Bush Fears War Crimes Prosecution, Impeachment

From ZNet:

With great fanfare, George W. Bush announced to a group of carefully selected 9/11 families yesterday that he had finally decided to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other alleged terrorists to Guantánamo Bay, where they will be tried in military commissions. After nearly 5 years of interrogating these men, why did Bush choose this moment to bring them to "justice"?

And

The President is undoubtedly familiar with the doctrine of command responsibility, where commanders, all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief, can be held liable for war crimes their inferiors commit if the commander knew or should have known they might be committed and did nothing to stop or prevent them.

Bush defensively denied that the United States engages in torture and foreswore authorizing it. But it has been well-documented that policies set at the highest levels of our government have resulted in the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

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Oh yeah. The President is definitely a war criminal, and that notion ought to be uncontroversial to pretty much anybody who's actually read even a smattering about what a war crime is.

For instance, there's this bit from the Wikipedia article on war crimes:

Under the Nuremberg Principles, the supreme international crime is that of commencing a war of aggression, because it is the crime from which all war crimes follow. The definition of such a crime is planning, preparing, initiating, or waging a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances. Also, participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any such act constitutes such a crime.

Click here for more.

I suppose it all depends on whether you think the Bush administration simply made the grandest fuck-up of all time in their belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, or if the whole WMD thing was a big lie. Personally, I think it was a lie, and there appears to be, at this point, a mountain of evidence that strongly suggests that's the case. But even if you set that aside, it is undeniable that Bush invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council, which is definitely a violation of treaty obligations--come to think of it, Clinton did the same thing with Yugoslavia, Bush I with Panama, Reagan with Grenada, and JFK, LBJ, and Nixon with Vietnam. Really, when you get down to it, war crimes are a very annoying habit of US Presidents.

But really, I don't think that's the biggest problem, the fact that he's actually guilty, with holding Bush accountable for his horrible crimes: in America, war crimes are something other people do, something Germans or Russians or Rwandans do. But not us. We're the good guys. I fear that most Americans simply cannot accept that their President is up there with Hitler and Stalin in terms of guilt--remember how many Republicans were freaking out a few months back about Democrats' use of the word "Nazi" to describe the administration's behavior? How easily they were shot down by squirrelly "arguments" about specifics?

Sad, but true. However, if this country is ever going to have any sense of moral credibility, Bush not only has to be thrown out of office, but also put behind bars. For life. Anything less is making ourselves accessories to his crimes.

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