A crime is a crime is a crime. No pixie dust or holy water can wash it away.

You’re correct. Holder has just consecrated Yoo’s OLC memos.

So let’s see if I get this. Scarborough and company are going nuts because this is too much and we are going nuts because it’s not enough? Nuts.

Thank you peterr, this is both moving and powerful.

These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood.

Sadly, Holder and Obama are now joining Cheney, Bush, Yoo, Addington and the rest as Lady MacBeth’s with stains that will never wash out.

Peter,

The most disgusting thing about this is that Uniform Code of Military Justice recognizes that certain orders are illegal. What’s more, it requires that officers refuse to execute illegal orders.

In the real world there will be slippage in combat situations. But Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were anything but combat situations.

So, what Holder has established is that certain government functionaries operating under color of authority are free to do things that our military are not permitted to do. Nice.

Unfortunately, the Nürnberg trials were a farce and travesty of justice — they were a victor’s form of justice.

To Scarborough and his friends, anything was too much. For us, everything might be enough. But it might not be, either.

In what sense, Alan? Because only Germans were on trial? Or because the Russians were there asking why we were bothering with a trial, rather than simply hanging them all?

If you have a problem with what Holder is doing, take it up with Obama. Holder is doing exactly what Obama wants him to do.

Boxturtle (Msg to Holder: Your sayin’ so don’t make it so)

Speaking of taking pains to conceal their violations, Marcy’s uncovered another example: the existence of an undated and unsigned document entitled, “Legal Principles Applicable to CIA Detention and Interrogation of Captured Al-Qa’ida Personnel.”

Undated and unsigned legal advice? Yeah, that’s the product of an office that proudly stands behind its work.

The Holder quotation, it seems to me, doesn’t say anything about pursuing or not pursuing the designers and implementers. It seems to speak only to those worker bees who exceeded even the rules as designated from above. It doesn’t, as far as I can see, preclude investigating as far as it takes to establish in the record who the designers and implementers were and who could be categorized as following orders. I still think the statement allows for taking the investigation where the facts lead.

Good morning,Petrr.

Coincidentally, I JUST finished reading a thought provoking piece over at Truthout.It may be of interest to you.

Here’s a small excerpt:

TUESDAY 25 AUGUST 2009

Secret Prisons and Sovereignty
Saturday 22 August 2009

by: Bernard Keenan | Visit article original @ The Guardian UK

Has Obama simply adopted a doctrine of the Bush administration, or does the ongoing existence of secret prisons and extralegal detention reveal something more about the limits of law itself?
In times of war, it is generally agreed that the executive branch of government could adopt emergency powers to suspend the normal legal order. In such a “state of exception”, as investigated by Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, normal legal rules are superseded by facts of life. The distinction between legal rule and bare necessity becomes blurred.

In a time of emergency, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote, “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception”. No sooner had Hitler come to power than he declared personal liberties contained in the constitution of the Weimar republic to be suspended, to bring about the Third Reich. His decree was never repealed, and so the entire 12 years of his rule was, in legal terms, a state of exception during which his word was law. The definition of a sovereign, for Schmitt, is the legal power to suspend legality itself.
Interest in Schmitt was understandably renewed following the declaration by the US president George W Bush in November 2001 that “enemy combatants” would be detained without access to normal courts. The ordinary laws of war would not apply to them. This decision fitted Schmitt’s concept of sovereign power to the letter. But in Agamben’s reading, this is not simply a particular doctrine adopted by the Nazis and the Bush administration. Rather it is inherent in the structure of sovereignty and law. For Agamben, the “state of exception” is in fact the normal situation. The power to create legal black holes is not so much an abuse of executive power; it is something built into the nature of executive power itself.~~~~~~~~~~(Excerpt)

peterr, a numbing post, thanx for making it

a reminder, you saying it was fine to crush the testicles of children

Torture has been codified. It is now legal. And if it is illegal, and OLC lawyer can just legalize it again. Our government is out of control. Obama is now complicit in war crimes. Oh, sorry, forgot, war crimes do not exist any longer. Ah, well, I guess ‘Might Makes Right’ is as good a foreign policy as ‘Shut Up Or We’ll Nuke You’. This country is over.

