They're war criminals and they know it

The Bush administration, their hangers on, fellow travelers and useful idiots have repeatedly scoffed at accusations of criminality. 'Crude partisanship from people suffering from Bush derangement syndrome' they sneer. Of course 'Bush derangement syndrome' as the die hard Bush supporters define it, is now suffered by 75% of Americans and the Bush administration is in its final months.

And behind the scenes they've been getting nervous.

The reaction of top Bush Administration officials to the ICRC report, from what I can gather, has been defensive and dismissive. They reject the ICRC’s legal analysis as incorrect. Yet my reporting shows that inside the White House there has been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees. This nervousness resulted in the successful effort to add retroactive immunity to the Military Commission Act. Cheney personally spearheaded this effort. Fear of the consequences of exposure also weighed heavily in discussions about whether to shut the CIA program down. In White House meetings, Cheney warned that if they transferred the CIA’s prisoners to Guantanamo, “people will want to know where they have been—and what we’ve been doing with them.” Alberto Gonzales, a source said, “scared” everyone about the possibility of war crimes prosecutions. It was on their minds.

One of the most successful and hard nosed criminal prosecutors in America flatly calls for the prosecution of George W. Bush for murder, but as Glenn Greenwald points out, the Democrats are so compromised by collusion with this criminal regime, we probably can't expect them to do their duty.

On the plus side, members of the Bush administration will never be able to travel outside of America again after Bush leaves office, without looking over their shoulders.