The
necessity for a war crimes investigation of Bush is
critical... |
|
Is Bush a War Criminal?
Posted May 7, 2003
thepeoplesvoice.org
By Dave Chandler, Publisher
of www.earthside.com
/
Go
to original
If American citizens who were opposed to the
invasion of Iraq had been wrong, if the
French, German, and Russian governments had been wrong, if the United
Nations Security Council had been wrong -- this is what FOX News would have
eagerly reported during the first few hours and days of the attack:
- "Special operations teams of the U.S.
military have secured a secret Iraqi base where thousands of liters of
liquid anthrax were being loaded into artillery shells for use against
British forces attacking Um Qasar."
- "In a mad dash into the Iraqi desert,
units of U.S. Marines have overrun an Iraq facility where botulinum
toxin was found in tanks on Iraqi unmanned drones preparing for flights
to release the poison over Kuwait City."
- "Green Berets parachuted just hours
ago into an Iraqi laboratory where uranium enrichment equipment for
producing material for nuclear bombs was being stored. The soldiers
destroyed aluminum tubes they found that were being used for the
processing of uranium. Secretary of State Powell had revealed the
existence of the equipment at the U.N. in February."
- "Using data obtained from spy
satellites, an Iraqi cache of illegal Scud missiles near Baghdad was
destroyed last night by stealth bombers. The Bush and Blair
administrations have said for months that they knew that Iraq had not
disarmed itself of these weapons and that intelligence had confirmed
their existence."
- "Just minutes away from launch, sarin-armed
Al Samoud missiles were shelled and destroyed by advancing British
military forces. "They could have been in the air in minutes,"
said Sergeant Smith. "But we knew they had these weapons of mass
destruction and we got to them in time." Prime Minister Blair said
the action proved his contention that Saddam's banned weapons were just
45 minutes away from when he gave the order for their use to deployment
on the battlefield."
- "Based on information provided by
Iraqi defectors, agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency moved
today into Iraqi government bunkers in Karbala and took possession of
two suitcase-size nuclear devices, proving the Bush administration's
contention that Saddam Hussein posed a direct threat to the United
States."
Of course, those news reports were never
given. Because it was Bush and Blair, Powell and Straw, Cheney, Rice,
Wolfowitz, and Perle that were completely wrong about the destructive
capabilities of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military; completely wrong
about the cause belli for attacking Iraq.
With U.S. military and civilian forces now in Iraq for over a month, the
banned weapons that were the preeminent basis for the attack and invasion
have yet to appear. The spin from the Administration is now all about
"liberation," because it is simply too embarrassing, indeed
potentially criminal, for Bush and his cronies to fess-up to their deceit.
So, like a cat in the litter box, US and British officials are covering up
the odor slowly rising from what they had to have known were lies and
deceptions about the Iraqi threat.
"The absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence," is the way Secretary of 'War' Donald Rumsfeld
marginalized the efforts of the U.N. inspection teams when they did not
confirm the existence of banned weapons Iraq said it had already destroyed.
Yet, today 'evidence of absence' condemns the Bush and Blair administrations
because the reason they gave for abandoning the United Nation's process was
that the threat was so immediate and their knowledge so absolute that attack
had become the only option.
The gravity of this problem is monumental. Without the existence of a real
threat, even using the flawed notion of "anticipatory
self-defense," the attack on and invasion of another sovereign nation
puts Bush in the same category as Hitler in 1938 or Saddam Hussein in 1991
-- the perpetrator of an unprovoked, aggressive war.
Lacking an actual conventional or unconventional attack on the United States
by Iraq, lacking possession of deliverable weapons of mass destruction
targeted at the U.S. or its allies, or direct tangible evidence of Iraqi
involvement with other organizations or nations plotting to attack the
United States, there is simply no case for a defensive war. Consequently,
that leaves one to speculate -- did Bush ordered a war of aggression against
Iraq? If so, that would be a crime.
Since World War Two, the standard for war crimes has
been the trials at Nuremberg in 1945 prosecuted by the United States and its
allies against the Third Reich. The first two counts of the Nuremberg
trial indictments of the Nazis and German government after World War Two
make this clear.
They are concisely summarized by Court TV's Casefiles
web site.
Count one of the indictment was "Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive
War." The Casefiles says: The "common plan or conspiracy"
charge was designed to get around the problem of how to deal with crimes
committed before the war. The defendants charged under Count One were
accused of agreeing to commit crimes.
And count two was "Waging Aggressive War, or Crimes Against
Peace." From Casefiles: This evidence was presented by the British
prosecutors and was defined in the indictment as "the planning,
preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also
wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and
assurances."
The conclusion one is forced to now draw from the facts that have been
demonstrated, is that there is certainly reasonable doubt that there was a
solid foundation for the attack on Iraq. A war crimes investigation is
therefore necessary to ascertain whether or not the Bush administration
conspired to ignore evidence that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were
indeed already destroyed or did not pose a threat. Furthermore, an
investigation is required to judge whether or not the Bush administration
premeditatedly planned to violate the U.N. charter (and thereby Article 6 of
the U.S. Constitution) and wage a war of aggression against Iraq.
