Amnesty International Wants Cheney Investigated For War Crimes

Eight activists representing Amnesty International donned orange jumpsuits Tuesday and held a protest in front of the Department of Justice in hopes of convincing the Obama administration to investigate former Vice President Dick Cheney for alleged war crimes.

“[Cheney] was one of the principal architects of a policy that instituted the torture of US detainees,” Tom Parker, the Policy Director for Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA told TRNS. “That torture included threatening people with power drills, discharging weapons right near their heads, threatening to lock them in a box of insects, throwing them against the wall, heat exhaustion, sleep depravation, withholding food and water and of course, the most infamous of all, waterboarding.”

Although the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques have been controversial for years, they have returned to the spotlight with the release of Dick Cheney’s memoir “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” in which Cheney describes different interrogation techniques used on detainees. 

“We’re here today to mark the publication of Dick Cheney’s memoirs and to present a copy of those memoirs to the Justice Department as exhibit A in a case to prosecute him for committing war crimes in the context of the global war on terror,” Parker said.

Cheney’s memoir was officially released Tuesday by Simon & Schuster

Click here to view a photo from today’s protest.

U.S. Coast Guard Says No Apology Needed For Drill

By Julianne LaJeunesse, University of New Mexico-Talk Radio News Service

Reports of fired shots on the Potomac River were enough to scare civilians and news agencies in Washington, D.C. on the eighth anniversary of September 11, 2009.

Reports of the shots came just before 10 am Friday morning, and by noon, the U.S. Coast Guard released a statement explaining that the incident was actually a training exercise that did not consist of fired shots.

In the statement, U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral John Currier said that while the agency was sensitive to the anniversary of September 11, 2001, an apology for planned training exercises was unnecessary.

"I am not issuing an apology because, althought it is unfortunate that it escalated to this level, what you're seeing here is the result of a normal training exercise," Currier said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today that when it comes to keeping the nation safe, he tends not to question law enforcement- even on September 11th.

Top Court: Ashcroft, Mueller Not Liable For Muslim Civil Rights Violations

By Jonathan Bronstein, Talk Radio News Service

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government allowed law enforcement officials to arrest people of “high interest” according to race, religion, or national origin, according to Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani citizen who was placed in a maximum-security prison in early 2002.

Iqbal claimed that the government’s decision violated his civil rights and he sued former U.S. Attorney General John Aschcroft and Robert Mueller, then-Director of the FBI.

Today, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Kennedy, ruled against Iqbal.

Kennedy wrote that Iqbal’s initial filings did not provide enough information to automatically find Ashcroft and Mueller responsible for the abuses he suffered while being held.

The case will now return to the lower courts, where Iqbal may have a chance to substantiate his claim that he was subjected to harsh conditions on account of his religion and nationality, and that Ashcroft and Mueller were the “principle architects” of this plan.

Four Justices dissented, and in an opinion written by Justice Souter agreed with the lower courts' findings that Ashcroft and Mueller did violate his civil rights and could therefore be held responsible.