://abcnews.go.com/...

It is plain to see then, that Bush's top advisors participated in (the use of torture) decision-making process. Fast forward to the then Judge Mukasey AG confirmation hearings last year, whereupon Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke out against waterboarding and Mukasey's nomination for AG here:
[...]

...Like many of my colleagues and many American citizens, I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey’s evasive answers about the legality of certain techniques of torture.

While the nominee acknowledges that torture is unconstitutional, he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that the controlled drowning of a prisoner, waterboarding, rises to the level of torture.

What is the big mystery here? Over and over again, civilian and military tribunals have found waterboarding to be an unacceptable act of torture.

My concerns began with Judge Mukasey's answers to our questions about waterboarding. Waterboarding is a barbaric practice in which water is poured down the mouth and nose of a detainee to simulate drowning.

It’s an ancient technique of tyrants. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, it was used by interrogators in the Spanish Inquisition. In the nineteenth century, it was used against slaves in this country. In World War II, it was used against us by Japan. In the 1970s, it was used against political opponents by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina. Today, it’s being used against pro-democracy activists by the rulers of Burma.

When we fail to reject waterboarding, this is the company that we keep.

Make no mistake about it: waterboarding is already illegal under United States law. It’s illegal under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit outrages upon personal dignity, including cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment.

It’s illegal under the Torture Act, which prohibits acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. It’s illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. And it violates the Constitution.

The nation's top military lawyers and legal experts across the political spectrum have condemned waterboarding as torture. And after World War II, the United States prosecuted -- prosecuted -- Japanese officers for engaging in waterboarding. What more does this nominee need to enforce existing laws?

It is the job of the Attorney General to enforce our Constitution laws. The Attorney General must have the legal and moral judgment to know when an activity rises to the level of a violation of our Constitution, treaties or statutes. But this nominee wants to outsource his job to Congress. That passing of the buck is completely unacceptable by a nominee who wants to be the highest justice official in our country".

So what is AG Mukasey saying and doing now about waterboarding and torture? He's giving Bush, et al, all of the smokescreens and political cover he can.

http://condimustgo.com/
http://bravenewfilms.org/...

Please WAKE-UP & THINK! Face reality because your eyes and ears are not lying to you, but they are. THINK about it. What's happening to our nation right under our noses? Who are we anymore? Are we free men and women--or are we sheeple?

Look at what we as a nation have become in 7 1/2 years under these warmongering, murdering criminals. Who are they that would scrap our Constitution, and with it our civil liberties? One thing's for sure, they are not our friends.

They are a crime family, a crime family of lawless thugs that must be brought to justice! This year, this election, is our last gasp of any hope of stopping them! Get mad! Vote for real change! Throw the bums out on their ears!

Please sign the petition!