Mikael's Accountability Blog (Go to our Main Page:ImpeachForPeace.org)

Friends of Impeach for Peace

Today I am writing with sad news about Mikael Rudolph, co-founder of ImpeachforPeace. Mikael had been struggling with cancer for some time and passed away last Friday.

Mikael was a talented mime, vaudevillian, and dance teacher. But the side of Mikael that those with Impeach for Peace saw, was that of a political activist. Mikael put great effort into opposing war crimes, resisting our country’s torture policies, advocating for the end of the war in Iraq, and more. Through his efforts at Impeach for Peace, he not only found meaning for his life but also helped others to organize towards a better world. And, if Mikael had done nothing else, this would represent a worthy legacy.

Mikael was a good friend of mine, and I’ll miss him dearly. My favorite memories are of  his involvement in Patriots for Corporate Rights. He and several of our common friends satirized the corporate interests of our country in street protests and on radio. This brought Mikael the performer and Mikael the protester together. If you are interested in seeing or hearing some of those moments, you can find them at CorporateRights.org

Mikael’s main political efforts went into Impeach for Peace (ImpeachForPeace.org) and World Can’t Wait (http://WorldCantWait.org) where he held meetings, marched in the street, called radio programs, blogged furiously, organized protests, met with congressional leaders, handed out leaflets and anything else he felt might stir the pot. Mikael spoke of how his activist inspiration was due in part to his mother’s legacy. She had fought for the rights of Japanese Americans interned during WW II.

Details of services being held for Mikael can be found at MikaelTheMime.com. I have included his obituary below.

I know that Mikael would have approved of my making following suggestion. If, in the coming days, the current political state of affairs frustrates you, or inspires you, take the time to act on it. Call or write a congress person, refuse to spend your money with big corporations, join a march–or start one! That’s how I’ll chose to remember and honor Mikael.

Jodin Morey
Cofounder, Impeach for Peace

MIKAEL JONATHAN RUDOLPH, 51, of Minneapolis (native to Bainbridge Island, WA) died peacefully in his home on February 26th following a courageous six-month battle with Therapy Related Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. Mikael was a beloved mime and vaudeville performer well-known to audiences at renaissance and fringe festivals, churches and schools nationwide. He taught swing, salsa and ballroom dance in the Twin Cities and was a political activist who co-founded Impeach For Peace and worked tirelessly with others toward political reform. He is preceded in death by cat Louie, sister Kristi, and parents John and Natalie.  He is survived by brother James, nephew Zephyr, nieces Jamila, Rio and Trinity, great-niece Aliyah, cats Ash, Moxie and Jabo, and many friends who love him. Memorials preferred to Visitation Monastery of Minneapolis or RESCU Foundation. Memorial service details to follow at www.mikaelthemime.com <http://www.mikaelthemime.com>.

This just in…
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Exciting news: there’s new life in the accountability movement! The People v Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way (Chelsea Green) has just been published. Author Charlotte Dennett will be in Cambridge January 20 at the Harvard Bookstore at 7 pm to discuss it and the following day, January 21, at 7 p.m. in New York City at the 92nd St Y. Vincent Bulgiosi is flying all the way from the west coast and will join Naomi Wolf in helping her launch the book on the 21st.

Also, check this out: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/7/822656/-FOIA-Request-Filed-for-OPR-Report-on-Bushs-Lawyers

Charlotte and David Swanson just filed a FOIA request to get the long-supressed internal misconduct report on Bush’s lawyers.

Back to Charlotte’s book: The advance praise has been terrific. Wolf calls Charlotte “one of the gutsiest women in America” for trying to “hold our leaders criminally accountable for shredding the Constitution.” Howard Zinn says her book is “trying to awaken the conscience of the nation.” And David Swanson says, “The eventual success of the accountability movement will be furthered by the success of this remarkable book.”

The People v Bush is not just about Charlotte’s race for attorney general in Vermont pledging to prosecute Bush. She’s recounts stories from our own leaders, and the book even has a ten page appendix listing organizations involved in accountability.

So: mark your calendars: January 20, Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Mass ave in Cambridge and January 21, 92nd St. Y, NY, NY

And, if you can’t make it, spread the word, show your support by buying the book and help her get on the road to promote it! Find out more on how you can help by going to her website, chardennett.org

Thank you. Let’s build the movement!

guardian.uk
Will Condoleezza rice be dogged for the rest of her life by questions about her role in the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation policies?
Last week, Rice was confronted by a student at Stanford University student who asked her if the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding is torture.
Yesterday, Rice was forced on the defensive by a Bethesda, Maryland, grade-schooler.
According to the Washington Post, Misha Lerner, a fourth grader at the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital asked Rice to comment on President Obama’s rejection of Bush-era interrogation methods.
On her first public appearance in Washington since Obama’s inauguration, Rice was giving a talk for about dozen school children.
She replied:

Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country. But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.

Last week, she told the Stanford student, in an exchange caught on video and widely viewed on youtube, that none of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used under the Bush administration were illegal, because Bush had approved them. “By definition, if it was authorised by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture,” she said.Source

Information Clearing House
Barack Obama, Torture Enabler

By Ted Rall

America is a nation of laws–laws enforced by Spain.

John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith wrote, authorized and promulgated the Justice Department “torture memos” that the Bush Administration used for legal cover. After World War II, German lawyers for the Ministry of Justice went to prison for similar actions.

