CYA Agents: Bush Hit Men Running Scared
Written by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Like a gang of twitchy hit men afraid they've botched the job, the Bush Regime is creeping back to the scene of the crime: the Congressional backrooms where they thought they'd put the kibosh on the American Republic once and for all.
But it seems there is still a flicker of life in the victim -- and thus a threat that the gangsters might have to face the music somewhere down the line. So they went back to the bagmen on Capitol Hill this week, ordering their minions to provide retroactive legal cover for the rank offenses committed by the big boys at the top when they devised their torture regimen -- in knowing, deliberate violation of the U.S. War Crimes Act, which was passed by acclamation in the Republican-led Congress in 1996, and toughened up the following year with the support of the Pentagon, the Washington Post reports.
The moribund Republic, which the Bush gangsters had slowly tortured for years, was thought to have been finally bludgeoned to death when the Bushists brought out the blunt instrument of the "unitary executive" earlier this year. After the Regime's patently illegal domestic spying programs were revealed, the Regime at last dropped all pretense and openly declared a presidential dictatorship, insisting that any action ordered by the "Commander-in-Chief" is beyond the reach of law.
When this extraordinary usurpation of the Constitution did not produce angry crowds in the street demanding the return of their liberties -- and nothing more than a prissy "Well, I never!" from the oozing invertebrates in the Democratic opposition -- it seemed that the Republic was well and truly dead. But then last month, the Supreme Court's decision in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case effectively overturned the Bushists’ "unitary executive" fantasies by ruling that the Geneva Conventions -- which have been incorporated into U.S. law and are the basis of the War Crimes Act -- applied to Bush's Terror War.
This was the nightmare scenario that Attorney General Alberto "The Fixer" Gonzales and Dick Cheney's capo, David "The Enforcer" Addington laid out in legal memos for George W. Bush in early 2002, when Bush, Cheney and Pentagon warlord Don Rumseld were signing off on the various tortures they would inflict on their captives. The legal minions told Bush that they could all be prosecuted, even executed, under the War Crimes Act for what they were doing -- if the Geneva Conventions were upheld. Gonzales thus advised Bush to issue a presidential order stripping Terror War captives of the Geneva protections, the Post reports. Only this bit of weasel-wording could provide a "defense against future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.
(There's more.)
Empire Burlesque
Like a gang of twitchy hit men afraid they've botched the job, the Bush Regime is creeping back to the scene of the crime: the Congressional backrooms where they thought they'd put the kibosh on the American Republic once and for all.
But it seems there is still a flicker of life in the victim -- and thus a threat that the gangsters might have to face the music somewhere down the line. So they went back to the bagmen on Capitol Hill this week, ordering their minions to provide retroactive legal cover for the rank offenses committed by the big boys at the top when they devised their torture regimen -- in knowing, deliberate violation of the U.S. War Crimes Act, which was passed by acclamation in the Republican-led Congress in 1996, and toughened up the following year with the support of the Pentagon, the Washington Post reports.
The moribund Republic, which the Bush gangsters had slowly tortured for years, was thought to have been finally bludgeoned to death when the Bushists brought out the blunt instrument of the "unitary executive" earlier this year. After the Regime's patently illegal domestic spying programs were revealed, the Regime at last dropped all pretense and openly declared a presidential dictatorship, insisting that any action ordered by the "Commander-in-Chief" is beyond the reach of law.
When this extraordinary usurpation of the Constitution did not produce angry crowds in the street demanding the return of their liberties -- and nothing more than a prissy "Well, I never!" from the oozing invertebrates in the Democratic opposition -- it seemed that the Republic was well and truly dead. But then last month, the Supreme Court's decision in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case effectively overturned the Bushists’ "unitary executive" fantasies by ruling that the Geneva Conventions -- which have been incorporated into U.S. law and are the basis of the War Crimes Act -- applied to Bush's Terror War.
This was the nightmare scenario that Attorney General Alberto "The Fixer" Gonzales and Dick Cheney's capo, David "The Enforcer" Addington laid out in legal memos for George W. Bush in early 2002, when Bush, Cheney and Pentagon warlord Don Rumseld were signing off on the various tortures they would inflict on their captives. The legal minions told Bush that they could all be prosecuted, even executed, under the War Crimes Act for what they were doing -- if the Geneva Conventions were upheld. Gonzales thus advised Bush to issue a presidential order stripping Terror War captives of the Geneva protections, the Post reports. Only this bit of weasel-wording could provide a "defense against future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.
(There's more.)
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