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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
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to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
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Supreme
Court: Bush Administration Has Committed War Crimes
By DAVE LINDORFF
Largely missed in all the coverage of
the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld
case was the establishment by the court majority that all
Bush administration claims to the contrary, the Geneva Convention
rules regarding captured prisoners apply to the captives taken
not only in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the so-called
War on Terror.
What has been largely missed
is the clear point that the Supreme Court has now declared that
for the past five years, Bush and his gang of war-mongers, including
Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, former Attorney General Donald Rumsfeld and current Attorney
General and former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales,
and many others in the administration, have been guilty of violating
the Third Convention on treatment of prisoners of war. They
are also, therefore, in violation of federal law, which back
in 1996 adopted that convention as part of the U.S. criminal
code.
In other words, the whole top
administration, from Commander in Chief George W. Bush on down,
is guilty of war crimes. The punishment for committing war crimes
ranges from a lengthy jail sentence to, in the event the crimes
in question caused the death of any prisoners being held, to
death. And there have been many deaths among those who have been
held and tortured on orders of the administration-most recently
the three suicides
at Guantanamo, which included on man who had only three days
earlier been targeted for release (but who never learned this
because government's secrecy and tight security prevented his
attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights from getting
the news to him).
Interestingly, Gonzales actually
warned Bush about this possibility. In a memo to the president,
written on January 25, 2002 when he was still White House counsel,
Gonzales warned prophetically that the U.S. adoption of the Third
Geneva Convention as a part of the U.S. criminal code in 1996
made violation of the convention a "war crime," which
he said was defined as "any grave breach" of the Third
Convention such as "outrages against personal dignity."
He noted that this law applied whether or not a detained person
qualified for POW status, and added that punishment for violation
of the law "include the death penalty." But then he
went on to say Bush could "substantially reduce" his
risk of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act
by making a presidential determination that the Third Geneva
Convention "does not apply to al Qaeda and the Taliban."
Clearly, Gonzales here was
behaving like a mob lawyer, not like an honest counselor. He
was telling the president not what was right and legal, but how
to dodge prosecution.
In Bush's case, this crime
calls for his impeachment, and for his subsequent prosecution
as a war criminal. In the case of his subordinates and abettors,
it calls for criminal indictments.
Naturally, we cannot expect
to see indictments issue from the Attorney General's Office,
particularly given Gonzales' own complicity and personal culpability
on the war crimes charge. Conceivably, I suppose, some career
prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been given wide authority
in his special counsel role, could bring charges, though this
seems highly unlikely.
Charges could also be brought
by another country whose laws permit such extraterritoriality:
Germany or Spain for example.
Meanwhile, we who value America's
once elevated standing in the world as a supporter and author
of the Geneva Conventions, should begin a campaign to press the
Congress to consider a bill of impeachment against Bush for war
crimes.
There are, as Barbara Olshansky
and I explain in our new book The
Case for Impeachment (which includes a copy of the above
Gonzales memo in an appendix), many important reasons to impeach
the president, but surely the deliberate policy of involving
the military in the commission of war crimes-torture, kidnapping,
denial of access to some process of challenge the justice of
their detention-is among the worst of all of those crimes against
the Constitution.
The blood is on Bush's hands,
and the hands of his henchmen, but unless we the people act,
and unless the Congress acts, to call them to account, it will
ultimately be on all of our hands.
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