The MSM is fulminating over Abdul al-Megrahi, who was recently released to go home to die of prostate cancer. He was convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, although he always maintained his innocence.

Megrahi was an employee of the Libyan government. If he had worked for the US government, he presumably would have been eligible for the “following orders” defense that Uncle Sam affords to the state-sponsored torturers in its employ.

Holder’s actions in the Marc Rich pardon showed what kind of honor he has. He violated the rules of the Justice Department to get his boss, Bill Clinton, what he wanted and the person representing the person he obtained the pardon for, “Scooter” Libby knew he had to do whatever it took to get what he and his people wanted.

We are dealing with moral relativism that leads to tortured logic just to allow odious, expedient acts to be performed in our name. The people who drafted the covering documents and those who issued the orders haven’t the slightest idea what really constitutes honor.

The question now is what do we do when the GOP returns to power and all these legal opinions are still controlling when they decide go after a restless population here at home.

I think Larry Flynt’s call for a general strike is a good first step in confronting the monsters who have become our government.

@11

Search Resultst r u t h o u t | Secret Prisons and SovereigntySecret Prisons and Sovereignty. Saturday 22 August 2009. by: Bernard Keenan | Visit article original @ The Guardian UK …
http://www.truthout.org/082409C – 23 hours ago – Similar

Were they perfect? Hardly. But the fact that not everyone tried at Nuremberg was convicted says something for the honesty of the process.

Jackson himself addressed this in his opening statement (pp. 101-102 at the link above):

Before I discuss particulars of evidence, some general considerations which may affect the credit of this trial in the eyes of the world should be candidly faced. There is a dramatic disparity between the circumstances of the accusers and of the accused that might discredit our work if we should falter, in even minor matters, in being fair and temperate.

Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the first World War, we learned the futility of the latter course. The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to, draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.

At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to put these men to trial is to do them an injustice entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used. Let us see what alternative they would have to being tried.

More than a majority of these prisoners surrendered to or were tracked down by the forces of the United States.

Could they expect us to make American custody a shelter for our enemies against the just wrath of our Allies? Did we spend American lives to capture them only to save them from punishment? Under the principles of the Moscow Declaration, those suspected war criminals who are not to be tried internationally must be turned over to individual governments for trial at the scene of their outrages. Many less responsible and less culpable American-held prisoners have been and will continue to be turned over to other United Nations for local trial. If these defendants should succeed, for any reason, in escaping the condemnation of this Tribunal, or if they obstruct or abort this trial, those who are American-held prisoners will be delivered up to our continental Allies. For these defendants, however, we have set up an International Tribunal and have undertaken the burden of participating in a complicated effort to give them fair and dispassionate hearings. That is the best-known protection to any man with a defense worthy of being heard.

If these men are the first war leaders of a defeated nation to be prosecuted in the name of the law, they are also the first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of the law. Realistically, the Charter of this Tribunal, which gives them a hearing, is also the source of their only hope. It may be that these men of troubled conscience, whose only wish is that the world forget them, do not regard a trial as a favor. But they do have a fair opportunity to defend themselves-a favor which these men, when in power, rarely extended to their fellow countrymen. Despite the fact that public opinion already condemns their acts, we agree that here they must be given a presumption of innocence, and we accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.

When I say that we do not ask for convictions unless we prove crime, I do not mean mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many of us might well have committed had we been in the defendants’ positions.. It is not because they yielded to the normal frailties of human beings that we accuse them. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.

We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers, and these defendants had their share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.

The judges may have been the victors, but the defendants were convicted on the basis of their own documents, films, and the words of their own mouths.

I don’t have a problem with Obama (or Bush for that matter) declaring anyone captured on a battlefield as a prisoner-of-war and detaining them for the duration of the conflict under all the applicable rules.

That’s what happens to captured prisoners: they are detained until the end of the conflict. But they are entitled to humane treatment, and their human needs have to be met.

I recently read Schmitt’s “The Concept of the Political” and it shows where the criminals in both parties get their thoughts on how to govern.

There was also the international aspect of the crimes of Germany that should have been more thouroughly investigated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..8;index=13

Absolutely thay are entitled to humane trestment. As US citizens are…and SHOULD be entitled …regarding health care.But that’s another kettle of fish…..

