NightBlogger

Russia escalated its conflict with Georgia today, launching further airstrikes and a naval blockade, despite the withdrawal of Georgian forces from the breakaway province of South Ossetia. As the international community called on Moscow to halt its offensive, a damaging new front opened in the province of Abkhazia, where 4,000 Russian troops were reinforcing rebels committed to breaking away from Tiblisi’s rule. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia accused Russia of trying to overthrow his government, but Moscow vowed to continue the fight, saying that Georgian officials could face charges of war crimes for attacking the South Ossetian capital on Thursday. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, hinted today that South Ossetia could be subsumed into Russia, and laid responsibility for the fighting at Nato’s door. More

Georgia’s President commits war crimes against humanity

Pravda
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said “Georgian military forces completely control all the territory of South Ossetia” except for a northern section adjacent to Russia. But Russian news agencies cited a Russian military official as saying heavy fighting was under way on the outskirts of the regional capital.

Witnesses said the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, was devastated.

“We lost our city … The Georgians are like Nazis, they are killing civilians, women and children with heavy artillery and rockets,” said 28-year-old Sarmat Laliyev, a Tskhinvali resident who had fled to Dzhava, a village near the border with Russia. The fighting broke out as much of the world’s attention was focused on the start of the Olympic Games and many leaders, including Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Bush, were in Beijing. More

Rachel Maddow reports on the possibility of the Bush administration being prosecuted for war crimes. Jonathan Turley weighs in.

Dan Froomkin
washingtonpost.com
The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability. In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation. The new report, he writes, “tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors. More

The senate report is out and the proof is there. The Bush Administration LIED the USA into war in Iraq. McCain went right along with them.

A legal brief has been sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging former prime minister John Howard committed a war crime by sending troops to Iraq. A loose alliance of peace activists, lawyers, academics and politicians is behind the brief, organised by the ICC Action group in Melbourne.

Organiser Glen Floyd says Mr Howard should be held accountable for sending troops to a war not sanctioned by the United Nations. “We have produced a 52-page brief of evidence which states to the chief prosecutor of the criminal court that we allege John Howard’s actions are war crimes under article 8 of the Rome Statute,” he said. Democrats Senator Lyn Allison says the legal brief sent to the ICC is justified. More

ARTHUR MAX
Belgian police arrested a Congolese warlord and ex-presidential candidate in Brussels after he was secretly charged with rape and torture, an international war crimes court said Sunday.

Jean-Pierre Bemba, who fled to Europe in 2007, was taken into custody at his home in a suburb of the Belgian capital late Saturday, one day after the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant, court spokeswoman Sonia Robla said.

Bemba, who is about 45, is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity as head of a militia that allegedly committed atrocities in Central African Republic’s conflict in 2002-2003, the court said. Read more

Bill Van Auken
WSWS
The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.

The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up. Read more