Bush war crimes trial?

Historians will long ponder the legacy of President Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq and, more broadly, the war on terrorism.

The dean of one left-wing law school doesn't want to wait that long.

Lawrence Velvel, who has battled the American Bar Assn. over its accreditation practices, is calling for a conference at his unaccredited Massachusetts School of Law at Andover Sept. 13-14 to plan a war crimes trial against key administration officials. The news was broken by Wednesday by ABA Journal.

"We must insist on appropriate punishments including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war criminals in the 1940s," he said in a news release to be issued Monday, provided to the Times today.

Targeting President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Justice Department official John Yoo, prosecutors should examine the administration's record on war, torture, detention of innocents, electronic spying and "use of executive branch lawyers to write professionally incompetent secret memoranda giving clearance to awful policies," he said.

The conference is not about the charges, he said. "Library stacks and Internet servers already are fairly bulging with books, journal articles, Internet essays, legal complaints, newspaper articles and other materials showing that horrendous crimes have been committed," he writes in the news release. Instead, attendees will discuss "organizational structures ... to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and to the ends of the earth in order to bring them before the bar of justice ... so that in future there may be no more Viet Nams, no more Iraqs."

Conference charge is $125 for the two-day session, which includes meals.

-- Johanna Neuman and David G. Savage

Photo Credit: James Gordon/Flickr

Comments

[ringo]

Never elected terrorist bush MUST be brought to Justice ! PRISON is too good, but if violent amerika is to change to the good, then mass murderer bush must not be executed !

[smchris]

Saddens me to see the stock photo of a bombed out car.

Visual media has visual cliches same as the written word can be cliched. That's why I've switched my network news to streaming BFM Paris. When there is a bombing in Baghdad U.S. news always shows the cliche of a bombed out car. Paris always shows the cliche of bleeding people being wheeling into the emergency room. That one consideration makes Europeans more sane than Americans. War is about crippled and broken people, not crippled and broken cars. To be persuaded otherwise by a visual cliche is to become a bit of a monster.

Institutionalized murder on an industrial scale with the use of a carefully assembled series of lies. Lies disguised as mistakes. But now, solid, verifiable evidence is out about pre-war intelligence. On October 1, 2002, six days before George Bush put the US on the road to the invasion of Iraq, the National Intelligence Estimate, a highly classified assessment by the top 16 US intelligence agencies, clearly stated that the claims of WMD and a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda were patently false. Yet George Bush and minions knowingly and carefully subverted the facts on 935 documented occasions to the American public.
The chief obstacle in grasping the the true nature of the 911 attacks for most people that continue to cling to the 'official story/excuse/apology' is known as cognitive dissonance. Believing what you should, based on loyalties, patriotism and emotion - lending government officials a sorely undeserved legitimacy - versus a critical, sensible examination of the unsanitized evidence in it's entirety.
Oddly collapsing buildings, secreted evidence, suppressed testimony and a sham/travesty called the 911 Commission are only part of the reality. If one fails to fully comprehend the nature of government and how key, top level officials have consistently used their positons in pursuit of hidden, often dark agendas, the 911 attacks will never make sense.

[Verite]

"War on terrorism" (sic) Bushism.
War -is- terror.
Read Pilger.

[Tax Resister]

In 2008, all taxpayers are complicit in this immoral war. Period. Luckily, more and more are protesting WITH THEIR WALLETS.

[Jack]

Mark your calendars: IRS auction at Tax Resister's house soon!

[Fil Munas]

Pinochet, Saddam, Charles Taylor, Rwanda's past leaders and those of the former Yugoslavia among others, have all been publicly tried as war criminals in recent years. Why are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cohorts exempt? Mark my words, this will happen in the forseeable future.

[Arthur]

As the US becomes less important due to the economic crisis, countries will become bolder in their attacks, both politically and physically. The US is wounded, it has run out of money. US military is not going to fight for free. Many soldiers are unpatriotic and would sooner run from combat than die serving their nation at the best of times, more so if they're doing it for free.

I expect another attack on US soil soon, and then litigation to begin over the illegal war in Iraq, and the illegal detaining and torture of civilians in the name of the "war on terrorism"..

[Jumbuk]

People who are eager to see a President tried -- and even hanged! -- for "war crimes" had better consider very carefully whether or not they want to make the next Chief Executive unwilling to relinquish power for fear that his political enemies will try to have him "legally" killed.