Earlier this year, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting he appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether Bush and senior members of his Cabinet committed war crimes by authorizing CIA and military interrogators to use harsh tactics against detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq.
That request followed an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross into interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay, which “documented several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”
But Cheney continues to dismiss such criticism, still insisting that the United States doesn’t torture and that the administration broke no other laws in conducting the “war on terror.”
"I think those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don't know what they're talking about,” Cheney told ABC News.
Mukasey has refused to open a war-crimes investigation, although a special counsel – Connecticut’s assistant attorney general John Durham, is investigating the CIA’s destruction of videotapes taken of the waterboarding of Mohammad and other detainees.
How President-elect Barack Obama handles evidence of the Bush administration’s use of torture will represent one of the first tests of his administration.
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose organization has represented Guantanamo detainees, said last week it is imperative that Obama authorize his Attorney General to launch a criminal investigation into Cheney and others in the White House.
“One of Barack Obama’s first acts as President should be to instruct his Attorney General to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush administration officials who gave the green light to torture,” Ratner said in a column published in the magazine The Progressive.
Ratner said anything less than a full-scale criminal investigation – a substitute like a Truth Commission assigned simply to ascertain the facts – would be unacceptable.
“If Obama and [Attorney General-designate Eric] Holder want to adhere to our Constitution and uphold our highest values, they must pursue those in the Bush administration who violated that Constitution, broke our laws, and tarnished our values,” Ratner wrote. “To simply let those officials walk off the stage sends a message of impunity that will only encourage future law breaking. The message that we need to send is that they will be held accountable.
“This is not Latin America; this is not South Africa. We are not trying to end a civil war, heal a wounded country and reconcile warring factions We are a democracy trying to hold accountable officials that led our country down the road to torture. And in a democracy, it is the job of a prosecutor and not the pundits to determine whether crimes were committed.”
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