WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: Could BuZh be Prosecuted for WAR CRIMES?

Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted July 10, 2006.

A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.'

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The extent to which American exceptionalism is embedded in the national psyche is awesome to behold.

While the United States is a country like any other, its citizens no more special than any others on the planet, Americans still react with surprise at the suggestion that their country could be held responsible for something as heinous as a war crime.

From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn't feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis -- most certainly not. Howard Zinn recently described this as our "inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."

Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis are our "gold standard of evil," as author John Dolan once put it.

But the truth is that we can, and we have -- most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz's biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or "aggressive" war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a "prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

It's that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a "clear breach of law," and dismissed the Bush administration's legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn't have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, "So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive."

Writing for the United Kingdom's Guardian, shortly before the 2003 invasion, international law expert Mark Littman echoed Ferencz: "The threatened war against Iraq will be a breach of the United Nations Charter and hence of international law unless it is authorized by a new and unambiguous resolution of the Security Council. The Charter is clear. No such war is permitted unless it is in self-defense or authorized by the Security Council."

Challenges to the legality of this war can also be found at the ground level. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse to serve in Iraq, cites the rules of the U.N. Charter as a principle reason for his dissent.

Ferencz isn't using the invasion of Iraq as a convenient prop to exercise his longstanding American hatred: he has a decades-old paper trail of calls for every suspect of war crimes to be brought to international justice. When the United States captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003, Ferencz wrote that Hussein's offenses included "the supreme international crime of aggression, to a wide variety of crimes against humanity, and a long list of atrocities condemned by both international and national laws."

Ferencz isn't the first to make the suggestion that the United States has committed state-sponsored war crimes against another nation -- not only have leading war critics made this argument, but so had legal experts in the British government before the 2003 invasion. In a short essay in 2005, Ferencz lays out the inner deliberations of British and American officials as the preparations for the war were made:

U.K. military leaders had been calling for clear assurances that the war was legal under international law. They were very mindful that the treaty creating a new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague had entered into force on July 1, 2002, with full support of the British government. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the defense staff, was quoted as saying "I spent a good deal of time recently in the Balkans making sure Milosevic was put behind bars. I have no intention of ending up in the next cell to him in The Hague."

Ferencz quotes the British deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry who, in the lead-up to the invasion, quit abruptly and wrote in her resignation letter: "I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution … [A]n unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances that are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law."

While the United Kingdom is a signatory of the ICC, and therefore under jurisdiction of that court, the United States is not, thanks to a Republican majority in Congress that has "attacks on America's sovereignty" and "manipulation by the United Nations" in its pantheon of knee-jerk neuroses. Ferencz concedes that even though Britain and its leadership could be prosecuted, the international legal climate isn't at a place where justice is blind enough to try it -- or as Ferencz put it, humanity isn't yet "civilized enough to prevent this type of illegal behavior." And Ferencz said that while he believes the United States is guilty of war crimes, "the international community is not sufficiently organized to prosecute such a case. … There is no court at the moment that is competent to try that crime."

As Ferencz said, the world is still a long way away from establishing norms that put all nations under the rule of law, but the battle to do so is a worthy one: "There's no such thing as a war without atrocities, but war-making is the biggest atrocity of all."

The suggestion that the Bush administration's conduct in the "war on terror" amounts to a string of war crimes and human rights abuses is gaining credence in even the most ossified establishment circles of Washington. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling by the Supreme Court suggests that Bush's attempt to ignore the Geneva Conventions in his approved treatment of terror suspects may leave him open to prosecution for war crimes. As Sidney Blumenthal points out, the Court rejected Bush's attempt to ignore Common Article 3, which bans "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

And since Congress enacted the Geneva Conventions, making them the law of the United States, any violations that Bush or any other American commits "are considered 'war crimes' punishable as federal offenses," as Justice Kennedy wrote.

George W. Bush in the dock facing a charge of war crimes? That's well beyond the scope of possibility … or is it?

See more stories tagged with: war crimes, nazis, bush

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.

Top Neocon Calls For Destruction Of Constitution

04-16-2008
www.roguegovernment.com
Lee Rogers

n a recent edition of the Austin-American Statesman a book review of Phillip Bobbitt’s new book Terror and Consent goes into how the book calls for the shredding of the Constitution. The article written by James E. McWilliams features an image of the Constitution being torn with a big bold headline that states “Everything must go.” The words “How to Fight Terrorism”, are put in place of where the Constitution is torn. The article is blatant propaganda to make people think that the answer to fight terrorism is to destroy the Constitution. As disgusting as this is, the contents of Bobbitt’s book advocates exactly what the picture depicts. Bobbitt endorses using nongovernmental organizations and multinational corporations to take over the roles and functions of nation states. He also endorses giving the United Nations the authority to wage war without approval from the Security Council and the use of non-lethal chemical weapons to fight terrorism. If he really wanted to end terrorism using non-lethal chemical weapons, he should be endorsing the use of non-lethal chemical weapons on the headquarters of the CIA, British Intelligence and Mossad because that’s where the majority of terrorism comes from. Of course, Bobbitt won't mention that fact.

