A host of organizations today released the following statement: “We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a nonpartisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush administration.

“Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed….”

The statement was signed by groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights and Peace Action.

Among those available for interviews:

COLEEN ROWLEY
RAY McGOVERN
Rowley, an FBI whistleblower, was named one of Time magazine’s people of the year in 2002. She recently wrote the piece “Criminal Justice 101 & the Bush War Criminals.”

Rowley said today: “The president can look forward regarding the affairs of the country while a prosecutor does the work required to bring former officials to justice.”

McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years. He and Rowley are both members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, one of the groups that has signed the statement.

DAVID SWANSON
Author of the upcoming book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, Swanson is part of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, which drafted the statement. It is named for the prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War II who argued: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167