International Red Cross: War Crimes at Abu Ghraib

History Will Not Absolve Us
The Village Voice Aug 28, 2007

If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament...

[A] former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that dark a place without it changing you."

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors. Full report ...

* Abu Ghraib painting by Fransisco Botero (more in series)

The only way for us to avoid complicity in this "crime against humanity" is to force our government to launch a full and complete investigation into the abuses of human rights carried out by the Bush/Cheney/Gonzales triumvirate. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil," cautioned Edmund Burke, "is that good men do nothing."