My issue is with “LeRoi c’est Moi” power that provides unbridled authority and impunity for executive decisions.

For them it’s the beginning of the end,
For us it’s the end of the beginning….

That will be decided when a Nuremburg 2.0 is instituted as required by THE LAW OF THE LAND.
International treaties and the Constitution have not been repealed.

At the risk of being repetitive, the Attorney General is supposed to be independent of the President. The AG is the highest law enforcement official in the country. The buck stops with him. If he is in fact acting as a political operative of the President, then the rule of law is lost. Put the responsibility where is belongs – squarely on Holder’s shoulders.

The chief thing about the Nuremburg trials is that the victors tried and convicted the vanquished.

If individuals are to have Nuremburg-style justice for the Bush Reich, they must become the victors.

That ain’t going to happen at the ballot box.

History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future.

President Barack Obama
Ankara, Turkey
April 06, 2009

Perhaps The AG should be addressed as Attorney General Holdover?

@26

Hmm…and how does this reconcile with the “let’s look forward” meme that Obama promulgates here in the US?

Thanks Peterr

How blest are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail, right here at the lake.

The fanatic…who solidified Nazi control by establishing the new order of authority without law, so that the will of the party was the only test of legality, proceeded to export his lawlessness to Poland, which he governed with the lash of Caesar and whose population he reduced to sorrowing remnants.

Robert H. Jackson, on Hans Frank, Hitler’s Lawyer

link?

You certainly can’t expect us to hold our President to the standards established for others, can you?

Sibel Edmonds’ testimony just released.

To refer to this dereliction of Rule of Law as being odious is correct.

One can only surmise as this dereliction of law abide is steered more and more away from understood process of there being consequences for breaking the law — especially in this brazen business of condoning torture,doing torture and then trying to justify it — is the door best left closed.

In time this entire premise of torture being done and then not punished from those at top of command/control chain downwards will reek of the cheap politics,the lack of principled law abide and the nonsense and stupidity of those who would ignore what was done being the politics of doing othersise are not “convenient”.

President Obama has now walked himself into the same box G.W.Bush and Richard Cheney are already in.

That three Bush WH AGs are now in — plus one Obama WH AG are now in.

Plus a layer or two of lesser participants from Yoo to Addington to several CIA and Pentagon ringleaders — just for starts.

AG Holder should understand that if he does not enforce the laws he too will have to answer for it — as will President Obama.

The other problem is what is WashingtonDC going to do when Americans are captured or snatched and end up being tortured?

What is WashingtonDC going to do? Say we can do torture but you can not?

American leaders can order and do torture but other leaders should not or can not?

This all is odious. Some truly craven stupidity is at play here as well.

It’s much easier to do when the folks in the dock have unconditionally surrendered.

That is still no excuse for Holder and DOJ not to do the heaving lifting.

Ankara Speech – transcript

and I should have thanked you for your post – you certainly speak for me

It would seem that the intent of the Holder investigation is not justice in it’s truest sense. How will all of this square with international law? Are we not bound to fully investigate crimes against humanity and take those investigations wherever they lead?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Silly me. Just another DFH who cares about justice.

The whole thing makes me so sick words fail. Glad you found the words, Peter.

Bingo

wow, great frigging link!

I can’t wait to read that testimony

It would seem that an investigation cannot include caveats of who or what cannot be part of the investigation if it leads there. Why bother to have an investigation that won’t blame the low end guys because they did what they thought was legal because someone told them it was, or the higher ups because some lawyers said it could be legal with what seems to be twisted logic.

If this investigation is to be honest and truthful it will expose the wrong doing. Then it is a matter of what to do when the facts are out. It appears that the admin is using the following logic:

We will not prosecute the big guys
We will not pin it on the little guys

Therefore limit the investigation so we don’t have to face inconvenient truths.

Does this mean that the guys who wrote the order (and those who did not did not go past what was approved) did not brake the law or the Geneva C. If that was true, does that mean it is true now? If the President of the US can make those kind of orders without committing war crimes, what other world leaders also have that right?

This entire situation is Kafkaesque.

The past administrations did some fancy footwork to dance around the law and this one seems to be saying they don’t care and want to move on.

Most will say that makes them complicit in the crimes of the past, since they have a legal and moral imperative to stand aside and let the law with it’s blind justice, let the chips fall where they may.

