NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee
Indictment of G. W. Bush et al for
Torture, Illegal Detention and Murder
For
Immediate Release
Contact:
Eric Lerner
973-736-0522
While the Army has absolved all officers of guilt in the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison, the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee and other activist groups in New Jersey are determined that those responsible for torture in Iraq, at Guantanamo and in the United States will face justice. On April 30, these groups will hold a People’s Grand Jury Indictment of President George W. Bush, et al for the crimes of Torture, Illegal Detention (false imprisonment) and Murder. “We will present documentary evidence and testimony from former detainees that shows that torture, detention without charge and murder have become a deliberate policy of this government, not the work of a few bad apples,“ explains Eric Lerner, a member of NJCRDC. “We will show to a grand jury of Americans the proof that this policy has been ordered by the top leaders of this government, including George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez, Dick Cheney, Tom Ridge and George Tenet as well as by top ranking Generals, including Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez and Major General Geoffrey D. Miller” Evidence will as well be presented against some of the low-level enforcers of the policy of detention and torture, such as Passaic County Sheriff Jerry Speziale, who runs a particularly abusive detention faculty.
The defendants are accused of a broad conspiracy to violate US laws, including the Torture Act, (18 USC 2340) and the War Crimes Act (18 USC 2441) which prohibits US officials from violating the Geneva Conventions. In addition, government officials including former President William J. Clinton, are accused of conspiring to illegally detain without warrant or charge tens of thousands of people in US jails and in detention facilities around the world, in violation of US laws against false imprisonment and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights.
The indictment will
be held on Saturday, April 30 from
The indictment is the first step leading to a full People’s Court Trial in the fall, with leading lawyers participating as judge, prosecution and defense. The indictment and trial are intended to bring to popular attention the connection between the widely publicized crimes at Abu Ghraib, the still covered-up torture at Guantanamo, and the detention without trial of tens of thousands of immigrants here in the US. The government has been all too successful in creating an image of the criminal immigrant—undercutting the rights and standards of living of all. The indictment will instead show that depriving non-citizens of the rights granted them, as well as citizens, by the Bill of Rights, inevitably leads to the horrors of torture.
Evidence will trace the abuses back not only to directives from Bush inventing the category of “enemy combatants” but to unconstitutional sections of the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Anti Terrorism Laws which first set up a extra-constitutional system of detention without charge. “We hope this indictment will be a step in putting the real criminals behind bars, “says Stan Organek, another NJCDC member, “and freeing all those detained without charge.”