was ratified by the us senate i think the reinforcement of the geneva conventions after the second world war and the decades that followed that led to the notes of the miraculous achievement of a united nations convention against torture in the hundred eighty s you know these things were hard to come by they were hard work they meant something and the bush administration did away with it they very deliberately tried to claim that torture wasn't torture so they could engage in torture that isn't something that you can't get away with saying that you know innocent by cynically redefining something like that in two thousand and four photographs of iraqi prisoners who had been tortured by the u military shocked the world president bush said today that he was disgusted by pictures of iraqi prisoners being abused by american soldiers six soldiers now face the possibility of a court martial and a brigadier general is under investigation photographs were taken by the soldiers themselves first aired on c b s sixty minutes two they are disturbing and explicit the iraqi prisoners were hooded stripped naked forced into sexually explicit poses or human pyramids and there are the american soldiers male and female smiling pointing humiliating the prisoners so the actual abuse the torture  humiliation went on and was documented and the investigation stopped at the lowest level individuals who were actually carrying out the physical abuse in the physical torture without any attempt systematically to go up the chain of authority and look at the officials who conceived of torture who authorized it who wrote legal memos i justify torture  and that today has been laugh totally on account of anything people are going to see him over the the long haul when looking back at this and what actually went on but again i'm just having the historical record is not enough you also need to act on those abuses and you know it may not have such profound impact here in the u s where people are focused on the economy and you're getting their lives together but in other parts of the world the lack of accountability for u s abuses has a very serious impact and is you know a source of hostility and anger towards the u s in a letter from the justice department to a federal judge on april twenty fourth two thousand and nine and the obama administration and now that the pentagon would turn over to the american civil liberties union forty four additional photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in afghanistan and iraq during the bush administration but the pushback from the military and intelligence establishment was immediate as former and current officials publicly admonished the new president and three weeks later president obama reversed the decision to release the  it's there for my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals in fact the most direct consequence of releasing them i believe would be to further inflame anti american opinion and to put our troops in greater danger w executive order a promising to close guantanamo within a year and everybody who had been campaigning for the closure of the prison because it such an abomination and every lead well it was you know was relieved thinking that this would lead to the closure of the prison he set up a task force he drew on officials within the relevant government departments and the intelligence agencies to review all the prisoners cases that took a year so it was a it was a long time when they were  i think trying their best to understand who they have who they were holding and whether they were dangerous or not but it took that time to decide what they were going to do with the prisoners but of course that left a lot of room for  to start making them moves we've been holding prisoners in guantanamo since two thousand and two in guantanamo the you know there are seven hundred seventy prisoners came through one been their case have been close and they're there they were and prosecuted and charged with crimes there's now only six cases that are currently under prosecution one is for the nine eleven attack and another is four of the cole bombing that happened in two thousand and yemen but other than that every prisoner had been there for nearly ten years now has not been prosecute with any crime and they are just being held there indefinitely the desire for governments all over the world to control information and conceal their activities has always existed but the increasing sophistication of the internet and the emergence of a global booth meant to challenge the legitimacy of powerful elites gave rise in two thousand and six to a new organization wiki leaks like the leaks came along as a journalistic pioneer it made available to the mass media vast amounts of documents that it had taken from e mails and allowed what had been private diplomacy to become public so the public was finally made aware or at least partially aware of some of the that were going on inside the offices of state and they should be given major prizes for that and not be prosecuted and instead julian i san suu the head of operation has been nothing but process persecuted is now holed up in the ecuadorian embassy in london trying to get asylum in ecuador the british have declared him portable to sweden for sex crimes not and it's not even because he has been indicted there he has simply been named and he's a subject of investigation the swedish police could this he is the person who released these documents that he was trying to expose things that shouldn't have been hidden and you know really if i think about the secrets that are still on april third two thousand and ten in what was to become perhaps the most widely seen footage of a war crime history wiki leaks released a classified video  be so called collateral murder video which is one of the items that bradley manning is accused of leaking to wiki leaks demonstrates evidence of at least three violations of the geneva conventions this is when the u s helicopter got permission and fired on a group of civilians in iraq including two journalists from reuters all of them unarmed so firing on civilians is the first violation of the geneva conventions and keep in mind when the united states ratifies a treaty such as the geneva conventions it becomes part of u s law under the supremacy clause of the constitution so the first violation of geneva was targeting civilians then when a van pulled up to rescue the wounded because they were not all killed immediately the helicopter then fired on the rescuers and killed the people who had who were on the ground who had been wounded the second violation of the geneva conventions finally a u s military jeep ran over some of the dead bodies at least one of the dead bodies defiling the dead is a third violation of geneva the helicopter crew were convinced that the reuters photographers cameras the weapons but an examination of frames from the video