Could George W. Bush end up behind bars?

Could George W. Bush end up behind bars?

www.cnn.com

Could George W. Bush or some of his top aides end up behind bars?

It's extremely unlikely, but the Obama administration is taking its first steps along a path that could lead in that direction, with the investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogators involved in the war on terror.

"You don't know where these things are going to end up," former CIA agent Peter Brookes told me. "They could go to very high levels in the government."

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
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Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
CIA Torture Methods
CIA 'threatened September 11 suspect's children'
'These People Fear Prosecution': Why Bush's CIA Team Should Worry About Its Embrace of Torture
CIA memo details procedures for breaking detainees

[edit on 9/4/2009 by whatukno]

Justice needs to be served in my humble opinion. The USA is not Nazi Germany, it is appalling that our government at any time thought that it was not only ok but imperative to torture Prisoners of War.

No one should be above the law. That goes doubly true for our government officials. Elected to be our leaders, they are to be held most accountable for those actions they take against another human being.

During wartime a country should be above reproach when it comes to the treatment of POW's. Yes it is widely known that the enemy wouldn't be as kind to our soldiers in the same situation, but that makes it much more important that we act in a civil and respectful manner to those we "detain" from the combat zone.

I for one want to know what role the administration played in the "interrogation" methods used by the CIA.

www.cnn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I'm torn.

We can't move forward if we are looking back. But we also have to stand for our own principles in the eyes of the world.

Then there's the vague feeling I have that it really wasn't Bush but Cheney...

reply to post by kosmicjack


I agree, but moving on also means clearing up unfinished business. A murderer does not get away with the murder just because a new murder is committed by someone else.

I think it must be investigated. If crimes were committed by our government those people who perpetrated or ordered those crimes must be held accountable.

reply to post by kosmicjack


You can move forward and look back at the same time. It's called multi-tasking. However, those in control could throw a wrench in the machine in order to stop us from moving forward if we try to look back. It's those folks who need to go in my opinion.

reply to post by theyreadmymind


The problem with this whole "detainee" & "Enhanced Interrogation" is that it flies in the face of everything brave men and women in this country fought for as far back as WWII.

The term Nazi is thrown around far too often, this is a case where that term would not apply either. However Khmer Rouge would be apt. POW's are still human beings and should not be treated in such an inhumane manner.


[color=Gold]Does this look like fun?

There is precident in showing that torturing POW's is a punishable offense.

Waterboarding: A Tortured History

A Punishable Offense

In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

"All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators," writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

Cases of waterboarding have occurred on U.S. soil, as well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

[edit on 9/5/2009 by whatukno]

reply to post by whatukno


Wukky, I agree with you in that someone needs to be jailed for this atrocious behavior.

Whether it is Bush or Cheney, however, is up for dispute.

Personally, I do not think Bush is that cruel, however, I have been known to be wrong before.

Dick Cheney, on the other hand, now he's as dirty and low down as a belly crawling rattlesnake.

As well as this the nonsense label of "detainee" needs to be changed back to prisoner, because using the label of "detainee" is only used as a means to sidestep our legal system, thereby with one word, staging a coup on the Legislative Branch.

Evidence, legal statutes, and court rooms will always be around, but not if Administration's like ex-President Bush had had any say in the matter, and to me the use of "unknown evidence" to convict someone is just an excuse to use any means necessary to not only put someone away but sidestep the entire legal system.

This is in essence the Pentagon attempting to usurp "civilian oversight" and as well as the "civilian management" since this military organization despises having civilians tell them what is right and wrong and what they can and cannot do, the "militarily indoctrinated" unfortunately see the "civilian" as the enemy because they want to wage war, make things go boom, and as well have unlimited funding.

By utilizing words like "detainee", "secret evidence", and "terror" our Government climbs the slippery slope of becoming a dictatorship and worse yet than Nazi Germany because if this route continues our nation will not just be hated as it is now, it will be despised, loathed, and seen as the enemy of all nations united.

When all nations eventually unite against one common enemy they will seek any measure to undo, destroy, dismember, and cast that country and their people to the winds of time and erase as well as eradicate the very knowledge that they existed to begin with.

Trust me Wukky, I would love to see this happen :

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/9aaece84618d.jpg[/atsimg]

And knowing Dick Cheney, by the time it did happen he would be long gone.

[edit on 5-9-2009 by SpartanKingLeonidas]

reply to post by whatukno


The Japanese soldiers were punished for a lot more than waterboarding. They also did a much harsher version of the technique and weren't doing it to save lives. They did it for fun.

You guys crack me up. Your assassination fantasies didn't play out, so now you're on imprisonment fantasies. The left would lock all of us up if they could.

reply to post by SpartanKingLeonidas


The idea of not torturing captives is not a new one. It actually comes from the antiquated notion of chivalry. A ideal that prisoners were to be honored and not harmed until they could be ransomed back to the country they were captured from. This practice was in effect up till our own civil war.

If we are to believe that we are of a higher moral standard than our enemy (winning of hearts and minds) Than by our example we must be superior in the treatment of those that we take from the battlefield as prisoners.

But the last administration stepped back in this ideal, stepped back from what we all would know is right, stepped back from what we hold as ideals to something barbaric.

History teaches nothing if it doesn't teach us what not to do. Obviously the last administration learned nothing from the killing fields of Cambodia. Learned nothing from our own Salem Witch Trials, learned nothing from the atrocities of the internment camps of Hitler's Nazi Germany.

How can we as a "polite society" win the hearts and minds of the people we purport to be "freeing" when it is known that we deal with our captives in such an inhumane and uncivilized manner?

To not right this wrong is to leave a black stain on the heart of our own society. It is to tell our enemy and future enemies that we are less than reputable in our treatment of comrades at arms. In war it is honorable to die for your cause and to be stricken from that honorable death is a blow to that warriors sense of reverence. We have taken from this warrior a death that should have come honorably in battle, do we belittle him further by torturing him in our care?

These two wars have shown a side of America that should not be associated with us. This is a side of our society that each servicemen should be ashamed of. We the citizenry should be aghast at the appalling nature of the interrogation techniques that the previous administration chose to use.

reply to post by Wimbly


This has little to do with left or right, this has everything to do with right and wrong. Prisoners in our charge were humiliated, and tortured as a means to an end that they could not produce.

The moment that these men were taken from the battlefield the intelligence they could have provided was rendered obsolete.

Justice can never be served against any crimes against these people because of the treatment that they received at the hands of their captors.

As I said on another board, I always felt that Bush was like the monkey in a very nice suit, while Cheney stood in the background, like this dark shadow of what the government is...

Like a shadow government...

Heh, the scene of them in W. fits perfectly with this!

In W., with Josh Brolin, Bush and Cheney are sitting down for lunch. They're discussing tactics to get information from POW's.

Bush is eating a sandwich and french fries, while Cheney has this lobster bisque, and Bush states that he doesn't want to torture them.

Cheney states that it's not torture, but it's enhanced interrogation techniques.

It was at this scene that I think we see Cheney as this evil figure...