If you don't get punished, you didn't go anything wrong, right?

That's the message Vice President Dick Cheney gave in an interview with CBS' Bob Schieffer on Sunday, suggesting that a president's actions are legal if those actions didn't result in his impeachment.

You can sense it in the valedictory interviews Bush and Dick Cheney are conducting on their way out.

The research arm of the US Department of Justice is working on two portable non-lethal weapons that inflict pain from a distance using beams of laser light or microwaves, with the intention of putting them into the hands of police to subdue suspects.

Last week, Cheney was all over TV setting the stage for pardons. He admitted he personally approved torture, but insisted it destroyed Al Qaeda and saved American lives.

According to a powerful article by David Rose in Vanity Fair, the Bush-Cheney torture regime accomplished exactly the opposite. The torture photos from Abu Ghraib helped Al Qaeda's recruitment soar. U.S. officers in Iraq say torture-inspired attacks on U.S. soldiers were the #1 and #2 cause of soldiers' deaths. CIA analysts say the "intelligence" produced by torture was worthless.

It’s par for the course for Obama and Biden, the men who promised “change” but in every step of their preparations for assuming office have pursued nothing but continuity, to acknowledge that they will protect criminals in the Bush administration from prosecution for authorizing torture, a complete violation of both the U.S. constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

What kind of people have we become when we exercise no oversight over a criminal justice (sic) system that destroys the lives of innocent people and locks them away in prisons to be tortured by sadistic guards?

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

For obvious reasons, the most blindly loyal Bush followers of the last eight years are desperate to claim that nobody cares any longer about what happened during the Bush administration, that everyone other than the most fringe, vindictive Bush-haters is eager to put it all behind us, forget about it all and, instead, look to the harmonious, sunny future. That's natural.

Vice President Dick Cheney's admission that he authorized waterboarding has focused attention on possible Bush administration war crimes, and former Nixon White House counsel John Dean believes there will be "serious consequences" if the Obama administration tries to avoid singling out those involved for prosecution.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

"Did he just admit to condoning torture?" Maddow queries.

"As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what he admitted," Levin said after a pause to shut his eyes, and shake his head as if still in disbelief.

The Pentagon is drawing up plans to shut the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be prepared for any order from President-elect Barack Obama, who has promised to close the controversial facility after he assumes office Jan. 20, a defense official said yesterday.

Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are still willing to inflict pain on others - if told to by an authority figure.

US researchers repeated the famous "Milgram test", with volunteers told to deliver electrical shocks to another volunteer - played by an actor.

Even after faked screams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychology study found.

Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit atrocities.

Thousands of Iraqis detained by US forces are at risk of torture or even execution, following the ratification of a security agreement between the US and Iraqi governments. Under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which will take effect on 31 December, around 16,000 prisoners held by the US will be transferred to Iraqi custody.

After acknowledging his role in approving the waterboarding of detainees, Cheney urged Obama in an ABC News interview to reconsider his "campaign rhetoric" and instead "retain the tools that have been so essential in defending the nation for the last seven and a half years."

In the Bush administration's first bow to a court directive to release prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Department of Defense flew three Algerians to their adopted homeland of Bosnia-Herzegovina on Tuesday.

The Pentagon acknowledged in a tersely worded announcement that the release was in reaction to a federal judge's order last month to free five Algerians seized in Bosnia in 2001. The men were suspected of participating in a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, but were ordered freed when authorities there dropped the allegations.

Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA and that the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.

When asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether he approved of interrogation tactics used against a so-called "high value prisoner" at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr. Cheney, in a break from his history of being press-shy, admitted to giving official sanctioning of torture.

The U.S. military says a detainee has died of an apparent heart attack while in custody at a U.S. detention facility in Baghdad.

A Jordan-based Iraqi rights group said on Monday it has filed 200 lawsuits against US former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and American security firms for their alleged role in torturing Iraqis.

Ali Qeisi, head of the group the "Society of Victims of the US Occupation in Iraq," said the cases, relating to torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners, have been recently filed in federal courts in Virginia, Michigan and Maryland.

The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found:

"The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Can we please stop torturing now?

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, says a bipartisan Senate report released Thursday.

A report issued Thursday by the Senate Armed Services Committee has provided official and bipartisan confirmation that the infamous acts of torture carried out by US personnel at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were planned, ordered and orchestrated by the highest-ranking officials in the US government. Based on the Senate's own conclusions, those named in the document, including President George W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are guilty of war crimes.

Here is the bottom line: No one who was in any position of real power is going to be punished for these outrages. Not even Rumsfeld; his "fall guy" role will be confined to serving as a lightning rod for bad PR, for awhile, before an inevitable, Nixon-like "rehabilitation" somewhere down the line. (Maybe Obama will appoint him to some blue-ribbon "bipartisan" commission on some weighty matter.)

The Justice Department has evaded a request from President-elect Barack Obama's transition team for documents about the secret programs of U.S. intelligence agencies.