Let’s look at a blurb from the Austin-American Statesman article that gets into some of the things that Bobbitt endorses in his book.

Bobbitt’s previous book, "The Shield of Achilles," explored the grand themes of warfare and state development, marking his penchant for the magnum opus. At nearly 700 pages (including more than 100 pages of notes), "Terror and Consent" follows suit, taking on a similarly big picture. If "we want to defeat state-shattering terror in the twenty-first century," Bobbitt writes, we will have to "transform the emerging constitutional order of the twenty-first century State."

Specifically, we must stop thinking like a nation state and start thinking like the "market state" that we are inevitably becoming. The nation state — a constitutional order dedicated to protecting and improving the material welfare of its citizens — served the United States well from the mid-19th century to the end of the Cold War. But Bobbitt contends it’s vulnerable to a new battery of threats. The accessibility of weapons of mass destruction, the globalization of international capital and the "universalization of culture" have eroded the conventional borders that once legitimated national security.

What’s needed is a constitutional order that takes its structural cues from multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations, relying "less on law and regulation and more on market incentives" to expand people’s options. Such a market state keeps its finger on the pulse of consumer demand, advocates trade liberalization, is prone to the privatization of public works and "will outsource many functions." In the seminar rooms of political science departments this change is referred to as "neoliberalism" (on the streets, it is known as "globalization") — and Bobbitt, who is a geopolitical realist, believes we have no choice but to embrace it.

Simply put, Bobbitt is endorsing what the elites have long sought after and that’s a New World Order or a global government. Bobbitt advocates the destruction of the Constitution and the transfer of power to multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations. This man is a traitor. In the New World Order that the elites envision, people will only have the illusion of choice via phony democratic rule. Real decisions will be made by multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations behind the scenes. Unfortunately, what Bobbitt advocates is already happening considering initiatives such as the Security and Prosperity Partnership which seeks to dissolve the national borders between the Canada, United States and Mexico.

Bobbitt also endorses preemptive use of force by the United Nations without a Security Council authorization as well as the use of non-lethal chemical weapons to prevent terrorism. This is confirmed from a blurb in the Austin-American Statesman.

Bobbitt believes that the UN Charter should be amended to allow the preemptive use of force without a Security Council authorization, that the Geneva Conventions should be changed to forbid the indefinite containment of terrorist prisoners without trial and that we must, in cases in which the use of non-lethal chemical weapons could be used to prevent terror, be able to redefine such methods as "counterforce measures."

What is not mentioned in the article is what sort of non-lethal weapons he would advocate using. Considering that the public is having pharmaceutical drugs and fluoride dumped in their water, mercury put in their vaccines, pesticides sprayed over populated areas and all sorts of other horrors one has to ask if Bobbitt would endorse these methods to fight terrorism?

The war on terror is a proven fraud which makes Bobbitt’s book entirely irrelevant. He bases all of his conclusions off of something that is a lie. Bobbitt also refuses to acknowledge mainstream history which shows that anytime power is concentrated in the hands of a few it always turns out badly. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the New World Order is seeking to gain absolute power. If they are successful in achieving this, we will see a tyranny like no other. The New World Order will be a global enslavement system in which advanced technology is used to dominate the people of the world. It is disgusting that Bobbitt prefers a system that concentrates power in the hands of the unelected few over the freedom and inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution. It is insane to say that the Constitution is outdated and a new form of governance is required in the 21st century. Free speech, the right to bear arms, the right not to have your home searched and personal belongings seized without a warrant are concepts that are just as applicable in the 21st century as they were in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Bobbitt is an elitist hack and a traitor for the statements he is making in his book. While he has every right to say these things under the First Amendment, his statements undermines everything that has made this country special. What he doesn’t realize is that the New World Order will dispose of him like they will everyone else when they see that he is of no further use to their insanely corrupt and tyrannical system. Bobbitt is nothing more than another useful idiot for the New World Order enslavement system and he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.

Below is Bobbitt’s contact information if you’d like to express your displeasure at his anti-American and pro-NWO statements.

Phone: (512) 232-1376
Fax: (512) 471-6988
E-mail: PBOBBITT@LAW.UTEXAS.EDU