reveals that some of the men killed in the event might actually have been carrying weapons even if they were armed they were not engaged in any kind of a military battle and so you still cannot fight and there are civilians now certainly people in this country have a right to bear arms so you can't go fire on people who are civilians who are walking around armed or we would be killing each other by his own admission the source of this disturbing video and thousands of documents revealing other war crimes was u s army private bradley manning in june two thousand and ten manning was arrested and charged with aiding the enemy and thirty three other counts manning was held for nearly three years pending court martial mostly in solitary confinement and often under harsh conditions all facing a possible death penalty in a statement to the court mann under the very well established doctrine of command responsibility which was first used at nuremberg and is in trying to the army field manual commanders all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief can be liable for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and they did nothing to stop or prevent it one thing that has led to this culture of impunity is that the guilt is widespread if it really was just right wing republicans or  large minority of house democrats support the war resolution a majority of senate democrats support the resolution but the very people who did support that resolution were rewarded even when it became apparent while disaster of the iraq war was even one became apparent of the lies regarding the so called weapons of mass destruction john kerry and john edwards who support the war got their party's nomination for president vice president in two thousand and four obama despite  his insistence that he would not only in the iraq war but in the mindset that led to the iraq war appointed supporters of the iraq war to the vast majority of his key foreign imagine how wrong you can be and how tragic the consequences you'll still be rewarded this is the democrats so you can imagine so i think it becomes very difficult then to challenge you know  to be true going to animate these people have no rights the president promised to let them go he found out it was politically difficult there's nothing that can be done apparently apparently these men if something doesn't change will die without most of them ever having been charged or tried or convicted of anything and i would say that a novel twist that has happened under president obama is that he's replaced a lot of the what was obviously perceived as the messy and difficult problem of capturing and detaining people interrogating them with a with it to process free assassination program he's returned to a discredited assassination program t is legally and morally dubious as everything the bush administration has done the united states used to be the model or at least claimed to be the model for  democracy for human rights and civil liberties but there was an idealism there was a holding up of a standard that the united states could claim to and then other countries were expected to rise up to and if in fact what went on in the bush administration what has been tolerated indorsed advocated and defended in the obama administration goes on and to future administrations it is a very dangerous standard and if we have moved into the new normal when what went on in the bush administration is blast and not held accountable then we can only blame ourselves one of the one of the problems with them is the obama administration has been the refusal to pursue you anyone in the bush administration level competition between the two parties in washington and we have imagine that they are at absolute odds with each other and they will slit each other's throats but both parties are  by and large in agreement that the president should have more and more power and are focused primarily on making sure that the next president is a member of their party and that those powers then belong to him or her  and so you don't have a congress that pushes back much less a presidency where the next president comes in and rejects the powers of the previous holder of that office i mean that would be absolutely unprecedented it would take it would take a saint it would take someone willing to go up against the permanent military powers and bureaucratic powers of washington and it would be asking something of that individual that we as the public and the congress and the media and the courts are unwilling to pursue so you have an attorney general eric holder who has advanced his career by being a subservient follower of whoever held power above him and you have a president obama who is openly instructing the attorney general what crimes he may or may not pursue the prosecution of  this was absolutely predictable this is not some sort of particular flaw in barack obama that we need to look into his genes or childhood this is a question of the permanent almost a law of physics that power corrupts and absolute ladies and gentlemen the president of the united states obama president george w bush president bill clinton president george h w bush president jimmy carter when president obama came into office i mean even before he came into office he spoke about looking forward not backwards so clearly what was already taking place at least in some parts of th established right now that it's clear once it became clear that the a bomb in an administration was not going to prosecute any senior u s administration officials for these crimes then you know  president bush rumsfeld cheney all went out on that in the public and in their books you know talked about the fact that they had indeed authorized waterboarding and had authorized these techniques and that they would do it again so you're faced with that type of of a message that says if you know these are are not going to be prosecuted then they're going to come back in april two thousand and thirteen a bipartisan constitution task force released a report these were the key findings perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the united states engaged in the fact just a fortress the second notable conclusion of the task force is that the nation's highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture i once heard an expression that every pay asked has been a present people lived with slavery they accepted slavery they defended slavery it was their present now we look back on it as a past and we are ashamed for what will be the past as our present is looked back on how will historians and others a match that we lived in this period that we knew what was going on that we tolerated that we elected and reelected political leaders who had engaged in it and who covered it up that's a shameful chapter in american history and i market and i worry that for my children and my grandchildren no one can tell we will have to