We’ve known about Yoo et al.’s crimes for years. Yet–unlike their victims–they’re free as birds, fluttering around, writing op/ed columns…and teaching. At law school!

Obama has failed to match changes of tone with changes in substance on the issue of Bush’s war crimes. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” he answered when asked whether he would investigate America’s worst human rights abuses since World War II. Indeed, there’s no evidence that Obama’s Justice Department plans to lift a finger to hold Bush or his henchmen accountable.

“They should arrest Obama for trying to impersonate a President,” one wag commented on The San Francisco Chronicle’s website.

Fortunately for those who care about U.S. law, there are Spanish prosecutors willing to do their job. Baltasar Garzón, the crusading prosecutor who went after General Augusto Pinochet in the ’90s, will likely subpoena the Dirty Half Dozen within the next few weeks. “It would have been impossible to structure a legal framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo]” without Gonzales and his pals,” argues the criminal complaint filed in Madrid.

When the six miscreants ignore their court dates (as they surely will), Spain will issue international arrest warrants enforceable in the 25 countries that are party to European extradition treaties. All hail King Juan Carlos I!

Which brings us to a leaked report by the Red Cross, famous for its traditional reticence to confront governments. Which means that physicians are enjoined to do no harm. Doctors are prohibited by their ethical code of conduct from attending, much less participating in, torture. (What does this have to do with Bush’s lawyers? Hold on. I’m getting there.)

The Red Cross found that CIA doctors, nurses and/or paramedics “monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls,” reports The New York Times.

“Even if the medical worker’s intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury,” the report said, they would have violated medical ethics. But they weren’t there to protect anyone but the CIA. They even “condoned and participated in ill treatment….[giving] instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods.” Charming.

Since 1945, at least 70 doctors around the world have been prosecuted for participating in torture. But not Bush’s CIA torture facilitators. Not by this president. Asked to comment on the Red Cross report, a spokesman for CIA director Leon Panetta replied that Panetta “has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” (There’s the lawyer connection.)

Which is similar to what Obama said about the torturers: “At the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up.” Don’t you just hate being micromanaged when you’re torturing people?

Ah, the great shell game of American justice. You can’t prosecute the torturers because their lawyers advised them that torture was OK. You can’t prosecute the lawyers because all they did was theorize–they didn’t torture anyone. You can’t prosecute the president and vice president who ordered the torture because they have “executive privilege” and, anyway, who would put a head of state on trial? What is this, Peru?

What’s the flip side of a victimless crime? A perpless crime?

It’s a neat circle, or would be if it fit, but drink some coffee and let the caffeine do its thing and it soon becomes apparent that it doesn’t come close. The trouble for the Bushies, and now for Obama–they’re his torturers now–is that lawyers are bound by a higher code than following orders.

Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Gonzales, Haynes and Feith were asked by the White House to come up with legal cover for what they knew or ought to have known were illegal acts under U.S. law, international law, and treaties including the Geneva Conventions (which were ratified by the U.S. and therefore hold the force of U.S. law). Since they don’t deny what they did–indeed, they continue to justify it–their presumed defense if they wound up on trial in Europe would be that they were just following orders.

However, the decision in the 1948 trials of German attorneys immortalized in the fictionalized film “Judgment at Nuremberg” makes clear that a lawyer’s duty is to the law–not his government. And not just his own country’s law–international law.

The Nuremberg tribunal acknowledged that Nazi Germany was an absolute dictatorship in which everyone answered to Adolf Hitler and could be shot for disobeying. Nevertheless, the court ruled, “there were [German] restrictions for Hitler under international law.” Despite his total legal authority within Germany, Hitler “could issue orders [that violated] international law.” Obeying a direct order from Hitler, in other words, was illegal if it violated international law. And German lawyers went to prison for doing just that.

The six lawyers about to face charges in Spain didn’t have to worry about Nazi firing squads. They were rank opportunists trying to advance their careers in an Administration that viewed laws as quaint, inconvenient obstacles. Here’s how not scared they are: Feith recently penned an op/ed in The Wall Street Journal daring–double-daring–Obama’s Justice Department to go after him.

“If President Barack Obama and the prosecutors see a crime to be prosecuted, they can act,” Feith wrote.

One can only hope. In the meantime, we’ll always have Spain.

Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge. Visit his website http://www.rall.com/

© 2009 Ted Rall

(Source)

therawstory
Turley: Spanish courts may be building case against Cheney
David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

According to constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley, the prosecution of Bush’s so-called “torture lawyers” might just give Spanish prosecutors the “low lying fruit” needed to bring a case against Vice President Cheney.

Appearing on Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, George Washington University law professor Turley said that although President Obama is “protecting” the former administration from prosecution, the Spanish investigation could serve as a point of leverage.

By targeting attorneys who wrote legal justifications for torture, said Turley, prosecutors are going “for the first line of defendants.”

“And then if you have a case, you go for the higher ones,” he added.

Referencing Seymor Hersh’s allegation that an “executive assassination ring” reported directly to the former Vice President — and the apparent confirmation of the allegation’s veracity by a former Cheney aide — Olbermann wondered, “Should the Spanish prosecutors be taking notes?”"

“It’s well known the Obama administration is protecting President Bush and Vice President Cheney from criminal investigation,” he concluded. “And if he went after the two of them, the U.S. government could move aggressively to shut down the inquiry.”

(Source)