- it also pretty clearly stated that the power to decide when military intervention was justified rested with the Security Council, not with a random member-state with a trigger-happy administration and too many voters watching Fox News.
What do you mean by “random”?
Yes, I’ve been laughing nonstop since 2006.
Seriously, The Gawker? I have just as much reason to believe the comment on that page as I do the gossip that it is.
From CBS News:
(link)
No real credibility that “calls for a legal case against him” are why he didn’t go. He didn’t go because the event he was invited to informed him they couldn’t host him any longer, thus eliminating the reason for the trip.
Request for clarification, please. Are there places that Kissinger avoids out of fear? Is it fear of assassination or fear of incarceration? From several posts in this thread, it seems to be a given that his fear is genuine. I honestly have never heard this or if I have, the winds of time have blown it away. Can someone give me examples of the places he avoids and why? I’d really like to know and not because I’m doubting anyone.
Here’s the thing. I’d like war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Yoo, etc. to be subject to arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity of which there is ample evidence for starting wars under false pretenses and torturing people. But it isn’t going to happen, especially to Bush. The UK came within a hair’s breath of extraditing Pinochet (they did arrest him), but he comes from a third rate power at best. Nobody is going to be doing that to a former US head of state. It would make foreign travel impossible for leaders and former leaders and their lackeys. It just isn’t going to happen because everyone realizes that it would create a judicial freak show that would never end. Only losers like the Nazis and Milosevic are going to be put on trial.
Mace, learn to use the google:
Here’s The Hill’s report–like them any better than gawker, ? (If you believe that the arrest threats were irrelevant, you are a fool.) Bottom line, Bush stays home…
If Bush really believes in personal responsibility, he and his lawyers should go to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and tell them to “bring it on”. Bush believes he is innocent of all possible charges against him. Let him prove it in a court of law.
I am not suggesting that anyone in the US government should force him to do this. Although that would be simple justice for the people GWB has harmed, US government action against former US Presidents is considered a poor precedent. IMO the precedents do not account for how terrible a presidency could get.
I posted this idea late in [post=12788046]2010[/post]. Along with a more constructive idea I posted in [post=9551714]2008[/post]:
Since Dubya cannot leave the US, he is free to follow this advice.
Considering the Swiss ministry of justice has already come out saying they could not charge Bush, and the only people who are talking about arrest are Amnesty International and another organization actively trying to get a case started, I don’t think Bush cared about the arrest threats. Amnesty International doesn’t get to try people in criminal courts, when you have the head of the Swiss justice system saying no case would happen, that means a lot more than some NGO demanding a trial.
From the article I have already linked:
He can certainly leave the US, and has, since leaving office. He has traveled to China, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Brazil and apparently a few different Middle Eastern countries since leaving office.
Also, the idea that one should ask for a prosecution to be started against them to “prove” their innocence, shows just how fucked up the logic of people calling for a trial can get. Trials are for the state to prove guilt, not for someone who isn’t even accused of a crime in a court to advocate that 1) charges be filed and 2) they be given a chance to “prove their innocence.” The default is guilt must be proven, innocence does not have to be and should not have to be.
Also, Presidents make decisions that affect life and death, people die. These are not criminal acts but valid exercise of executive authority.
“Declaring war on false pretenses” is not a crime. Perjury before Congress is, and if you think Bush can be convicted of that, then start writing the Department of Justice and ask them to look into it for you (I hope you have a lot of pen and stationery.)
It is not a war crime. It is a Crime Against Peace. According to Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, ‘To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’
And who would charge Bush with such a thing? The International Criminal Court did not specify what a “Crime of Aggression” was when it was formed in 2002. After a few years I believe they got it sorted out, but the ICC cannot try anyone for a Crime of Aggression until 2017, and that is only going forward, it does not work retroactively.
Secondly, the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC. The ICC’s own charter says that it does not possess universal jurisdiction, and to try a person from a non-member state there are only two options:
- Cooperation from the non-member state
- The U.N. Security Council can make a motion to put someone from a non-member state before the ICC for trial (this happened in a case involving Sudan.) However, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council the United States can block any such move it wishes, and would almost certainly do so if the SC moved to do this to Bush.
Additionally the ICC is only supposed to go after cases where it finds the member country itself did not investigate the matter satisfactorily. That would be a whole legal case in and of itself, since Obama’s Department of Justice would argue it had done an investigation.
Finally, Robert Jackson is long dead. Even if he were still alive (and the world’s oldest person) his authority as a Supreme Court justice ended when he left the court. His authority as a justice at the Nuremberg trials ended when those trials ended, his words had no lasting legal power.
Firstly, it is not my responsibility to “use google” to disprove your nutty assertions. You must first establish that they are true.
Secondly, you need to find a non-blog, non-partisan source. Here, let me help you with an article from The New York Times:
So, the person asking for the Swiss to arrest him states that they Swiss government told her they wouldn’t.
I’ll note from your own blog cite:
ETA: I forgot to quote the best part of your cite. I guess you didn’t read past the sensational headline, but the very first sentence of the article says:
It makes good tabloid news to link that with calls for his arrest, but the straight news is the visit was canceled because the expected protests. Bush is not under any threat of arrest if he travels to Europe.
So, yeah, I’m still laughing. At you.
Exactly.
But it isn’t going to happen to Bush because the US is simply too powerful. There is ample evidence that Bush and Company did exactly what Goering and Company did that got them sentenced to death at Nuremburg. They started a war of aggression based on a bunch of lies. The difference is that at the end of WWII Goering and Company were utterly defeated, captured and at at our mercy. Incidentally, I think the result was a just one. The same thing happened with Saddam Hussein. He was an evil, repressive ruler. But he probably killed a lot less Iraqis in 30 years than the US did in 5. Abu Ghraib and other enhanced interrogation methods in Iraq had nothing to do with WMD or 9/11, Iraq having been involved in neither. It was just abuse of power and crimes against humanity.
You’re wrong about the number of Iraqi deaths, but that doesn’t really matter. However, don’t you think we should proceed chronologically and start with Bill Clinton for Operation Noble Anvil? It differs in degree, but not in kind.
I think any government on Earth is going to have some serious ‘shit their pants’ moments just thinking about the possibility of arresting a former US President. All this pointless posturing, saying that the US couldn’t do anything about it, is just as silly as the very idea that it would be done in the first place.
:rolleyes: As if they’d ever look into it under any circumstances.
The Bush Administration did lie repeatedly to Congress. They made up stories about mobile WMD labs, about fleets of drones, about all sorts of things they knew to be untrue. But they are Republicans, and so will never be called on it. They’ve got Obama covering for them.
Bush could have been having Iraqi women hauled into the Oval Office and raping them in front of the Secret Service and he wouldn’t be punished.