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Obama not ruling out interrogation prosecutions 16 mins ago WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama Tuesday refused to close the door on prosecuting authors of Bush-era legal rationales for terror suspect interrogations, after offering immunity to CIA operatives involved. Obama made a distinction between the agents who carried out harsh interrogations permitted by the White House after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the legal officials which justified such methods. "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters...

President Holds Open Door For Prosecutions of Bush Officials For Interrogation Policies, Truth Commission President Obama suggested today that it remained a possibility that the Justice Department might bring charges against officials of the Bush administration who devised harsh interrogation policies that some see as torture. He also suggested that if there is any sort of investigation into these past policies and practices, he would be more inclined to support an independent commission outside the typical congressional hearing process. Both statements represented breaks from previous White House statements on the matter. While the Bush-era memos providing legal justifications for enhanced...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama left the door open Tuesday to prosecuting Bush administration officials..."

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on...

It isn’t quite true these days that, to cite that over-quoted Monty Python sketch, “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Case in point: Phillipe Sands, a British lawyer with Cherie Blair’s London firm. Last year, he published a book claiming that when the Bush administration came to an end, six of the president’s top-level advisors would face charges in international court. Sure enough, now Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon wants to charge those six senior policy advisors with “giving legal cover” to alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. How will Obama respond?...

HANOI, Vietnam -- Sen. John McCain paid a quiet visit to the "Hanoi Hilton" prison where he was held for more than five years during the Vietnam War on Wednesday, making a few deadpan remarks as he made his way through dark corridors and past musty cells. McCain allowed reporters to follow him while he escorted Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina through the prison. -snip-

BAT AYIN, West Bank (AP) — An ax-wielding Palestinian militant went on a rampage Thursday in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, killing an Israeli 13-year-old and wounding a 7-year-old boy before fleeing the area. The attack posed an important test for Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised a firm hand against militants and expressed skepticism about prospects for peace. Government spokesman Mark Regev called it a "senseless act of brutality against innocents." Police and military units were searching for the attacker, according to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld and army officials. Army forces were operating in...

If you wanted to find a single story that summed up everything wrong about the politics of the Arab and Islamic world, it is this little item from the New York Times about the Arab summit meeting in Doha, Qatar. As the Times puts it, the Arabs are divided about everything … except their support for Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the architect of a campaign of rape and murder in Darfur that earned him an indictment from the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. There may be a warrant for al-Bashir’s arrest sitting in...

In one of his last moves before leaving office March 13, then-Navy Secretary Donald Winter quietly awarded 19-term Democratic congressman John Murtha (Pa.) with the service's highest civilian honor. Citing Murtha's "courageous leadership, vision, and loyalty to the men and women of the Department of the Navy," Winter presented the influential chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense panel with the Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award, an honor bestowed in "those extraordinary cases where individuals have demonstrated exceptionally outstanding service of substantial and long term benefit to the Navy, Marine Corps, or the Department of the Navy as a whole,"...

The British Paper, The Guardian has committed the equivalent of an Journalistic pogrom. They published a report from a secret, unidentified woman who took a five day trip to Israel and Gaza and supposedly came up with examples of Israeli War Crimes. All the examples are without witnesses proof or context. They even have some convincing footage, in fact it is just as convincing as the Mohamed al Dura video. The British press is famous for spreading rumors of Israel Massacres, they fell for the Jenin hoax hook, line and sinker, they also fell for the disproved "attack" on the...

PARIS — Every time Radovan Karadzic, the onetime Bosnian Serb leader, appears in court on war crimes charges, he has hammered on one recurring claim: a senior American official pledged that he would never be standing there. The official, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration, has repeatedly denied promising Mr. Karadzic immunity from prosecution in exchange for abandoning power after the Bosnian war......

