Bush Convicted of War Crimes
Remember where you were when you heard the news. It’s not the International Criminal Court and it doesn’t have any government endorsements, but the first conviction for war crimes against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and several of their senior legal advisors has been made. A U.S. President has been convicted for war crimes, and it's the initial collection round the ICC probably needed towards raising Bush’s airfare to The Hague.
The prosecution occurred at the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal Foundation, a private organization chartered under Malaysian law. It has no endorsement from any government worldwide and is anything but an institution of global acclaim, but it is still very significant because it has been created by those with power to persuade the ICC. Those condemned are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and former deputy assistant attorney general John Choon Yoo, former assistant attorney general Jay Bybee, and former counsels Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes.The transgressions are the use of torture and the war crime of using torture during war, as defined by the Convention against Torture and four Geneva conventions of 1949, to which the United States government is a party. The statement of the tribunal was that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld “engaged in a web of instructions, memos, directives, legal advice and action that established a common plan and purpose, joint enterprise and / or conspiracy to commit the crimes of Torture and War Crimes, including and not limited to a common plan and purpose to commit the following crimes in relation to the ‘War on Terror’ and the wars launched by the US and others in Afghanistan and Iraq.” The evidence that they knew about this and supported it has been very compelling for quite a while.
One of the most revealing things about this development, however, is that the mainstream press in the US and UK have not touched it. At all. Not one spillage of ink, kb of information or second of airtime. CNN, the BBC, Newsweek, ABC, the London Times. The list could be as long as this article. The only major news source to touch it has been The Real News Network. I would rush to say that this display is some bizarre double-standard or moral evasion by the mainstream press, but it’s not as if these stations have been quiet about news that criticizes the war previously.
Nevertheless, it shows there are undercurrents of willingness to neglect topics of political importance. This is a war crimes tribunal verdict against the former president of the United States and his senior officials. And as one of the prosecution team, the University of Illinois’s Francis Boyle has said, the tribunal was set up because of the influence it will have on an eventual ICC hearing. The outlets have reported before on much of the evidence that was used in the tribunal. This is an age where news stories are pumped out by the minute. If a backbencher makes a mundane remark about some lowly issue, a remark about it will appear somewhere. The tribunal is, on paper, only a “tribunal of conscience”, but I honestly can’t think of a reason why this story has not been relegated, but ignored. It can’t surely be because Bush is the former U.S. President, can it? I’m being serious: like I said, these channels have had panels with commentators calling for ICC investigations and spitting against things like Blair’s 45 minute claim. What’s so different about the latest news that it can’t be mentioned?
Last November the tribunal looked at what, for most people, might be the biggest claim: whether or not the invasion itself should be viewed as a war crime. As The Real News's senior editor Paul Jay stated it, “[w]hat is a bigger war crime than invading a country and killing several hundreds of thousands of people?” This is quite right. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait led to the first gulf war for this reason. Kofi Annan called the 2003 invasion illegal, as did many others. But, playing with words, what was legal about Saddam Hussein’s regime, an imperialism on its own people? It's what a lot of the debate on this subject has been over, and the tribunal found Bush guilty of "crimes against peace" over the invasion itself.
The answer regarding Bush and his cohorts should be decided by the reasons given for the Bush-led invasion. If he and his officials in the know willingly lied and gave false information as their main reasons to invade, then this is another count. In some ways this won’t make the debate on the invasion clearer: you don’t have to base your views about the invasion as good or bad around this. But if you are sympathetic to humanitarian reasons of the Hitchenseque about the subject, it is hypocritical to not damn Bush and the other top suits if they are guilty of fabricating on this count. And it certainly is hypocritical to not do on the counts for which they have just been convicted.
It’s often assumed that the answer is obvious, but it is a very good question to ask why Bush decided to invade Iraq in the first place. This is what centres the debate, and it will be primary question of any Hague investigation. Bush in the ICC sounds far off, but it’s come a little closer. Critics say it was war for oil. Have you seen the price of oil over recent years? Maybe it’s that Bush has benefited from it personally via the military-industrial complex Moore-documentary-style and felt that such an undertaking could be made. But he was very consistent in his public claims about doing what he believed to be right. Hussein-Iraq was discussed for a decade, but suddenly attention was drawn towards it as the major global question. Why? Was this drawing towards the topic of Bush’s making, or of those around him? Was it fabrication of, or confusion over information at the top?
Bush is more complicated than most people realize. One of his major interests is a Shakespearean obsession over what leaders go through and conviction they need. I think this will be one of the main keys to unlocking what exactly he knew and did not, and what his decisions were on this subject given what he knew. But for now he’s had a conviction the world needed. The ICC might be where we find out whether he was an innocent flower or a serpent under it. It certainly didn’t end well for Macbeth.
No comments:
Post a Comment