BUSH & CHENEY COULD FACE CHARGES OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY FOR ORDERING WATERBOARDING

Today's The New York Times has a story by Scott Shane and David Stout on the reluctance of Judge Michael Mukasey to admit what everyone else in the whole world already knows - that waterboarding is nothing else than torture and always has been since it was dreamt up to get information from captured enemy soldiers, spies, heretics et al.

Write Shane and Stout:

"Jack L. Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department in 2003 and 2004, wrote in his recent memoir, “The Terror Presidency,” that the possibility of future prosecution for aggressive actions against terrorism was a constant worry inside the Bush administration.

"“I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators, acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment, would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls,” Mr. Goldsmith wrote."

So top officials and White House bureaucrats are worried that they may be subject to criminal prosecution for ordering waterboarding because it is clearly a form of torture? If they were so worried about future charges brought against them, they must have realized before they ordered agents to use waterboarding that it was illegal as well as reprehensible and immoral.

Shane and Stout write:

"Scott L. Silliman, an expert on national security law at Duke University School of Law, said any statement by Mr. Mukasey that waterboarding was illegal torture “would open up Pandora’s box,” even in the United States. Such a statement from an attorney general would override existing Justice Department legal opinions and create intense pressure from human rights groups to open a criminal investigation of interrogation practices, Mr. Silliman said.

"“You would ask not just who carried it out, but who specifically approved it,” said Mr. Silliman, director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke. “Theoretically, it could go all the way up to the president of the United States; that’s why he’ll never say it’s torture,” Mr. Silliman said of Mr. Mukasey."

We have a possibility here that even Mr. George Bush as well as Mr. Dick Cheney could be very well brought up on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is why they are so afraid of the new AG nominee saying what everyone else knows, that waterboarding is a form of torture. They live in fear that successive administrations and foreign countries will arrest them and make them face charges on their un-American actions.