I very much admire Congressman Stark for his refreshing, principled, and aggressive criticism of the Iraq War, though I neither condone nor condemn his recent statement involving George Bush’s motivations for the war.
On the one hand it was refreshing for me to hear a Congressman publicly rant about the war, thereby bringing more public attention to the war crimes committed by the Bush administration.
On the other hand, I believe that it may have been a tactical mistake to say that the Iraq War is being conducted “
for the President’s amusement”. Although that statement may or may not be true, I believe that the evidence is much stronger that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq
was undertaken in order to enrich Bush and Cheney’s corporate cronies, and for geo-strategic purposes.
In either case, and regardless of the motives, the Bush administration is guilty of numerous war crimes – and that is the most important point.
Therefore, if Congressman Stark were to apologize for his “for the President’s amusement” remarks I would suggest that he take the opportunity to make the more important point, which is the abundant evidence of war crimes committed by Bush and Cheney. Howard Zinn, in the preface to the final report by the International Commission of Inquiry on “
Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration of the United States”, put the case eloquently. Discussing the conduct of the Iraq War, Zinn says that it:
… has now reached the point of crime, crimes against humanity, a phrase which came into general understanding after World War II when the Nuremburg trials talked about the Nazis and their crimes against humanity… a charge that peoples all over the world, and now more and more people in the United States, are beginning to level against this administration… The Bush administration has been reserving to itself the right to act unilaterally… presumably in the interests of democracy and liberty, but actually in the interests of business, big business, the oil business in this instance.
The Constitution provides for impeachment for what it calls “high crimes and misdemeanors.” … This is a clear case for the removal of a president for committing “high crimes”. What could be a higher crime than sending the young people of a country into a war against a small country… which is no danger to the United States, and in fact a war which is condemned by people all over the world and a war which results in, not only the loss of American lives and the crippling of young Americans but results in the loss of huge numbers of people in Iraq? These are high crimes.
Making the case for war crimes (not to mention numerous other impeachable offenses) committed by the Bush Administration should not be very difficult at this time, as the case has already been made by numerous organizations and individuals. Here is a small sampling of the available examples:
International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration of the United StatesI’ll start with the
findings of this Commission, since it involves, as far as I can tell, the most extensive investigation into the Bush war crimes currently available. The Commission consisted of a five-member panel of jurists who undertook a one year investigation that included five days of public hearings with 45 expert witnesses, including 27 year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and DU’s own David Swanson, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org. Here are some excerpts (with internet links added) from the Commission’s findings on war crimes, which were broken down into two major categories, “Wars of Aggression” and “Torture, Rendition, Illegal Detention and Murder Indictment”:
Wars of AggressionWe find that the Bush Administration authorized, under the doctrine of “preventive war” and a policy of “regime change”, a war of aggression against Iraq. The doctrine of “preventive war” is not recognized as a justification for war under international law…. Notwithstanding these facts, the Bush administration launched a full scale war against Iraq, a sovereign state; it did so not in self-defense or under the authorization of the United Nations Security Council.
The Bush administration knew prior to the 2003 invasion that Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda, was disarmed, had no weapons of mass destruction and was incapable of mounting a credible defense, much less a credible attack on the United States. Accordingly, the Iraq War is an
aggressive war in violation of international law…. A war of aggression is termed the supreme international war crime in international law because it is the world’s most egregious war crime…
In addition to committing the supreme international war crime, the Bush administration, pursuant to its war of aggression in Iraq, has committed additional enumerated war crimes that include:
1. The use of force beginning with the campaign of “
shock and awe”… was a severe example of overwhelming, indiscriminate, and disproportionate use of military force against a nation state.
2. The indiscriminate use of weapons such as cluster munitions, incendiary bombs, depleted uranium and
chemical weapons for which it is reasonably foreseeable would have caused and indeed caused significant civilian injuries.
For the duration of the United States Occupation of Iraq, the United States is failing to safeguard the lives of Iraqi civilians that have resulted from the devastation created by its intentional bombing of civilian infrastructure… and created by its ongoing criminal acts that include:
1. Because the invasion of Iraq was the supreme war crime, the resultant occupation of Iraq itself is a war crime. The occupation consisted of additional war crimes such as: …
intentional and targeted attacks upon civilian populations, hospitals, medical centers, residential neighborhoods, electrical power stations and water purification facilities, the
widespread use of torture against the Iraqi people, mass arrests and detention of civilians and civilian home demolitions….
