ALBERTO GONZALEZ IS TORTURER IN CHIEF

The Centre For Constitutional Rights says Attorney General Designate’s testimony before the Senate confirms his role in Abu Ghraib Torture...

The CCR filed new documents on January 31, 2005, with the German Federal Prosecutor looking into war crimes charges against high-ranking U.S. officials including Donald Rumsfeld: one includes new evidence that the Fay investigation into Abu Ghraib protected Administration officials – it is a comprehensive and shocking opinion by Scott Horton, an expert on international law and the Chair of the International Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The second is a letter that details how Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirms his role as complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

In a declaration filed with the prosecutor in Karlsruhe, Germany, Scott Horton, who was asked to consider whether or not the U.S. would conduct a genuine investigation up the chain of command for war crimes, unequivocally states that “…no such criminal investigation or prosecution would occur in the near future in the United States for the reason that the criminal investigative and prosecutorial functions are currently controlled by individuals who are involved in the conspiracy to commit war crimes.” One of the legal issues before the prosecutor is whether the German investigation should be dismissed or deferred so that the U.S. authorities have a chance to conduct their own investigation. The obvious answer from Horton’s affidavit is no. The impossibility of an independent and far-reaching domestic investigation of high-ranking U.S. officials coupled with the United States’ refusal to join the International Criminal Court make the German court a court of last resort.

Full story here.

Amidst the cherleading (gosh sorry I mean really serious news journalism) Robert Fisk in Baghdad: "America has insisted on these elections - which will produce a largely Shia parliament representing Iraq's largest religious community - because they are supposed to provide an exit strategy for embattled US forces, but they seem set to change the geopolitical map of the Arab world
in ways the Americans could never have imagined. For George Bush and Tony Blair this is the law of unintended consequences writ large.

Full article here.