Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's action against RTLM began on 23 October 2000 - along with the trial against Hassan Ngeze, director and editor of the Kangura magazine.

On 19 August 2003, at the tribunal in Arusha, life sentences were requested for RTLM leaders Ferdinand Nahimana, and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, They were charged with genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity, before and during the period of the genocides of 1994.

 Read more…

Here:

The pressures and allegedly selfless motivations being cited on behalf of Bush officials who ordered torture and other crimes -- even if accurate -- aren't unique to American leaders. They are extremely common. They don't mitigate war crimes. They are what typically motivate war crimes, and they're the reason such crimes are banned by international agreement in the first place -- to deter leaders, through the force of law, from succumbing to those exact temptations. What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn't their nationality. It's their conduct. And leaders who violate the laws of war and commit war crimes, by definition, aren't good, even if they are American.

Bingo

Via TFT:
Obsidian Wings:

I'm not sure it tells anything we don't already know (read, e.g., The Dark Side). But the Levin-run Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse is now out (pdf exec summary). And it deserves some press attention.

 Read more…

[Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers!]

Reuters:

The Polish prosecutor's office is investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have used methods close to torture, the prime minister's top adviser said on Friday.

I suppose this is happening now because the Bush administration has, er, disposed of the prisoners? Because the birds have all flown? One more little problem cleaned up before the perps enter the dreaded private sector?

Biden Rips Bush Administration

Looking to the future but with one eye on the past, Biden also promised that an Obama-Biden government would go through Bush administration data with "a fine-toothed comb" and pursue criminal charges if necessary.

"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation," he said, "they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution - out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law."

More like this please.

Systematic rapes to destroy women in the Congo.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

Just to remember. War is a moral force.

That.
Gives.
Us.
Meaning.

This is why they hate us.
This is the fault of the American people   Read more…

These guys are despicable human beings. They deserve to be removed from society and imprisoned for life. And they have been. They won’t be hacking off any more arms and legs. They won’t be raping and sodomizing helpless women. And they won’t be recruiting children to fight their battles for them. But they will not be executed. For their crimes they will sit in steel cages for the rest of their lives, contemplating and (hopefully) regretting their savage brutality toward their fellow human beings.

This was cited over at Big Orange, but with no link to the original or the site to sign the petition:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men and Women were created equal, that they are naturally endowed with certain unalienable rights, rights which have been deliberately and repeatedly ignored, eroded, even destroyed. To re-secure these rights that our forefathers toiled so hard to create and support, we again state that governments are created for the people and solely by the consent of the people so governed. Whenever, such as now, a form of government has become destructive to these ends, it is OUR RIGHT as citizens, to alter and/or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on the original ideals and ideas from whence this country was first imagined, then created through sweat, education, imagination, experience, tears, and toil. Likewise, it becomes our duty as citizens to strive to improve upon that foundation, eradicating the biases based on differences of sex, culture, religion, skin color, nationality, and other individual and groups traits that make individuals who and what they are.

As our forefathers warned 231 years ago, Prudence continues to dictate that a government long established should not be changed for light or transient reasons. However, the transgressions of the current administration against his own people and that against people of other countries are so serious and numerous in nature, that it becomes imprudent not to act immediately. We approach a form of absolute despotism of the kind suffered by our forefathers when they began their own revolution for reasons not dissimilar to ours.

To prove our case, the facts below are without question:

* HE has refused his assent to law, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
* HE has obstructed the administration of justice, by politicizing the method and manner in which justice is sought across the states and in the federal courts.

 Read more…

So The Nation has an angle on the Watada mistrial I hadn't heard yet. The good part:

Watada maintained that his refusal to participate in an illegal war in Iraq was justified, indeed required, under the Army's own Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under Judge Head's rulings, however, there simply would be no way for a soldier to resist an illegal order. Indeed, an American military person could be ordered to commit mass murder or genocide and then be denied the right even to make a case for the lawfulness of his actions. The judge's rulings fly in the face of the Supreme Court's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, which stood for the principle that all US officials are bound by national and international law not to commit war crimes.

Joy.

The Pentagon plans to build a military commissions compound at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, costing up to $125 million, a major undertaking meant to accommodate up to 1,200 people for the first U.S. war crimes trials since World War II, The Miami Herald learned Thursday.

If funded by Congress, the compound would be the largest single construction expenditure at Guantánamo since the Bush administration set up the offshore detention center in January 2002.

 Read more…

Thanks, McClatchy. Charlotte News Observer:

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture, and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Good thing it calls for a brain instead of a heart, right, Dick?

Whoa! I guess we now know that Lil Andy doesn't like it rough

What the Bush administration wants is to introduce vagueness to get away with exactly the same barabarism they have deploying illegally for the past five years. They must be stopped. And eventually, they must be prosecuted for war crimes.

Flowers and chocolates for the little tyke, stat. Welcome to the community of the sane, Andy. I hope you regret your support of these assholes back when it could've made a difference, because we've been telling you they don't use lube and they don't reach around for years now.

Hale's got a great piece up that I think we should all email to our Congresscritters. These aren't what you'd call "happy" numbers:

More than six in 10 Americans say the country is on the wrong track, according to a new Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll. More than half disapprove of Bush's handling of the economy, and 36 percent strongly disapprove. Almost half, 48 percent, say his policies have made the economy worse than it was when he became president; 19 percent say it's better.

``Gas prices are knocking us back into the dirt,'' said Burden, 31, one of the respondents in the poll. ``It seems like, since Bush took office, the government is burning up cash again, and things are getting worse.''

 Read more…

Murtha's appearance seems to be The Big Story out of the Sabbath Gasbags this time around. Before the show was even off the air (CDT anyway) I was seeing it in the "AP Reports" box most papers carry. I found the appearance remarkable--not for the Haditha Massacre & Coverup story itself, which blog readers have known for a week or more--but the fact that it could be discussed for ten solid minutes at least and the words "My Lai" never once get mentioned. What an exquisite squeeze the Bushits are in: Murtha can say, and others pick up and repeat, that this Haditha incident is "worse than Abu Ghraib" and the only line the warmongers could possibly come back with is "Yeah, but it's not as bad as My Lai!"