How much more evidence of the Bush regime's criminal acts does the Wussacrat House leadership need to put impeachment back on the table?  (Pelosi's current spinning doesn't count....she doesn't walk the walk.)

From the NYTimes: "Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law..

"The book says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position” and was one of several prisoners to be “slammed against the walls,” according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

"The book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for The New Yorker, offers new details of the agency’s secret detention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interrogation methods and other tactics in the campaign against Al Qaeda."

Bush, the nation's Liar-in-Chief lied about the Red Cross report.

According to ThinkProgress: "In August 2007, investigative journalist Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker that a highly confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross had found that interrogation methods used in CIA detention facilities were “tantamount to torture.” According to Mayer’s sources, the report warned that CIA “officials may have committed ‘grave breaches’ of the Geneva Conventions.”

"After the article was published, President Bush was asked in a news conference if he “had read” the Red Cross report. “Haven’t seen it; we don’t torture,” Bush bluntly responded before moving on to another question.

"But Mayer’s upcoming book, The Dark Side, appears to contradict Bush’s claim that he never saw the report. In a preview of the book, the New York Times reports today that it claims the CIA “shared the report” with Bush:

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"The Red Cross report, according to Mayer’s book, found that the torturous interrogation methods used by the CIA “could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.” 

And Glenn Greenwald weighs in with his piece on the book and its revelations:  "The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, one of the country’s handful of truly excellent investigative journalists over the last seven years, has written a new book — “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals” — which reveals several extraordinary (though unsurprising) facts regarding America’s torture regime. According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer’s book reports the following:

• “Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”
• “A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”
• “[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases . . .’There will be no review,’ the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. ‘The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.’”
• “[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.”
• [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were ‘categorically’ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law“.
• “[T]he Red Cross document ‘warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.’”

"This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want — including breaking our laws — and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country — live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We’ve collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws — that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We’ve thus become a country which lives under the proverbial “rule of men” — that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed — and Mayer’s revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice."

What a terrible time for this country when members of Congress fail to uphold their Constitutional oaths and refuse to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their high crimes.

I never believed that in my lifetime this country would become so debased that the world court, which defends and preserves the rule of law when individual countries refuse to do so, would have to support the rule of law regarding war crimes because the United States would not.  

The Bush administration, which tortures, spies on it citizens, defies the Constitution with the assistance of Congress, affirms that it is above any law, directs political prosecutions, authors illegal programs and laws to disenfranchise voters, illegally invades and occupies sovereign countries like Iraq based on lies, and other heinous crimes has become as bad as Zimbabwe, Milosevic's Serbia, and other tyrannical, lawless regimes.

God help America.