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Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke : Bush Committed War Crimes | Democracy Now !
▻http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/5/28/former_counterterrorism_czar_richard_clarke_bush

In a Democracy Now! exclusive, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official has said he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Richard Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during President Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion and later made headlines by accusing Bush officials of ignoring pre-9/11 warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda. On Tuesday, Clarke spoke to Democracy Now! in an interview that will air next week.

Amy Goodman : “Do you think President Bush should be brought up on war crimes [charges], and Vice President Cheney and [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld, for the attack on Iraq?”

Richard Clarke : “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it’s clear that some of the things they did were war crimes.”

#crimes_de_guerre

Fukushima: An Ongoing Warning to the World | Democracy Now!
▻http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/1/16/fukushima_an_ongoing_warning_to_the

The government’s refusal to grant Funahashi access is indicative of another significant problem that has emerged since the earthquake: secrecy. Japan’s conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, enacted a controversial state secrecy law early last December. Here in Tokyo, Sophia University Professor Koichi Nakano says of the new law, “Of course, it concerns primarily security issues and anti-terrorist measures. But ... it became increasingly clear that the interpretation of what actually constitutes state secret could be very arbitrary and rather freely defined by government leaders. For example, anti-nuclear citizen movements can come under surveillance without their knowledge, and arrests can be made.”