I had written on many occasions demanding that Dick Cheney be tried along with the war cabal. This cabal forged the intelligence information justifying the invasion of Iraq, while suppressing other information in this regard, leading to the destruction of an entire country, the ruin of its people and the death of thousands of Iraqis. In any case, I usually return to this issue every time new information comes to light. Yet, the possibility that these war criminals will be seen anytime soon in court remains weak, and well ahead in the future, because not only would it convict individuals, but also the whole establishment in America. What is open for discussion and possibly for action instead is an investigation into possible constitutional violations as well as violations of local laws by members of the Bush administration in the torture of prisoners and detainees. There seems to be sufficient evidence in this vein, while the U.S Department of Justice is currently facing pressure from the Congress and the media to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Cheney's role. While President Obama announced that he doesn't want to dig out the past, but rather wants to prevent the repetition of these violations in the future, and look forward, he also said that the final decision is in the hands of Eric Holder, the United States Attorney General. In any case, I do not want to go back to the old material that I used in this column as I demanded that Cheney be brought to court. Instead, I just want to go over the reasons for this recent uproar, and review the events in the order of their occurrence. Last May, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Leon Panetta, said that the CIA did not lie to the Congress. However, he reversed his statement on June 24 and admitted to the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress that the CIA had indeed withheld information from Congress about the CIA's plan to assassinate senior Al-Qaeda members, at the request of Cheney. According to published information, this plan remained on hold without being executed for eight years, and was eventually replaced by the Bush administration through the usage of drones and unmanned aircraft to fire missiles at Al-Qaeda suspects. I would like to ask the reader here to note the similarity between this plan and the Israeli methods followed in the assassination of Palestinian leaders, or in attacking them with missiles: In both the American and Israeli plans, many civilians are killed along with the intended target, and sometimes only civilians are killed with the target surviving. Meanwhile, and following Panetta's admission of Cheney's role in withholding information from Congress, seven Democratic members of Congress wrote to the CIA's director requesting a formal apology for having misled Congress (although I think it likely that he was not aware of all the details, as he has been only been recently appointed to his post). Moreover, while the uproar about this issue was still raging, the New York Times published a news story written by Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston, entitled “Bush Studied the Use of Military in U.S. Arrests”. I don't think that any American media outlet missed out on commenting on this news, with many calling for an investigation into the matter – which they saw as a military coup - as mentioned in Harper's magazine. In this regard, Cheney perhaps would not have been able to think about using the military, had the administration not have hired lawyers to provide the necessary legal justification for these actions. In fact, the Vice President and the other members of the war gang perused in a debate about this subject (on 23/10/2003) a memorandum drafted by the lawyers John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, in which they claim that “the president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States.” (Also, Yoo managed to legalize torture in another memo). While these lawyers may not face trial, they have become pariahs where they practice their profession, and they may very well be disbarred. If we take John Yoo as an example, he teaches at the University of California, where students attack him every day, and call for his expulsion or trial. If the Ministry of Justice appoints a special prosecutor in the end, the focus will be on the torture of detainees because this charge is well established, and easy to sway the jury in favour of. This is because the U.S. Constitution clearly prohibits government employees from exercising harsh or inhumane punishment against detainees, while the Fifth Amendment protects the prisoner from providing any testimony that may incriminate him. In addition, Cheney has since requested the CIA to lift the confidentiality from the information that demonstrates that enhanced interrogation, or torture, has saved the lives of thousands of Americans, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, and that it was the right thing to do to prevent mass attacks by Al-Qaeda. The Obama administration, however, released many torture documents, including one by the Inspector-General of the Central Intelligence Agency, in which he said that torture did not help in the prevention of any specific terrorist attacks. If the Ministry of Justice appoints a special prosecutor, he or she will immediately notice that Dick Cheney did not apologize or regret his actions, but is actually continuing to lie. I continue tomorrow.