The team asked to "review classified legal opinions related to secret CIA and National Security Agency programs," but the inquiry has been denied

Officials at the top of the Bush administration bear the blame for use of interrogation tactics on military detainees that were designed to help U.S. troops endure torture at enemy hands, says a report released Thursday by a Senate panel chaired by Sen. Carl Levin.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees," claims a Senate Armed Services Committee report issued Thursday.

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate's findings.

The CIA destroyed videotapes showing its agents subjecting high-level al-Qaeda detainees to waterboarding after the agency's inspector general issued a classified report in the spring of 2004 that concluded the interrogation methods used on the prisoners "appeared to constitute cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, as defined by the International Convention Against Torture."

Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Congress Daily that President-elect Obama should keep Mike McConnell on as Director of National Intelligence and Michael Hayden as head of the CIA. He said Obama should keep “continuity” in the intelligence sector because we live in “a world that is very dangerous.”

Reyes dismissed concerns over Hayden and McConnell’s records as apologists for torture. He insisted that that “there are some options that need to be available” to interrogators — presumably beyond the Army Field Manuel — to get the best information:

Asylum-seekers who claim to have been abused by British security guards accused the Government yesterday of running Guantanamo Bay-style detention camps.

Mafungasei Maikokera, a Zimbabwean asylum-seeker attending a meeting at the House of Commons, said guards had beaten her when she resisted attempts to deport her. and had discussed "bonuses" they were paid for removing asylum-seekers.

Thirty-three relatives of people killed in the 9/11 attacks on the US have denounced the Guantanamo war crimes trials as illegitimate and unfair.

The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."

Now the detainees aren't the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons.

Since it invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. has detained thousands of juveniles---some of whom were tortured and sexually abused, according to published reports. Figures of the number of children behind bars vary. Some estimates put the number as high as 6,000.

While the criminal abuse of male prisoners at Abu Ghraib is well known, child and women prisoners held there have also been tortured and raped, according to Neil Mackay of Glasgow’s “Sunday Herald.” Abu Ghraib prison is located about 20 miles west of Baghdad.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said Monday he will confess to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, throwing his death-penalty trial into disarray and shocking victims' relatives who watched from behind a glass partition.

Four other men also abandoned their defenses, in effect daring the Pentagon to grant their wish for martyrdom. The judge ordered lawyers to advise him by Jan. 4 whether the Pentagon can apply the death penalty — which military prosecutors are seeking — without a jury trial.

The US government has charged lesser offenders than Yoo with war crimes. Yoo helped the DOJ achieve the Bush regime’s goal of finding a way around the torture prohibitions of both US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions.

Former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson also said of the Bush torture program:

“Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that’s important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough.”

Obama and his freshly minted team of foreign policy and legal officials, facing pressure from congressional Democrats and human rights organizations, are grappling with calls to prosecute officials at the CIA and the Department of Justice who authorized torture.

A group of retired military officers opposed to harsh interrogation techniques sanctioned by the Bush administration met with members of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team yesterday to press the incoming administration to establish a single, internationally accepted standard for the treatment of detainees by all U.S. government agencies.

At the request of the Obama team, the officers declined to say whom they met with or detail the contents of the meeting.

A judge in Raymondville, Texas has dropped indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

"One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra spoke to two Texas television stations Wednesday night regarding his investigation of injustice within the prison systems which led to the indictment by a Texas grand jury of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, along with other officials.

Nearly sixty years have passed since the historic Nuremberg Trials concluded and we are faced yet again with the task of what to do with a set of individuals that have committed blatant war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The GEO group, the prison corporation at the center of the indictments has a long history filled with allegations of prisoner abuse. The abuse has sometimes even turned deadly.

A former corrections officer who did not want to be identified says she was on-duty at the Willacy State Jail in 2001 when Gregorio De La Rosa, Jr. was beaten to death by fellow inmates. She says he was bloody and not very responsive after the incident.

A hearing was set to determine whether or not to disqualify the judge presiding over the cases filed by a South Texas prosecutor against Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others.

The state Supreme Court's chief justice appointed District Judge Michael Peden of San Antonio to preside over a hearing Monday on a motion to recuse and disqualify Judge J. Manuel Banales.

Once considered a dangerous terrorist by the Bush administration, Mr. Hamdan was convicted only on lesser charges in August and given what amounted to a four-month sentence by a military jury. At that time, a military judge gave Mr. Hamdan credit for at least the 61 months he was held after being charged, reducing his sentence to a matter of months. The verdict was a sharp setback for Pentagon officials, who had contended they could detain him indefinitely.

A county prosecutor who brought indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others pounded his fist and shouted at the judge Friday about special treatment for high-profile defendants as a routine motions hearing descended into chaos.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra, who is accusing the public officials of culpability in the alleged abuse of prisoners in a federal detention center, asked Presiding Judge Manuel Banales to recuse himself. Guerra has complained about Banales' handling of the case.

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration.

Virtually alone in the press corps, veteran Helen Thomas asks the
tough questions. Other reporters cower for fear they will lose access to government officials.

A US military judge in Guantanamo Bay has thrown out the US government's evidence against an Afghan detainee because it was obtained under coercion, a rights group said Friday.