why George W. Bush must be tried as a war criminal'

[jbfam4]

Bob Fitrakis: 'Again, why George W. Bush must be tried as a war criminal'
Posted on Saturday, April 24 @ 09:12:02 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Free Press
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=15904&mode=nested

As one of the 49 original signers of the UN Charter, the United States committed itself to the ideals and practices of the norms of international law. Only two U.S. senators voted against the treaty, which includes Article 2(4) that specifically prohibits "...the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independent of any state...." In a September 23, 2003 speech to the United Nations, President Bush noted that both the UN Charter and American founding documents "recognize a moral law that stands above men and nations, which must be defended and enforced by men and nations." Following World War II, just such action was taken at the Nuremberg trials and American, British, French and Soviet jurists established Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter, which legally defines "Crimes Against Peace."

To commit a crime against peace, one must engage in "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war." Bush is guilty on all these counts. The most damning evidence coming not from the liberal left, but in a series of well-documented books providing revelations by people in his own administration or party. Now, with Woodward's work, the President is condemned with his own words.
Finally, in the latest blockbuster, Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate reporter Bob Woodward outlines Bush's illegal attack plan. Woodward establishes that five days after 9/11, the President was secretly scheming to go after, not bin Laden - the man responsible for the 9/11 attack - but rather bin Laden's arch enemy Saddam Hussein. Specifically, 72 days after 9/11, Bush gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the orders to draw up the secret war plans. Once enacted, these plans made George W. Bush a war criminal, just like the Nazi generals at Nuremberg.

Bush, supported by the mainstream corporate media, has hidden behind the semantics of "pre-emption." Under international law, a pre-emptive strike is allowed when a nation is preparing for an imminent attack. Bush would be hard pressed before any tribunal, short of a Texas kangaroo court, to establish that the Iraqi military was an imminent threat to the U.S. Iraq was a defeated, heavily impoverished nation, under economic sanctions and restricted by U.S.-enforced no-fly zones in both its north and south.


Woodward's book reads, as do Clarke's and Susskind's, as another lengthy prosecutory indictment against the Bush administration. Bush's only defense against such blatant illegality is to find the real or imagined, or more likely recently planted, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. For the last two months the Mehr News Agency from Tehran, Iran has reported allegations that the U.S. and British governments have been unloading weapons of mass destruction into southern Iraq. The news service claims that these weapons are dismantled Soviet-era nuclear material and weapons. Reuters reported these allegations as well. The President's recent comments that he hasn't given up on finding weapons of mass destruction, sound eerily familiar to his refrain in Florida on Election Eve, when he was asked if he was going to concede the election when exit polls showed him losing. He told the media that his brother Jeb's political forces on the ground were indicating different results. What are Bush's forces on the ground in Iraq doing now, particularly his private contractor friends?

For a President who took us into war under an illegal Nazi doctrine and sold it to the American people based on cooked intelligence information, would it not be the next step to simply plant the evidence he needs amidst the chaos of a disintegrating Iraq? With the illusion of Iraqi sovereignty fading and potential disaster looming with a premature turnover, Bush's re-election bid may be based on his hitting another "trifecta": "capturing" Osama bin Laden, "trying" Saddam Hussein, and "finding" weapons of mass destruction. The recent alarmist talk about another terrorist attack prior to the election should be cause for great concern for an administration that conveniently ignored the overwhelming evidence of the Al Qaeda attack.


Bob Fitrakis is senior editor of the Free Press (http://freepress.org) and co-author of George W. Bush vs. the SuperPower of Peace.