War Crimes

Friends,
I do not see why Bush should not be brought to trial for war crimes. This is the guy who "skipped" war remember. This is disgraceful and embarrassing to the United States.

Love and Peace,
Rev O

Bush's Shameful Legacy
Damage That Must Be Undone, Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

The White House's Perverse Argument

White House Watch When you get right down to it, the White House's new argument in favor of waterboarding is that the ends justify the means. - Dan Frookin, Washington Post

Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin blogs: "Actually, it violates the law whether or not you call it illegal. Generally speaking, war criminals don't usually admit that they have engaged in war crimes. They usually say they were justified in acting as they did.
"But as we've argued on this blog many times, the statutes (and the Geneva Conventions) do not support the White House's strained interpretation. Waterboarding is torture. And torture is a war crime. If the White House has admitted to waterboarding, it has admitted to both."

The Boston Globe editorial board writes: "In 1901 in the United States, the military court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years hard labor a US major who had waterboarded a prisoner in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. The United States officially outlawed the practice after World War II, when the Germans and Japanese had both used it against Allied troops. The Allies executed eight Japanese officers for waterboarding British prisoners and sentenced another to 15 years hard labor for waterboarding a US civilian, among other crimes.

Pariah Nation
Bradley S. Klapper writes for the Associated Press: "The United Nations' torture investigator criticized the White House Wednesday for defending the use of waterboarding and urged the U.S. to give up its defense of 'unjustifiable' interrogation methods.
"The comments from Manfred Nowak, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture, came a day after the Bush administration acknowledged publicly for the first time that waterboarding was used by U.S. government questioners on three terror suspects. . . .
"'This is absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law,' Nowak said. 'Time has come that the government will actually acknowledge that they did something wrong and not continue trying to justify what is unjustifiable.'"

"In a recent GOP presidential debate, McCain said it was inconceivable that 'anyone could believe that [waterboarding is] not torture. It's in violation of the Geneva Convention. It's in violation of existing law.'"