A leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the body responsible for safeguarding the Geneva Conventions, shows that there's a growing mountain of evidence being gathered to try Bush and members of his administration in an international war crimes trial.

Nat Hentoff, writes in the Village Voice that "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.

As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on-at the White House, really-and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down... They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or... anything that would give them a sense of where they were."

She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he was about to be drowned) but also "kept in... a small cage, about one meter by one meter, in which he couldn't stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box."

The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on CIA interrogations - which, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment" - "fails explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, with the president's approval (emphasis added).

To read more from Nat Hentoff's article History Will Not Absolve Us click link or View button below. 

War crimes are defined in the statute that established the International Criminal Court, which includes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, such as:

• Willful killing, or causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health
• Torture or inhumane treatment
• Unlawful wanton destruction or appropriation of property
• Forcing a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of a hostile power
• Depriving a prisoner of war of a fair trial
• Unlawful deportation, confinement or transfer
• Taking hostages

While the USA is not a member of the International Criminal Court, in 2006 the Bush administration drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners. The amendments alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean.

The amendments to the War Crimes Act would narrow the scope of potential criminal prosecutions to 10 specific categories of illegal acts against detainees during a war, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking. Left off the list would be degrading and deliberately humiliating acts - such as the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear seen at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq - that fall short of torture. Read more in The Washington Post's article War Crimes Act Changes Would Reduce Threat Of Prosecution

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