Morning Must Reads–Part I, George Bush and War Crimes

I will give the Washington Post its due. While the Editorial page is awful, the News guys and gals, like a blind squirrel, find a nut once in a while. Today’s news is worth your time. Turns out that the Bush Administration did authorize torture.

Bob Woodward (the great enabler of the Bush Administration, who is busy kissing the ass of the incoming Obama Administration because he realizes he will need their help for his future blockbusters now that the Bushies are no longer relevant) breaks news with a report that a retired judge with solid Republican credentials says a Guantanamo prisoner was tortured:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

So much for Dick Cheney’s denial that the U.S. allowed or endorsed torture. Judge Susan Crawford reportedly decided that:

the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

This is bad news for George Bush and Dick Cheney’s future tourist plans. Judge Crawford is helping write the indictment for war crime charges likely to be brought against senior members of the Bush Administration by jurists in Europe. George Bush and Dick Cheney, along with Paul Wolfowitz (DOD), George Tenet (CIA), John McLaughlin (CIA), Dougie Feith (DOD), and Cofer Black (CIA), are likely to find themselves facing charges similar to those levied against the former governors of Rwanda and Serbia. George Bush leaves office on the 20th of January but he will be living with the nightmare of his Administration for some years to come.

Peter Finn has a great companion piece that details the challenges the Obama Administration faces in trying to pursue charges against the suspected terrorists because of the breakdown in the judicial system that was supposed to be used to prosecute the Guantanamo inhabitants:

A former military prosecutor said in a declaration filed in federal court yesterday that the system of handling evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay is so chaotic that it is impossible to prepare a fair and successful prosecution.

Darrel Vandeveld, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, filed the declaration in support of a petition seeking the release of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who has been held at the military prison in Cuba for six years. Jawad was a juvenile when he was detained in Kabul in 2002 after a grenade attack that severely wounded two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their interpreter.

The parade of people talking about the abuses of the Bush Administration is just starting. This is sure to help give the new Obama team a brief honeymoon as the media and public finally come to grips with the long evident fact that Bush and company botched and bungled the handling of terrorist suspects and, in the process, tarnished the reputation of the United States. Heck of a job, Bushie.