Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Barry & Bully" of Barack consulting his inner spiritual guide Bully Boy Bush.
FAILURE TO PROSECUTE BUSH FOR WAR CRIMES
THREATENS PROSPECTS FOR WORLD PEACE
BY Sherwood Ross
President
George W. Bush did much to turn the world into the lawless battlefield
it is today, and as he has not yet been prosecuted for his crimes, other
terrorists will only continue down his path.
The
late Vincent Bugliosi, the famed Los Angeles county district attorney,
wrote, "Bush should be prosecuted, in an American courtroom, for first
degree murder arising out of his war in Iraq."
Bush
“beyond all reasonable doubt” is responsible for all the murders of
American troops killed in Iraq and could be prosecuted by any of 140
Federal and State legal authorities, Bugliosi wrote.
The
president is guilty of “the most serious crime ever committed in
American history…knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war
in Iraq under false pretenses,” Bugliosi said, killing 4,000 GIs,
seriously wounding 30,000 more, and killing 100,000 innocent Iraqis as a
consequence.
Bush is referred to above as a "terrorist" as the facts overwhelmingly support this epithet.
In
his book, "George W. Bush, War Criminal?"(Praeger) professor Michael
Haas writes prisoners of the Bush regime typically were held without
even knowing the charges against them, a right first established in the
Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 in Britain. (Haas is Professor Emeritus of
Political Science at the University of Hawaii and has authored and
edited 33 books on human rights.)
Haas counts
no fewer than 269 different kinds of war crimes for which Bush is
liable, of which the denial of habeas corpus is just one. These range
from torture of children(!) to denying prisoners' attorneys, to forcing
confessions under torture to sexual attacks to threatening prisoners'
families to water boarding.
Many innocents
were held in prisons kept secret from the Red Cross, another war crime.
The CIA alone operated at least 11 such prisons. Bush's forces also took
24,000 prisoners, most of them civilians, virtually all of them
innocent of any offense, and locked them away for years without lawyers
or bringing them to trial.
Referring to Bush's
many wrongs, Haas asserted, "they have been so devastating to those
affected that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because
civilization cannot survive their being repeated over and over again."
Since
Bush has left office, Haas noted, he is no longer immune from
prosecution. In fact, he can be tried in federal district courts.
While
a federal prosecution by the U.S. Attorney General in Washington, or
any of the 93 U.S. attorneys throughout the country “would be the
easiest procedure,” Bugliosi wrote, any of the 50 State
attorneys-general also “could bring a murder charge against Bush for any
soldiers from that state…who lost their lives fighting Bush’s war.”
Writing
in “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder”(Vanguard Press),
Bugliosi said Bush’s lies to the public constituted “overt acts” and
their broadcast nationally via the media are a basis for prosecution in
every state. Charges could include murder as well as conspiracy to
commit murder, the veteran prosecutor said.
“Bush
and his gang of criminals were constantly telling Americans that
Hussein constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country,
but they kept the truth from the American people that their CIA was
telling them the exact opposite, that Hussein and Iraq were not an
imminent threat to this country,” Bugliosi writes.
In
his speech of October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Bush said “The Iraqi
dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with
horrible poisons and diseases and gasses and atomic weapons…” even
though a CIA report dated October 1 gave Bush notice that “the CIA did
not consider Hussein an imminent threat to this nation,” Bugliosi
pointed out.
As Bush did not act in
self-defense, he did so with “a criminal state of mind,” with “criminal
intent,” Bugliosi asserted, thus, “every killing of an American soldier
that took place during Bush’s war was an ‘unlawful killing’ and murder.”
“In
my opinion,” Bugliosi continued, “there certainly is more than enough
evidence against Bush to justify bringing him to trial and letting an
American jury decide whether or not he is guilty of murder, and if so,
what the appropriate punishment should be.”
Another
prominent legal authority, Professor Francis Boyle of the University of
Illinois, Champaign, identified a number of presidential aides and
Pentagon officials as candidates for prosecution as war criminals. These
are:
Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joseph
Biden; Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and Leon
Panetta; Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary
Clinton; National Security Advisors Stephen Hadley, James Jones, and
Thomas Donilon; Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and
James Clapper and Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) Directors George
Tenet, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus.
In the
Pentagon, war criminals include the members of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and some Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for the U.S.
Central Command (CENTCOM), and more recently, AFRICOM. Besides Chairman
General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army, JCS members include Admiral James
Winnefeld Jr.; General Raymond Odierno, Chief of Staff of the Army;
General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps; Admiral Jonathan
Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations; and General Mark Welsh, Chief of
Staff of the Air Force.
Those who have headed
the Central Command since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan include Lt.
General Martin Dempsey; Admiral William Fallon; General John Abizaid;
General Tommy Franks; Lt. General John Allen; and General James Mattis.
"In
my book 'Tackling America’s Toughest Questions'(Clarity Press), I
argued and reached the exact same conclusion that Vince did: Bush and
his immediate subordinates can be prosecuted here in the United States
for murdering U.S. Armed Forces (personnel) whom they deployed to Iraq
knowingly to die in an illegal, unconstitutional, and criminal war,"
Boyle said in a statement to this reporter.
"I
had worked with some lawyers in Boston to get Rumsfeld so prosecuted
when he went there to give a speech. But they chickened out at the last
minute. I and other lawyers around the world will continue our efforts
to bring Bush et al. to Justice in American Courts, Foreign Courts, and
International Courts," Boyle added. He noted further:
"There
is no Statute of Limitations for committing murder or their other
international crimes, and there is Universality of Jurisdiction to
prosecute Bush et al. everywhere in the world for these offenses for the
rest of their lives."
Boyle recalled:
"It
took me about eight years to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic to Justice before the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia for his International Crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina
from the time I first went after him in the International Court of
Justice as the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993
and despite Richard Holbrooke’s promise of immunity/impunity to
Milosevic if he signed the Dayton Agreement in 1995. See my book 'The
Bosnian People Charge Genocide!'(Aletheia Press:1996). The Wheels of
Justice turn slowly against once powerful government officials. But they
do turn!” #
(Sherwood
Ross formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and The New York
Herald-Tribune, among other dailies, and for major wire services. He
holds awards for his reporting, running, and poetry. Reach him at sherwoodross@gmail.com)
sherwood ross
