Payback time looms for George Bush and his gang

From dismissal only a few months ago by leading Democrats in Washington as unthinkable, it now seems possible that senior officials in the Bush administration - maybe even at least one of the top two - will be the target of public war crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions, here in the United States.

Overseas is already dangerous terrain. George W Bush's  first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, fled Paris a couple of years ago to avoid honouring a subpoena from French investigators, replicating a similarly hasty exit from the French jurisdiction by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

For almost the entire four years of Bush's second term, one of the main campaigns of the left was to pressure the Democratic leadership to support impeachment proceedings against the Republican president and vice-president.

Officials of an outlaw regime would be in the dock for trashing the US constitution Top Democrats such as House majority leader Nancy Pelosi nixed the idea. But following regime change in Washington in January, prosecution of officials such as Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and attorney general Alberto Gonzales, for instituting, supervising or condoning specific war crimes, is now far more plausible with them out of power.

Last Wednesday, February 25, Pelosi was asked by MSNBC's  Rachel Maddow what her reaction would be to any charges levelled at the Republicans who've now retreated to private life and are writing their memoirs.

Maddow: "If the US Justice Department's inspector general report that comes out this summer suggests that there has been criminal activity at the official level on issues like torture, or wireless wiretapping, or rendition, or any of these other issues..."

Pelosi: "No one is above the law. I think I have said that."

In active English, Pelosi's pious phraseology about no one being "above the law" translates into something like: "These guys are out of power and their popularity ratings are in the toilet so it's safe to turn the dogs on them."

And since Pelosi controls the assignment of hearings to relevant committees in the House, this means that she could give the green light to House Justice Committee chairman John Conyers to organise hearings.  Equipped with a fierce director and subpoena power - that is, the ability to compel testimony and documents under the threat of criminal sanction - such hearings could form the first of what the left regards as necessary show trials.

Officials of an outlaw regime would be in the dock for trashing the US constitution and international law regarding  treatment of 'enemy combatants' and torture of captives either directly by US personnel or indirectly by kidnapping those suspected of terrorism and handing them over to allies to be tortured in prisons in Egypt or Thailand or eastern Europe.

There is already a significant trail of evidence that links torture in the US prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib directly to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 

According to a sworn statement by Air Force Lt General Randall Schmidt, appointed in 2005 to investigate charges by FBI officials that there had been widespread abuse at Guantanamo, Rumsfeld gave verbal and subsequently written approval to torture suspects, using the notorious techniques of isolation, sleep deprivation and psychic degradation.

When the micro-managing defence secretary was apprised by Schmidt of his own documented instructions to the torturers in Guantanamo, Rumsfeld said in apparent surprise: "Did [I] say 'put a bra and panties on this guy's head and make him dance with another man?'"

In the case of Abu Ghraib, there is again a trail of evidence showing it was Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. One US army officer, Janis Karpinski, has described finding in Abu Ghraib a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators.

Donald Rumsfeld could be hauled before a Congressional committee

It was a memorandum signed by defence secretary Rumsfeld, authorising techniques such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld's handwriting, was the terse instruction, "Make sure this happens!!"

In contrast to Pelosi's toughening posture on Capitol Hill, over at the White House Obama has been sticking carefully to the line that partisan witch hunts are part of the old politics of divisiveness and that it's time to move on.

Simultaneously, Obama's justice department lawyers have told judges that the new administration will not be moving on from Bush's policies on supposed enemy combatants. These will not be afforded international legal protections, whether on the field of battle in Afghanistan or, if kidnapped by US personnel, anywhere in the world.

This explicit continuity with the lawless Bush years has deeply disappointed Obama's supporters on the left and their dismay no doubt has emboldened the cautious Pelosi to take the harder stand she adopted last Wednesday.

Six months or a year down the road it would not be astonishing to see more than one Congressional committee hauling before them  not just Rumsfeld or former justice department officials but also corporate titans for cross examination and subsequent criminal charges. 'Bipartisanship' is a rhetorical device, not a strategy. ·