2. Killing and injuring individual civilians through random fire during military operations… The Bush administration declared the city of Fallujah, a population of over 350,000 people,
a free fire zone. As a result, the Bush Administration
bombed 70% of the city in 2004. The Bush administration also extensively and indiscriminately bombed Ramadi, Samara, Haditha, Alkaim, Abuhisma, Sania, Najaf, Kut, Baghdad, Musul, and other Iraqi cities, causing substantial civilian deaths and severe injuries.
3. The
failure of civil reconstruction, the
impeding of medical care during the occupation, and the facilitating of
corporate looting of Iraq through the
re-writing of Iraq’s laws.
4. Deliberately bombing civilian and neutral broadcasting outlets and otherwise restricting press and media coverage of actual events; and
5. Extrajudical killings at checkpoints.
We find that the Bush Administration authorized the
use of torture and abuse in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law, customary international law, and domestic Constitutional and statutory law.
In December 2001, the Bush Administration authorized the
Special Access Program that authorized the secret seizure, detention, and interrogation of persons and subjected them to torture. The torture included but was not limited to: water boarding, beatings, the administration of electric shocks, extreme temperatures, denial of pain medication for injuries, severe burning, deprivation of food and water, and threats of death and sexual assaults on family members….
The commission finds that the Bush Administration authorized the seizure, transfer and detention (“
rendition”) of persons to foreign countries where torture is known to be practiced….
The commission finds that the Bush Administration authorized the
indefinite detention of persons seized in foreign combat zones and in other countries far from any combat zone and denied them the protections of the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and the protections of the US Constitution.
On November 13 2001, the Bush Administration created a “trial system” for trying non-citizen detainees where the United States
does not provide these detainees due process protections that are well established in domestic and international law… where detainees are deprived of due process rights under the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments of the United States Constitution.
Persons have been or are currently detained in these detention centers without charge and are being held indefinitely…
In January 2002, the Bush Administration
declared that Geneva Convention protections will not be honored for the “war on terror” prisoners held at Guantanamo detention centers in Cuba. In August 2002, the administration attempted to redefine torture to escape liability…
Here are excerpts from
an article that discusses a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which discusses the abundant evidence available from human rights organizations:
If and when there’s the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA’s secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations… including…. such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey’s
http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dghost%2Bplane%2Bstephen%26btnG%3DSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPP1,M1">Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture.
While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial.
The New Yorker’s
Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons…. On July 20, the Bush administration
issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques-without disclosing anything about them.
If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.
We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.
As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is “a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on-at the White House, really – and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . .
The
Center for Constitutional Rights has drawn up several articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney, which they published in “
Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush”. Included are the following two articles of impeachment, which involve war crimes and are similar to the findings of the above noted International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration:
Article 2 – unlawfully taking our nation to war against Iraq.... George W. Bush has subverted the Constitution, its guarantee of a republican form of government, and the constitutional separation of powers by undermining the rightful authority of Congress to declare war, oversee foreign affairs, and make appropriations. He did so by justifying the war with false and misleading statements and deceived the people of the United States as well as Congress. He denied the electorate the right to make an informed choice and thereby undermined democracy. George W. Bush also committed fraud against the United States by lying to and intentionally misleading Congress about the reasons for the Iraq war….
Article 3 – unlawful treatment of prisoners of war, in violation of established law.... violating the constitutional and international rights of citizens and non-citizens by arbitrarily detaining them indefinitely inside and outside of the United States, without due process, without charges, and with limited – if any – access to counsel or courts….
allowing his administration to condone torture, failing to investigate and prosecute high-level officials responsible for torture, and officially refusing to accept the binding nature of a statutory ban on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment….
The United States Supreme CourtThe U.S. Supreme Court so much as branded George W. Bush a ‘war criminal’ for violating the Geneva Convention, in their
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, as
explained by Vyan. In that decision Justice Stevens, speaking for the majority, explained that the petitioner Hamdan was “entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Convention”, and that the “military commission convened to try him was established in violation of both the UCMJ and Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention”. Justice Kennedy further elaborated on the Geneva Convention that the USSC determined the Bush administration to have violated:
The provision is part of a treaty the United States has ratified and thus accepted as binding law… moreover, violations of Common Article 3 are considered “war crimes,” punishable as federal offenses…
In a similar vein, here is an excerpt from an interpretation of the same Supreme Court decision,
from Rosa Brooks in the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog:
As the Court just noted in Hamdan, one violation of Common Article 3 is "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
But Common Article 3 also says that the "following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."
