War Crimes
Jul 25th, 2008 at 10:39 am by Susie
Is Bush going to pardon all of them?
As long as CIA agents could convince themselves they were not deliberately inflicting severe pain or suffering on detainees, they were free to do virtually anything in their questioning of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding. Furthermore, the agents’ belief they weren’t in fact torturing their captives didn’t even need to be “reasonable.”
These are the implications of a controversial August 2002 memo from the Justice Department to the CIA that was released Thursday. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained several internal Bush administration documents it says authorizes the CIA to torture detainees.
“These documents supply further evidence, if any were needed, that the Justice Department authorized the CIA to torture prisoners in its custody,” Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, said in a news release. “The Justice Department twisted the law, and in some cases ignored it altogether, in order to permit interrogators to use barbaric methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes.”
presidential pardons don’t prevent prosecution in an international tribunal. in fact, they actually make that more possible. the international war crimes tribunal only has jurisdiction if the home country is unwilling to prosecute.
I don’t understand how that will work. Currently the folks involved in doing the torture are unnamed. In order to pardon them, bush must name them. By naming them, does that now make them targets for procersecution???
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/vietnam/vietnam_1-21-77.html
Carter issued a group pardon to those who evaded the Vietnam draft. So it is possible to issue a pardon without naming individuals.