Can Of War Crimes

by digby

Dday is blogging like a madman over at Washington Monthly so be sure to check in over there to see what he and the rest of the gang are up to.

He references this amazing story about Spain potentially indicting the Cheney Gang for war crimes and writes.

The amount of material connecting these six to the creation, authorization and direction of state-sanctioned illegal torture, based on perverse and discredited reasoning, is voluminous, and given the record of Garzon, I would imagine this will lead to arrest warrants. This story shows once again the growing global unease with the implicit policy of the United States to conveniently forget the torture and other abuses of the Bush regime. In England, police are investigating whether British intelligence officers knew about and prolonged the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the recently released Guantanamo detainee. As Glenn Greenwald notes, other countries have not abandoned their commitment to the rule of law.[…]The end of the NY Times article shows why the US can hardly claim that Spain is acting irresponsibly beyond its own borders and violating the soveriegnty of other nations, because in one recent case we did almost exactly the same thing:

The United States for the first time this year used a law that allows for the prosecution in the United States of torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a Miami court sentenced Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia. Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”

So do I.

Me too.
I honestly think they opened a can of worms that the United State government may end up wishing they’d dealt with themselves. Wars have been started on less provocation. We’ve even started some of them.