http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/08/usa.warcrimes
Should Bush be tried for war crimes?
The chorus demanding George Bush be prosecuted for torture and other
constitutional abuses is getting louder
Dan Kennedy
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 8, 2008
I had a good laugh when my friend Seth Gitell re****ted in the New York
Sun on a campaign by the dean of the obscure Massachusetts School of
Law to put George Bush and other top White House officials on trial
for war crimes.
Lawrence Velvel, Gitell notes, wrote last month that his model was the
Nuremberg trials held after second world war. Velvel went so far as to
say that "we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if
guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top Germans and Japanese."
Oh, my.
Though I found Velvel's apparently earnest quest as ridiculous as
Gitell did, the idea of holding our leaders accountable for the crimes
and constitutional violations of the past seven and a half years isn't
ridiculous in the least.
We are less than a decade removed from impeaching a president and
nearly relieving him of office because of a lie in a civil deposition
about blowjobs. Yet when congressman Dennis Kucinich recently
attempted to impeach Bush over torture, extraordinary rendition and
other grotesque constitutional abuses, Kucinich's embarrassed fellow
Democrats couldn't kill the measure quickly enough.
Why? Top Democrats are so complicit in what has happened since 9/11
that my guess is they dare not travel down that road. From voting in
favor of the war in Iraq to holding the telecommunications companies
guiltless for their role in spying on Americans (Barack Obama
infuriated much of his progressive base by voting for immunity), the
Democrats have often acted more as enablers than as a true opposition
party. From their point of view, no doubt it's best to move on.
And yet we can't move on. Everywhere you turn, there are reminders of
the demons that have been unleashed in the name of fighting terrorism.
We are less democratic and less free than we were before Bush and Dick
Cheney entered office following an election that they demonstrably did
not win. If we don't come to terms with what happened, there's little
chance of reversing our slide into authoritarianism.
We shouldn't be too optimistic. Even when the truth is proclaimed, few
are willing to listen. Not long ago the McClatchy newspapers published
a five-part series on what went wrong with American detention
policies, mainly at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan.
The massively do***ented stories revealed horrifying tales of torture
and abuse; of innocent Afghans imprisoned for years because they ran
afoul of tribal rivalries the Americans didn't understand; of ordinary
people radicalised and transformed into violent jihadists inside
US-run prisons. Yet because McClatchy is not part of the media elite,
its journalism has barely been mentioned by the New York Times, the
Wa****ngton Post and the television networks.
We find ourselves, nevertheless, at a certain transformational moment
where things that had long gone unsaid are now being spoken aloud.
Take, for instance, the ideologically promiscuous war sup****ter
Christopher Hitchens, the British expat who recently underwent
waterboarding - voluntarily - and pronounced it to be torture.
Hitchens can't help himself from inveighing against any "lame and
diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who
defend civilisation and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it
out". Still, he concludes by saying he wishes Americans didn't
practice torture.
Or consider Vincent Bugliosi's new book, The Prosecution of George W
Bush for Murder, which has zoomed up the bestseller lists despite
having received virtually no attention from the mainstream media.
Bugliosi, a celebrity lawyer-author with a decent reputation, argues
that because Bush misled the country into the war in Iraq, he should
be held criminally responsible for the deaths of American soldiers.
Finally, consider that most mild-mannered of liberal pundits, the
Times' Nicholas Kristof, who on Sunday actually called for the
formation of a truth commission in the manner of post-apartheid South
Africa "to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing".
The determinedly bipartisan Kristof, who did read the McClatchy
series, writes that both Obama and John McCain should commit
themselves to forming such a commission. For that to make sense,
though, you'd have to ignore such inconvenient facts as McCain's own
ambiguous stands on torture and his demagoguery over the supreme
court's recent decision upholding the habeas corpus rights of those
being held at Guantánamo.
Velvel is organising a weekend-long war crimes conference to be held
in mid-September at his campus at the Massachusetts School of Law. The
school is located in the beautiful New England town of Andover, home
of Phillips Andover Academy, of which Bush is an alumnus. Shuttle
buses will be running from the nearby Wyndham Hotel for those
attending from elsewhere. It promises to be a fun-filled two days of
righteous anger, leading to nothing.
But if Bush shouldn't be hanged by the neck until dead, as the ancient
pronouncement would have it, he - and we - nevertheless must be called
to account for what we have allowed to happen to our country. If we
don't, then we are all responsible - if not for what happened, then
for what is yet to come.
--
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government
talking
about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.
Nothing has
changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
we're
talking about getting a court order before we do so"
-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004
Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
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Putsch: leading America to asymetric warfare since 2001
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