ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld; and former attorney general John Ashcroft. All were members of the Principals Committee of president Bush’s national security council.

Torture is illegal under US and international law. In 2006, with the help of a complaisant Congress, the administration immunized themselves from prosecution under the relevant US law—the 1996 War Crimes Act—by slipping into the Military Commissions Act a provision amending the previous law and retroactively forgiving any government official or employee who violated it.

In November of 2006, we suggested that the Military Commissions Act would backfire on administration officials because it stripped war crime victims of any recourse under US law, making it more likely that courts in countries outside the US would consider claims against the US. With the news that at least the seven top officials named in the ABC story were not only aware of the torture but actively involved in planning it, the likelihood that an overseas court will hear charges becomes much greater.

Along with passage of the Military Commissions Act, Congress further effectively immunized the administration from domestic accountability when Nancy Pelosi declared impeachment “off the table” prior to assuming the House speakership in January of 2007. With Bush assured of finishing out his term of office and holding the power of the presidential pardon, we can expect that he and his accomplices will never be at risk of paying for their crimes here. Pelosi herself could be held accountable outside the US because she, along with other senior members of Congress from both parties—including fellow Democrats Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman—was aware that the US was contemplating the authorization of torture and failed to act to prevent it.

Together with other, previous revelations, the ABC story confirms that for the past six years at least, the US government has been run by bona fide war criminals with the consent, active in some instances, tacit in some and unwitting in others, of Congress. The US is a rogue nation. What are we going to do about it?

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