People in power at any level think they have all sorts of discretion in their decision making. They do. But there can be consequences.

Holder uses pretty much the same argument that the Nazi’s would have used had they been victorious in Europe and then had a fit of conscious. Go after the underlings and let the big fish off the hook. Breathtaking

Spencer talked about this a couple of weeks ago, noting how very bad an idea it would be for an investigation to ignore what he called “the climate of command responsibility within which any interrogator operated.”

And here’s what Spencer wrote:

But the atmosphere of command responsibility at Abu Ghraib — and from Abu Ghraib up the chain of command in Iraq, and from the U.S. military commander in Iraq up to the Department of Defense that instructed Abu Ghraib to get “Gitmo-ized” — did not receive the same legal scrutiny.

Per the wikipedia:

The “Yamashita standard” [a.k.a. “the doctrine of command responsibility”] is based upon the precedent set by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita. He was prosecuted, in a still controversial trial, for atrocities committed by troops under his command in the Philippines. Yamashita was charged with “unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to commit war crimes.”[7][8]

Note that Yamashita was executed for fail to stop war crimes that he should have known were on going. He was not convicted of authorizing anything.

IMHO, Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted under the doctrine of command responsibility for taking impeachment off the table.

‘cuse me, what was that again Mr President ??

Holder has again reminded me of another of his best and brightest
contemporaries, Condi Rice. He has the same self absorbed look and
indifference to history beyond current events that guarantees him a
seat at the big table. Is this the end product of the civil rights
struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries… if he and Obama keep it up
they will make a new legacy we all will have to live down.

appalling.
we have come so far and fallen so low.

if one of the attackers’ goals was to knock the US off its moral pedestal (which was cracking of internal stresses), it is fully accomplished.

AG Holder, like Obama and Bush, is ignoring the elephant in the living room. In Holder’s case, it is that the “legal” guidance on torture issued by his two predecessors was so flawed as to be obvious, incompetent and inherently unreliable. The “guidance” on torture was intended and seen by its perpetrators as after the fact papering of illegal acts, a single roll of toilet paper in a cholera ward, so to speak.

If the legal opinions at issue were credible and sound, had they not made false arguments, ignored binding precedent and wished away dangerous facts, Holder’s argument, too, would be sound. They weren’t. And neither is Holders’.

Under normal circumstances, Holder’s argument would comfort the grunts who never saw those opinions but who were told by their superiors that their orders and actions were “legal” and they had DoJ opinions to prove it. But in the down the rabbit hole world that has become the Beltway, it is those grunts who are to be investigated, not the few who saw or wrote or designed those deeply flawed opinions.

Apart from the tensions this faulty position should give Mr. Holder, it ought to insure that he suffers the same fate as ‘Fredo, not being able to find work. Predictably, however, his ability to repeat this argument without laughing or crying uncontrollably will be the biggest draw in his resume.

As a matter of interest, I think this language comes from the Alstoetter case, sometimes called the Judges Case or the Attorneys case.

One of the biggest problems with Nuremberg is that nations find it easy to impose the principles on nations they have defeated in war, but extremely difficult to apply it to their own conduct. Peterr’s repetition of the phrase “Great captains are not automata” brings this point close to home. The US Army acknowledges that the principles of Nuremberg apply to it, and they teach it to soldiers over and over.

I guess we now know that Holder is unable to live up to the principles of the US Army.

No, the Judges’ Case was the third of the Nuremburg trials– this came from the very first trial, with the highest ranking defendants of the Nazi regime.

I haven’t looked at those trial docs, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they didn’t pick up on the language of Jackson and Maxwell-Fyfe for their arguments.

Whatever happens with health insurance reform and repairing our fractured economy, whether good or bad, will pale into relative insignificance when compared years from now to this odious break from the Rule of Law.

This whitewash will forever be associated with Obama’s and Holder’s names, which shall deservedly and forever be synonymous with disgrace, cowardice, and shame.

if one of the attackers’ goals was to knock the US off its moral pedestal (which was cracking of internal stresses), it is fully accomplished.

Bin Laden said that his goal was to “bankrupt America,” but I thought he meant “fiscally.”

Let us review the law:

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Article. VI.

Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Clause 3: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment

Part I
Article 1
1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3
1. No State Party shall expel, return (”refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Article 4
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.

Thank you. If I may add: UNCAT Article 7:

“The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed [torture] is found, shall […], if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”

In other words, if we don’t prosecute those who (1) acted in good faith and (3) stay within the bounds of their (illegal) orders, then we must extradite them.

Interesting tidbits from Holdout’s,er,I mean Holder’s bio on Wiki:

Holder briefly served as Acting Attorney General under President George W. Bush until the Senate confirmed Bush’s nominee John Ashcroft.[14]

Private practice
From 2001 until he became Attorney General, Holder worked as an attorney at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.,[8]

Holder favors closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp,[28] although he has said that the detainees are not technically entitled to Geneva Convention protections.[29]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Wiki

NOTE: Michael Chertoff joined Covington and Burlington in March,2009,after departing DHS.

Google Covington and Burling /CIA sometime.

But what constitutes “severe pain or suffering?” John Yoo said in his memo that it was pain that approximated that of organ failure, and anything short of that wasn’t “severe” enough to be covered. That enabled President Bush to declare that whatever we were doing wasn’t “torture,” and therefore he could say with a straight face “we don’t torture” and here’s the legal opinion telling me why that is so.

You have to deal with the politicization of the Justice Department first. That’s where the slide down the slippery slope began. When the Bush White House was able to go to the Justice Department and ask for a memo that enabled them to get around the Convention Against Torture (among other things), and they actually got such a memo, that’s where things went wrong.

Even John Ashcroft, as maligned as he is, had a line he would not cross and suffered pangs of conscience about what was happening (though apparently not strong enough to act to prevent it). Alberto Gonzales had no such scruples, apparently.

I fully expect, in the fullness of time, that Bush Administration officials will be brought to account for their actions. Maybe it’s too soon, and the full enormity hasn’t sunk in. But it will. The truth will out, and whether it’s us or Spain or someone else, the Bush Administration will have to answer for what happened.

What is wrong with these freaks? Didn’t ANYONE take even one history class in public school???? I distinctly remember studying that Nazis, even if they were following orders, were prosecuted.

Too bad WWII was so long ago. Wouldn’t it be interesting if some real Nazis (as opposed to right-wing whining) spoke up and said, “I am in prison, 50 years later, and I, too, was just following orders?

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. I wish! Not that I wish for another holocaust, but that those responsible would be punished.

And what’s more, those who did the right thing get nothing. See how fast they don’t do the right thing next time, if there are no consequences for it.

And, of course, don’t stop at the lower-level CIA criminals — go all the way up — to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush.

Thank you, peterr. This diary should hit the front pages of every newspaper and online news coverage. Holder has been weighed in the balance…and found wanting.

Cardinal Richelieu’s blanket pardon in “The Three Musketeers” comes to mind.

Since we know that Bush and Cheney approved of water-boarding and other harsh interrogation techniques it seems fairly likely that nearly anything might be defended as being appropriate. The Department of Justice says it is not interested in individuals who had permission to act illegally so long as the believed they were given permission and we know the kinds of action that John Yoo defended. Neither the Obama Administration nor Holder have repudiated Yoo so we can assume that punishing harsh techniques is not on the table. Given that Yoo effectively defended any act that didn’t destroy a major organ quickly as appropriate, the Holder Preliminary Review does not sound much like an investigation in to misdeeds.

We can assume that those who are looked at by Holder will get a clean bill of health which would effectively make further investigations into currently questionable acts unacceptable. Rather than being interested in Nuremberg as a standard, Holder appears to be actively cleaning up after the Bush administration. Or perhaps, since so little has changed in terms of policy over the last 8 months, they are effectively cleaning up after themselves as well.

By way of reference for those that want to believe this circumstance is an anomaly, Calley spent three years under house arrest for his part in My Lai. The three soldiers that tried to halt the massacre were denounced by US Congressmen as well as getting death threats and hate mail for years afterwards.

Anything done with the intent to follow orders is the new good faith.

Many years ago when part of my degree required passing Public International Law, we discussed and studied such quaint things as the Nuremberg Trials and The United Nations. I am glad that Peterr is one American who has not forgotten them.

CIA = Gestapo in their conduct?