1. “ We can support the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission or we can scrap that and go for prosecutions. There are two factors that I see that would greatly hinder the quest for prosecutions
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1) The strong possibility for self-incrimination by low-level members. Like people mentioned earlier, prosecutions (if they were obtained at all) would most likely result in the imprisonment of people who were of little consequence, “minions” if you will.
2) The vested interests of the people at the top of the chain of power. Many people here may realize this already, but 9/11 was only the tip of the iceberg. While 9/11 was a terrible crime (one of the worst ever committed), it is just one event in a long line of large scale, increasingly devastating, high-level criminal actions that continues to this day. The vast culpability of extremely powerful criminal elements makes the possibility of prosecutions rooting out those at the top almost nil. As an related example, here is a quote from former CIA director Bill Colby to then senator John DeCamp, explaining why he needed to quit investigating and write a book (resulting in “The Franklin Coverup”):
“What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. This is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face.”
On the other hand, a truth and reconciliation commission (while, at this time, almost as unlikely to succeed) provides the slightest glimmer of hope for pulling back layers of secrecy that we currently can only imagine. That is because only the second problem remains from the two I listed above. With T&R, low-level people can no longer legally incriminate themselves. This is a major barrier to truth that would be instantaneously knocked down with the granting of immunity for testimony.
I think it is also important that we step back and look at the big picture. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, a global change of consciousness towards issues that affect human civilization as a whole. The 9/11 truth movement is one of the most tangible and viable catalysts for this shift because it has the ability to expose the corrupt power structures of the world. In one form or another, the movement will succeed, however not until people realize that their belief systems will be inexorably changed. The current ideas of justice and punishment, while valiant and well-meaning for our old paradigm, do not fit into our future global society. The continued belief in “eye for and eye” justice (no matter how heinous the crime) only serves to de-rail and delay one of the ultimate goals of the “truth movement”: truth.“
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19548
2. “Obama lawyers argue to drop Yoo torture suit
President Obama’s Justice Department defended former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo in a San Francisco federal court Friday, arguing that a prisoner formerly held as an enemy combatant had no right to sue Yoo for writing legal memos that allegedly led to his detention and torture.
“We’re not saying we condone torture,” department attorney Mary Mason said at a hearing on the government’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Jose Padilla. But any recourse against a government lawyer “is for the executive to decide, in the first instance, and for Congress to decide,” not the courts, she said.
“You’re not saying that if high public officials commit clearly illegal acts, a citizen subject to those acts has no remedy in this court?” asked U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White.
Not unless Congress has expressly authorized a lawsuit, Mason replied. She cited the argument the Justice Department made in Yoo’s case last year, with President George W. Bush still in office, that courts should not interfere in executive decision-making, especially in wartime.“
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/07/MNFD16AQ7Q.DTL&type=politics
3. How funny:
“How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.“
4. This is GREAT news!
“Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court
An ex-UN prosecutor has said that following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, former US President George W. Bush could — and should — be next on the International Criminal Court’s list.
The former prosecutor’s assessment was echoed in some respect by United Nations General Assembly chief Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, who said America’s military occupation of Iraq has caused over a million deaths and should be probed by the United Nations.
“David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects,” reported the New Zealand Herald.
The indictment of Bashir was a landmark, said Crane, because it paved a route for the court at The Hague to pursue heads of states engaged in criminality.“
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/ExUN_prosecutor_Bush_may_be_next_0307.html
5. Talk about unexpected consequences:
“Opium-poppy eradication has been hailed as a success in much of Afghanistan’s north and east, allowing counternarcotics officials to declare 18 provinces there as “poppy-free” despite record opium cultivation in the south and southwest.
But UN officials tell RFE/RL that many former opium farmers in those poppy-free areas have switched to another lucrative and illegal drug crop: cannabis.
As a result, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says, Afghanistan is now the world’s largest producer of two illegal drugs — heroin from opium poppies and cannabis.“
http://ionglobaltrends.blogspot.com/2009/03/afghanistan-former-opium-farmers-switch.html
6. “Nobel Economist: Ban Credit Default Swaps
Bloomberg notes:
Myron Scholes, the Nobel prize- winning economist who helped invent a model for pricing options, said regulators need to “blow up or burn” over-the-counter derivative trading markets to help solve the financial crisis.
