anthony @ 13:03 BST
Sherwood Ross | http://www.opednews.com | July 17, 2008 at 10:35:33
President Bush “beyond all reasonable doubt” is responsible for all the murders of American troops killed in Iraq and could be prosecuted by any of 140 Federal and State legal authorities, famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says.
Bugliosi said the president is guilty of “the most serious crime ever committed in American history…knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false pretenses,” killing 4,000 GIs, seriously wounding 30,000 more, and killing 100,000 Iraqis in the process.
While a federal prosecution by the U.S. Attorney General in Washington, or any of the 93 U.S. attorneys throughout the country “would be the easiest procedure,” Bugliosi says, any of the 50 State attorneys-general also “could bring a murder charge against Bush for any soldiers from that state…who lost their lives fighting Bush’s war.”
Writing in “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder” (Vanguard Press), Bugliosi says Bush’s lies to the public constituted “overt acts” and their broadcast nationally via the media are a basis for prosecution in every state. Charges could include murder as well as conspiracy to commit murder, the veteran prosecutor said.
Related stories:
The US will not prosecute Bush
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will never be tried for war crimes in the US because the country lacks a consensus on torture
John McQuaid | London Guardian | Sunday, July 20, 2008
The evidence is mounting that top US officials – including President George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld – committed war crimes by authorising the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” – ie torture. The war crimes drumbeat has accelerated with the recent release of two books: New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side and Philippe Sands’s Torture Team, which document the executive decision-making that led the US to set aside not just the Geneva Conventions, but a tradition of respect for the human rights of enemy prisoners that dates to back to George Washington’s prohibition on harming POWs.
Current and former Bush officials are now scrambling to avoid the opprobrium – not to mention the risk of prison time – that would result from criminal prosecution. This week, Capitol Hill was treated to the spectacle of Sands and Douglas Feith, a former Rumsfeld protege who was an architect of the Iraq invasion, testifying side by side before a House subcommittee. In an earlier interview with Sands, Feith claimed to be “really a player” in the engineering of legal workarounds to the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo. Before the committee, Feith declared his unerring support for Geneva.
Torture Team
On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation – techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition.
Guantánamo children
In a submission to the UN in May, the Pentagon said that no more than eight youths, aged 13 to 17 at time of capture, were held at Guantánamo Bay. But a prisoner list released in 2006 in response to US freedom of information act litigation names 21 inmates under 18 when they arrived. A separate defence department admission brings the total to 22. Testimonies collected by the charity Reprieve, which represents 30 inmates at Guantánamo, indicate the actual number is much higher.