As a matter of both international and US law, there is zero doubt that techniques such as waterboarding, sexual humiliation, placing people in dog collars, forcing them into painful positions for extended periods, mock executions, etc. violate Common Article 3.
Which again, sorry to belabor the point, but it seems not to be as obvious to some as it is to me – means that many of the techniques approved by the Bush administration and used against detainees constitute war crimes, and are prosecutable as such in US courts.
Other U.S. CongresspersonsAt least two U.S. Senators and two other U.S. Congresspersons, including two Democratic Presidential candidates, have made a good case for war crimes committed by the Bush administration:
Representative John ConyersCongressman Conyers describes the basis for war crime charges in his report, “
The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”. Following his detailed investigation, Conyers
summed up his evidence in a press release as follows:
The report finds there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people … The Report concludes that a number of these actions amount to prima facie evidence that federal criminal laws have been violated… The Report also concludes that these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct.
Senator Richard DurbinOn the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator Durbin read a detailed eye witness account of torture of U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, as provided to him by an FBI agent. He then
summed up the account as follows:
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in the gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings….
It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course. The president could declare the United States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism. He could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstances, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decision maker.
Such a change of course would dramatically improve our image and it would make us safer. I hope this administration will choose that course. If they do not, Congress must step in.
Senator Christopher DoddSenator Dodd, in his new book “
Letters from Nuremburg – My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice”, introduces the similarities between Nazi and Bush Administration war crimes with the following statement:
On the morning of December 13, 1945, my father presented to the (Nuremburg) court an argument that has an eerie connection to the present. He charged the Nazis, among many other heinous crimes, with “the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention.
Dodd then later explains how his father’s work at Nuremburg reminds him of the current state of our nation:
I began to wonder how he would react to what is happening in the world – and in the United States itself ... The rule of law that my father addressed in Nuremberg and the standards so eloquently expressed at the trial can seem lost in an array of abuses, some of them committed by our own country.
And then Dodd describes how the original purpose of the Nuremberg trials bore fruit for many decades but is now being undermined:
There’s a sense that the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism… If, for sixty years, a single word, Nuremberg, has best captured America’s moral authority and commitment to justice, unfortunately, another word now captures the loss of such authority and commitment: Guantanamo.
We may also trace the loss to a single speech of an American president, standing in the Rose Garden of the White House, trying to convince members of his own party that America should reinterpret the Geneva conventions that have defined human rights in this world for half a century. In a mockery of justice, we lock away terrorism suspects for years and give them no real day in court. We deny the lessons of Nuremberg, of universal rights to justice.
Representative Dennis KucinichCongressman Kucinich has written a
detailed explanation of evidence which all points to the following stark conclusion:
This war is about oil.
We must not be party to the Administration's blatant attempt to set the stage for multinational oil companies to take over Iraq's oil resources.
Needless to say, that is tantamount to accusing the Bush administration of war crimes, since access to oil is not a legal justification for war under international law.
ConclusionUnder U.S. law, the
penalty for war crimes is defined as follows:
Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall 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.
Well, it very well may be too late to charge Bush and Cheney with at least some of their many war crimes, as they have apparently already been pardoned for it by legislation signed by… President Bush. As
explained on Jack Cafferty on CNN:
Buried deep inside this legislation is a provision that will pardon President Bush and all the members of his Administration for any possible crime connected with the torture and mistreatment of detainees, dated all the way back to September 11, 2001.
At least President Nixon had President Ford to do his dirty work. President Bush is trying to pardon himself.
Ok, perhaps Bush and his cohorts in crime have blanket criminal immunity for some or all war crimes they may have committed in the past or may commit in the future. However, at the very least they should be removed from office for their war crimes.
The evidence for war crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney Administration is abundant and solid, and it is
currently available. If any additional investigation is required, it certainly couldn’t take very long for Congress to accomplish it.
Unfortunately, that will not happen in this country any time in the foreseeable future because war crimes is one of those
unmentionable subjects that portends political suicide for anyone dares to publicly talk about it.
Ok, then. There are
plenty of other impeachable offenses for Congress to choose from. Let us hope that they garner the courage to do so before George Bush and Dick Cheney engage our nation in further war crimes that make their past war crimes look mild by comparison.
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