The markets have stopped functioning and are failing to provide pricing signals, Scholes, 67, said today at a panel discussion at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Participants need a way to exit transactions and get a “fresh start,” he said.
The “solution is really to blow up or burn the OTC market, the CDSs and swaps and structured products, and let us start over,” he said, referring to credit-default swaps and other complex securities that are traded off exchanges. “One way to do that, through the auspices of regulators or the banking commissioners, is to try to close all contracts at mid-market prices.”
Scholes also recommended moving the trading of credit- default swaps, asset-backed securities and mortgage-backed securities to exchanges to allow for “a correct repricing” of the assets. The securities are currently traded between banks and investors, without any price disclosure on exchanges.
I agree.
Legally, you can cancel CDS based upon the theory that fraud is a basis to rescind contracts. Or you can reform (that is, modify) CDS if one party to the contract was mistaken about what he was getting into.“
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/03/nobel-economist-ban-credit-default.html
7. “Binyam Mohamed is the British resident who, two weeks ago, was released from Guantanamo and returned to Britain after seven years of detention, often in brutal conditions. Since his return, compelling evidence has been steadily emerging that British agents were knowingly complicit in Mohamed’s torture while in U.S. custody — including the discovery of telegrams sent by British intelligence officers to the CIA asking the CIA to extract information from him. How does a country with a minimally healthy political class and a pretense to the rule of law react to such allegations of criminality?
…
Notice what is missing from these accounts. There is nobody arguing that the dreary past should simply be forgotten in order to focus on the important and challenging future. There’s no snide suggestion that demands to investigate serious allegations of criminality are driven by petty vengeance or partisan score-settling. Nobody suggests that it’s perfectly permissible for government officials to commit serious crimes — including war crimes — as long as they had nice motives or were told that it was OK to do these things by their underlings, or that the financial crisis (which Britain has, too) precludes any investigations, or that whether to torture is a mere ”policy dispute.” Also missing is any claim that these crimes are State Secrets that must be kept concealed in order to protect British national security.
Instead, the tacit premise of the discussion is that credible allegations of criminality — even if committed by high government officials, perhaps especially then — compel serious criminal investigations. Imagine that. How shrill and radical.
If one stays immersed in American domestic political debates, it’s easy to lose sight of just how corrupted and rotted our political and media class is, because the most twisted ideas become enshrined as elite orthodoxies. Britain is hardly the paragon of transparency and adherence to international conventions; to the contrary, they’ve been with the U.S. every step of the way over the last eight years, enabling and partaking in many of the worst abuses. Yet this one single case of documented complicity in torture — mere complicity with, not actual commission of, the torture — is generating extreme political controversy and widespread demands across the political spectrum for judicial and criminal investigations. The British political class may not have wanted to see it, but when compelling evidence of criminality is rubbed in their faces, they at least pay lip service to the idea that crimes by government officials must be investigated and subjected to accountability.
By stark and depressing contrast, America’s political class and even most of its “journalists” — in the face of far, far greater, more heinous and more direct war criminality by their highest political leaders — are explicitly demanding that nothing be done and that it all be kept concealed. They’re surveying undeniable evidence of grotesque war crimes committed over many years by our government — including enabling legal theories that even Fred Hiatt described as “scary,” “lawless” and “disgraceful” — and are literally saying: ”just forget about that; it doesn’t matter.”
…
Compare all of that to Binyam Mohamed’s post-release statements — supported by other corroborating evidence — that “conditions at the US detention camp in Cuba have worsened since President Barack Obama was elected. . . . “‘Since the election it’s got harsher,’ Mohamed told the newspaper.” Isn’t this something that the U.S. Government should be called upon to address?
UPDATE: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick reviews, and dismantles, each of the justifications being offered by the Obama administration for keeping Bush crimes concealed and shielding them from investigations and prosecutions (h/t Bystander). It’s quite concise and well worth reading in its entirety (as is Digby’s discussion of that article).”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
