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Why we must prosecute Bush and his administration for war crimes
Mike Ferner
Online
Journal
Tuesday, Dec 16, 2008
During the rush to get the Nuremberg Tribunals underway, the
Soviet delegation wanted the tribunal’s historic decisions
to have legitimacy only for the Nazis. U.S. Supreme Court Justice,
Robert Jackson, serving as the chief prosecutor for the Allies,
strong-armed the Soviets until the very beginning of the tribunal
before changing their mind.
In his opening statement Jackson very purposely stipulated, “
. . . Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against
German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful
purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including
those which sit here now in judgment.”
Can there be a better reason for prosecuting George W. Bush and
his administration for war crimes than those words from the chief
prosecutor of the Nazis, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, with the
full support of the U.S. government? Robert Jackson’s words
and the values this nation claims to stand for provide sufficient
moral basis for putting Bush and Cheney, their underlings who
implemented their policies and the perverted legal minds who justified
them all in the dock. If those are not sufficient reasons, there
is a long list of binding law and treaties -- written in black
and white in surprisingly plain English.
Bush imagined, and his attorneys advised, that he could simply
wave aside these laws with “they don’t apply.”
Imagine how a judge would treat even a simple traffic court defendant
who brazenly stated the law was only a quaint notion, just “words
on paper?”
Masses of people and an embarrassingly small number of their
elected representatives in this country read the law for themselves
and demanded otherwise, only to be silenced by the Guardians of
Reality in the corporate news media.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
But it’s all there, where it has been for 220 years, the
Constitution’s “supremacy clause,” Article II,
section 4, and in the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18USC §2441).
They provide the authority to make additional treaties legally
binding -- no matter how much former White House lawyers David
Addington and John Yoo may object.
Those additional treaties include among others, the Geneva Conventions,
the Nuremberg rulings, the Laws and Customs of War on Land and
UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. To give just a snapshot of
how serious these laws are, consider this portion of 18 USC 2441
which defines a war crime as “ . . . a grave breach in any
of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949,
or any protocol to such convention to which the United States
is a party . . .” The guilty can be “ . . . fined
under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years,
or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject
to the penalty of death.”
Here, Justice Jackson answers another question about war crimes
-- who bears the greater responsibility: those who committed barbaric
acts in the field or those who created the conditions for barbarism?
The case as presented by the United States will be concerned
with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These
defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil
its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use
lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers,
the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the
world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence
and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions,
of this terrible war.
And yet it is not just because Bush violated the Constitution
and federal law that he and his lieutenants must be prosecuted.
At Nuremberg, the foremost crime identified was starting a “war
of aggression,” later codified by U.N. Resolution 3314,
Art. 5, as “a crime against international peace.”
Launching a war of aggression, as Hitler did against Poland, is
considered so monstrous that the nation responsible can then be
charged with “war crimes” and “crimes against
humanity,” spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions.
As Tom Paine said long before the U.N. formalized the definition
of aggression, “He who is the author of a war lets loose
the whole contagion of Hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation
to death.”
A small sampling of the contagion of Hell let loose by Bush includes
illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such
as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian
infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing
and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing
a million people and displacing 4 million more in Iraq alone.
Following World War II, humanity resolved that wars do more than
spark a series of loathsome, individual crimes. Leaders responsible
for a war actually commit crimes against the entirety of humanity.
They inflict harm on every human being, something that must be
put right before humanity can be restored.
There is a final reason why we must prosecute Bush and Co. It
is not what some argue, although they point to a serious danger:
that Bush trashed the law and usurped powers, encouraging future
presidents to expand where he left off. Such reasons are about
George W. Bush and those who hold the office after him, but in
the final analysis this is about us.
We are complicit in the horrors of this administration. We can
claim neither ignorance nor innocence. We are complicit by the
very fact that we are citizens of the United States, more so because
we paid for the war, and even more so for this reason. Listen
to a village sheik I met in Iraq describe it better than I ever
could.
I met this man in a small farming village one afternoon in early
2004. He described how he and a dozen others were swept up in
a raid by the U.S. Army and detained on a bare patch of ground
surrounded by concertina wire. They had no shelter and but six
blankets. They dug a hole with their hands for a toilet. They
had to beg for water until one time it rained for three days straight
and they remained on that open ground. He somehow found the graciousness
to say he understood there was a difference between the American
people and our government. Then through his tears he added, “But
you say you live in a democracy. How can this be happening to
us?”
Do we? Whether or not we bring our own government officials to
justice for their crimes will determine the answer.
Ferner is a writer from Ohio and author of “Inside the
Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq.”
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