Put plainly -- because an imminent threat from Iraq's alleged weapons of
mass destruction has clearly not been demonstrated by the discoveries, or
lack of discoveries, resulting from the prosecution of the war, it is
entirely reasonable to examine if Bush lied and deceived for the purpose of
starting a war.
An analysis of the actual events and facts
demonstrate the peril in which Bush finds himself.
Besides the fact that the fictitious news quips above are indeed just that
-- fictions, there are three other circumstantial facts that expose the
potential venality of Bush's unprovoked attack.
First, it is a matter of fact that in his hour of maximum peril -- even
after he was personally targeted by the multiple cruise missiles that
started the war -- Saddam Hussein did not use weapons of mass destruction to
defend himself or his regime. What other conclusion can one draw? Either he
did not have those weapons, could not access those weapons if he had them,
or chose not to use them if he had them. In any case, this is prima facia
evidence that Iraq was not an imminent threat to American troops inside
Iraq, let alone to the continental United States.
Second, US actions inside Iraq demonstrate that the U.N. weapons inspection
process was working just as it was intended.
Currently in occupation of the entire country, the U.S. is saying that it
has over one thousand suspect weapons of mass destruction sites to
investigate and that it may take many months, maybe two years, to complete
the task. Now that the pre-war "cheat and retreat" accusation
aimed at Iraq is gone, one wonders why, therefore, the occupation forces are
having such a hard time finding the vast quantities of banned weapons Bush
and Blair swore they knew Iraq possessed.
Yet, Bush could barely tolerate the five months that the United Nations
inspection team headed by Dr. Blix was on the ground in Iraq. Moreover, in
announcing that he was abandoning the proceedings of the United Nations
Security Council and taking the course of war, Bush 'premeditatively' forced
the Blix inspection effort to cease its work. The justification for war
because the U.N. could not verify the "absence of evidence" now
becomes an indictment of Bush. Without clear-cut evidence that Iraq had and
was ready to use those weapons means that Bush ordered an attack contrary to
the findings of impartial analysis. In other words, Bush ordered the
ultimate international death sentence without independent verification that
a crime had been committed.
Third, Bush made much of the "relevance" of the United Nations in
regards to the enforcement of its Iraq resolutions. Through its orderly and
legal process, the U.N. put into effect an investigation to verify Iraq's
claim that it had complied with disarmament resolutions. That was the Blix
headed UNMOVIC weapons inspections team. In his last report before the
attack, Blix informed the Security Council that real disarmament of the Al
Samoud missile was taking place (in spite of Iraq's contention that the
missile's range was not in violation of U.N. requirements), and that no
banned weapons had been discovered.
Nevertheless, Bush wantonly disregarded this legally constituted authority,
under which the United States had agreed to abide through the UN Charter,
and Article Six, Paragraph Two of the U.S. Constitution, and ordered
American military personnel to attack Iraq. While Bush accepted the U.N.
process with the resolution creating the UNMOVIC inspectors, he gave up in
March 2003 when it appeared that he was not going to get the outcome he
wanted, ie., a second resolution approving war. The rule of law has little
value if Bush, or anyone else, can capricioulsy disregard the means to
obtain the desired ends.
Bush acted as would the worst characters in an old cowboy movie: convinced
of the alleged rustler's guilt and too impatient to wait for the sheriff to
get all the facts, he and his gang strung-up the prisoner from the branch of
the old cottonwood tree. Unfortunately for Bush, fans of old westerns know
how the truth played out in most of those movies. In this case, even if a
stockpile of banned weapons is someday discovered, Bush has acted as judge,
jury and executioner in contravention of the 'Code of the West' and
everything American tradition stands for.
In summary, simple logic and a recognition of the actual facts means that a
war crimes investigation of Bush is obligatory based on these three
conclusions:
One, Iraq did not use weapons of mass destruction, nor was there any proven
threat or hostile action taken against the US by Iraq requiring a violent
defensive response.
Two, as the ongoing U.N. inspections process was finding, there was not
evidence of banned weapons at the time the attack was ordered, in other
words, no evidence of a crime.
Third, Bush's order to start the war interrupted and obstructed a legal and
peaceful process in violation of U.N. jurisdiction, a system accepted by the
United States, and violated accepted reasons for war as described in the
Nuremberg indictments.
The necessity for a war crimes investigation of Bush is critical to
reminding Americans and the world, that the euphoria of US victory must not
obscure how serious deception and deceit are to the future of freedom and
global peace.
------------------------
Dave Chandler lives in Arvada, Colorado.
He is publisher of the environmental and political web site: earthside.com
Comments to: earthside1@aol.com
© Copyright 2003 All rights reserved by
Dave Chandler
|
