First, from The Village Voice via Roy. The ‘if and when’ is certainly little more than an extremely hopeful ‘if’, but…

“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—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey’s Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin’s Press) and Charlie Savage’s just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn’t let them in.

But The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In “The Black Sites” (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do—on the orders of the president—to “protect American values.”

She quotes 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.”

Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques—without disclosing anything about them.

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.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

Only one congressman, Oregon’s Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA’s techniques—so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush’s nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA’s top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn’t object to the Justice Department’s 2002 “torture” memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as “organ failure . . . or even death.” (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.”

Of course, the probability of such a trial occurring is entirely remote. If the United States can refuse an extradition request by the Italians with regards to 26 members of the CIA indicted in the abduction and rendition of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr to Egypt, where he was tortured, then what real power will any international body have with regards to bringing anyone else to trial?

The United States opted out of the ICC for a reason, and it wasn’t simply to ‘protect’ US soldiers from the legal scrutiny of international criminal bodies, but very likely those that implemented policy as well.

As some of you are aware, former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, might have trouble vacationing in Germany for some time, after a lawsuit was brought against him, and 13 others, by a Berlin based lawyer for the violation of international law and the UN Convention Against Torture.

The truth of the matter is that a nation as militarily powerful as the United States will never be brought to justice for its crimes, even if American forces abandon Iraq in the years to come, which I doubt will ever happen on permanent basis, and the war itself is viewed as a loss. Even more, that after such an outcome occurred, that evidence of widespread criminality began to surface that exposed crimes that had, until that point, not been wholly revealed.

Even if some future government of Iraq were to move to take action in an international court, or a similar lawsuit was filed by Iraqis with regards to the abuse of international law and the UN Convention Against Torture, what would the outcome really be? That those responsible would be handed over? Hardly.

It’s important to remember that Nuremburg took place because Germany was decimated and its leadership had been captured. They hadn’t the ability to simply refuse to be tried because they were in the custody of those trying them. With regards to Iraq, Guantanamo, rendition, and practices at US Black Sites, that will never be the case because the United States will not find itself in the same position – to have no other recourse but to face the scrutiny of an international legal body. They will simply ignore it, passing it off as ridiculous, which is something that lends credence to just how damaging the Bush Doctrine has been, not to mention how its implementation as official US foreign policy will affect administrations to come.

No, there will be no justice for those seeking it with regards to the United States, nor do I believe that the next administration, Congress, or the people themselves, will really seek to hold accountable those that have been responsible for making the United States the most feared nation on the planet – even more so than terrorist organizations according to international polls.

Might makes right. And the mighty, in their time of unchallenged superiority, never forget it.

To put it another way – from today’s New York Times…

“Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by United States soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released today by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 cases. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man’s head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a “stress position” they said was an approved technique.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush after a January 2006 court-martial that received wide attention because of possible C.I.A. involvement in the interrogation.

But even after his conviction, Mr. Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents show.

“The simple fact of the matter is, interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information,” he wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. “To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation — it is a conversation.”