ICTY - Tribunal Update Zagreb awarded damages to families of victims killed in detention. Croatia secretly paid 1.8 million kuna (250,000 euro) to the families of people killed in the notorious Lora prison camp in the early 1990s, confirmed officials this week. Lora, a Yugoslav-era naval base in the coastal city of Split, was taken over by Croatian forces in 1991, the start of the Croatian war of independence, as the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, JNA, forces withdrew. From 1992 to 1997, it functioned as a prison camp for mainly Serbian, but also Bosnian and Montenegrin, civilians and prisoners of war,...

March 2009 Update on the racist Arab Muslim [Arab league backed] dictator Al Bashir's arrest warrant for genocide, crimes against humanity     Ban urges Sudan to ensure safety of UN bodies Reuters - [March, 4, 2009]UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Khartoum to cooperate with all UN entities and ensure their safety after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on Wednesday for Sudan's leader.http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE5234A520090304   World court issues arrest warrant for Sudan's Bashir Christian Science Monitor [Mar. 4, 2009]‎http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0305/p90s01-woaf.html   Court issues war crimes warrant for Sudan's Bashir The Associated Press  [Mar. 4, 2009]‎...charges...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder ruled out the use of "waterboarding" as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects on Monday, calling it a form of torture that the Obama administration could never condone. Holder's declaration underscored President Barack Obama's break with the former Bush administration's anti-terrorist policies, which were condemned by human-rights groups, civil liberties advocates and U.S. allies abroad. "Waterboarding is torture ... My Justice Department will not justify it, will not rationalize it and will not condone it," Holder, who his heading a review of the treatment of terrorism suspects, said in a speech to...

When discussing war crimes during World War II, two events usually get thrown out as indictments of the Allies: dropping atomic weapons on the Japanese and the raid of Dresden, in which 25,000 people died mostly of the raging fire that swept the German city. Critics accuse the Allies of deliberately attacking a civilian population center with little military value as a payback for Nazi attacks on Britain. This perception gained a lot of credence through Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, his autobiographical tale inspired by his eyewitness experience at Dresden as a POW. Interestingly, though, Germans apparently tend to view...

Germany's war crimes prosecutor issued an impassioned warning Thursday against any further delay in bringing 88-year-old John Demjanjuk to trial for allegedly helping kill 29,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp. Kurt Schrimm, who heads Germany's national office on war crimes in Ludwigsburg, said his staff have already set out a compelling case against Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born man who now lives in the US state of Ohio. Schrimm rejected claims by local German prosecutors that the case was incomplete. Demjanjuk was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges that he was a guard at the Treblinka death...

International law expert Avi Bell talks about war crimes in Gaza

A Petition to the U.N. on Palestinian Muslims Crimes By Jamie Glazov January 16, 2009 Gabriel: Something simply had to be done to bring attention to what Hamas is doing. Hamas is a religiously driven radical Islamic organization. Westerners simply do not understand, and I believe have a hard time believing, how far radical Muslims are willing to go to accomplish their objectives. That's why so many in the West tend to dismiss the evil of Islamofascism and Islamists' depth of hatred towards the Jews and their commitment to destroy Israel at any cost -- including sacrificing their own children...

Best. Excuse. Ever.Human rights groups argued Wednesday that a detailed probe into Hamas's firing of Kassam rockets at Israeli communities is not necessary, because it constitutes such a "blatant" war crime. By contrast, Israel's actions are more complex, and therefore do require such investigation, they said... said Sarit Micha'eli of B'tselem... "It is quite clear that [Hamas is] attacking and targeting civilians... With Israel things are more complicated because Israel states it does not deliberately target civilians and that it safeguards them. With Israel, you have to investigate each specific incident because even if a civilian is killed in an...

A movement has begun among American college professors to boycott Israeli universities and professors and Israeli culture, over the “oppression” of Palestinians by Israelis. I read some of the press accounts of this academic movement, and decided to investigate its leader. David Lloyd, Professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the leader of this US effort. Anti-Semitism is commonplace in Europe, where such boycotts are old news. The background of Dr. Lloyd doesn’t look that bad on first glance. On his Biographical Sketch, there are only a few hints that the man is off-balance. Half of his...