Wishful Thinking: Prosecuting Bush ...
... is way too little, and way too late - thanks largely to a shameful lack of courage, or care, to do so in the U.S., coupled to an equally large state of overall indifference on the matter.
Especially because prosecuting Bush would mean admitting that the U.S. has been acting criminally - a demonstrated fact.
Which most Americans would never accept - if only because of their own complicit (or silent) support of the Bush-Cheney policies over the last seven years.
And the consequences will be felt throughout decades to come.
To whit:
Especially because prosecuting Bush would mean admitting that the U.S. has been acting criminally - a demonstrated fact.
Which most Americans would never accept - if only because of their own complicit (or silent) support of the Bush-Cheney policies over the last seven years.
And the consequences will be felt throughout decades to come.
To whit:
Prosecuting Bush
By Carl Boggs
The arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in July 2008 for war crimes allegedly committed in the 1990s took the Western (especially United States) media by storm, a case that was upheld as a watershed moment in the struggle for global justice. Demonized by the Western media as an “architect of genocide” in the former Yugoslavia, Karadzic was quickly extradited from Serbia to the Hague to be prosecuted before the NATO-funded International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a court that had already put on trial 66 Serbs for assorted war crimes. Despite a paucity of evidence showing that Karadzic was actually involved in anything resembling genocide, the media and political elites were quick to celebrate his arrest as a triumph of international legality. Whatever Karadzic’s ultimate fate before this politically-charged tribunal, the truly odd feature of this drama is that a relatively minor figure like Karadzic could be the target of so much moralizing scorn –likened by some to another Hitler – while leaders of the most powerful war machine in history, planners of an illegal, catastrophic war and occupation in Iraq lasting almost six years, are treated with the dignity and respect of statespersons instead of being held accountable for criminal behavior dwarfing anything that took place in Yugoslavia. Within American political and media culture, of course, it has long been an article of common belief that war crimes must be the work of evil others, never Americans whose taken-for-granted noble intentions serve to immunize them legal accountability.
Might it be possible that President George Bush and his co-conspirators in military aggression will some day be held to the same international standards as the designated enemies – to the very norms that U.S. leaders themselves so righteously champion when it comes to Serbs and others? Could Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and the entire gang of neocon ideologues responsible for bringing the Iraq debacle to the world ever be judged according to the principles of Nuremberg, the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter, and other canons of international law? Within prevailing American discourse, the very idea that U.S. leaders might be prosecuted for war crimes is, more than ever, beyond the scope of tolerable debate.
A recent dissenting opinion has been cast by Vincent Bugliosi, whose book Prosecuting George W. Bush for Murder lays out a compelling, relentless argument that the president must be brought to justice for taking the U.S. to war based on a series of flagrant lies that resulted in the death of several thousand American soldiers and at least a hundred thousand innocent Iraqi civilians. A criminal prosecutor best known for his success in the Charles Manson case, Bugliosi insists he will not rest until the despicable Bush is prosecuted and convicted of first-degree murder – a charge, built exclusively around U.S. deaths, he believes will be easy to prove before any fair-minded American jury. The goal is to put the president behind bars, a well-deserved lifetime purgatory.
There is no need here to recapitulate the litany of horrors the Bush administration has unleashed in Iraq; it is enough to suggest a reading of Bugliosi’s powerful moral, legal, and political indictment of Bush that spans several chapters. Bush emerges from this book as the most dishonorable of criminals among U.S. presidents -- a shallow, mendacious, ruthless human being capable of unleashing barbaric actions as a matter of routine government policy, always with a smile. Bugliosi goes further: Bush stands as the main protagonist of the worst crimes ever committed in American history – not just the deaths of Americans and Iraqis but the purposeful destruction of an entire country that never posed a threat to the U.S. Fully aware of abundant military intelligence to the contrary, a cynical and power-mad Bush repeatedly told the American pubic of a “gathering threat”, of a vulnerable U.S. facing an imminent “day of horror” as Iraq gathered its arsenal of frighteningly lethal weapons, ready to unleash its “mushroom cloud” of annihilation at any moment. Bugliosi is unsparing in his criticism. The idea that “these young men [sic] from relatively poor families are fighting a war and dying for multimillionaires like Bush and . . . Cheney, and that companies have made billions . . . of dollars off their blood in contracts, is enough to make any decent human being sick to the stomach.” For Bugliosi, the sickness is compounded by the fact that the war and occupation have only harmed the interests of the American people while giving rise to a new generation of insurgents and terrorists fiercely hostile to those same interests. Several years of nightmarish violence, Bugliosi stresses, have yet to dent the hardening surface of Republican callousness.
Bugliosi writes that continuous death and destruction have done little to disturb Bush’s own calm, relaxed, even cheerful demeanor. In fact rising to the level of a “war president” has apparently given the commander-in-chief a special raison d’etre. He absolutely knows that the carnage is worth the prize. Through years of war and occupation, as the dead bodies pile up, Bush remains the same fun-loving, backslapping guy as during his fraternity days, incapable of feeling sorrow and pain for what he had done -- yet another sign of psychopathic disregard for life and moral arrogance bred of wealth and power. In Bugliosi’s words, “ . . . this small man of privilege has had a smile on his face through it all”, his behavior going “so far beyond acceptable human conduct that no moral telescope can discern its shape, form, and nature.” (pp. 71, 80) Only a “human monster” like Bush could carry on with his splendid lifestyle as thousands of innocent victims suffered the unspeakable terror of an immoral, illegal war planned and waged without regard for its predictable horrors.
The sad truth is that, despite a long record of criminal behavior, the political leaders and operatives of Empire has been forced to confront relatively little political dissent, much less moral outrage, today as in the past. The vast majority of Americans remain either fearful of voicing opposition or simply indifferent to the havoc their country routinely brings to other countries. Bugliosi readily acknowledges that most people cannot accept the idea that a U.S. president might be guilty of war crimes or be prosecuted for murder. After all, the ideological hold of bipartisan consensus means both Democrats and Republicans will go along with the criminality, in this case passing resolutions to demonize Iraq and allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain the occupation. It has been a simple matter for Bush and his accomplices to escape scrutiny and investigation, whether by the media or the political system, whatever the evidence of culpability. And no legal bodies have rushed to indict Bush for crimes carried out in Iraq even as comparatively minor culprits like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic – along with the aforementioned Karadzic – have been energetically prosecuted by U.S.-controlled tribunals. The question is: can the Iraqis, at least, hope for justice in the case of George W. Bush, or must superpower exceptionalism once again carry the day?
(Keep reading ...)
By Carl Boggs
The arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in July 2008 for war crimes allegedly committed in the 1990s took the Western (especially United States) media by storm, a case that was upheld as a watershed moment in the struggle for global justice. Demonized by the Western media as an “architect of genocide” in the former Yugoslavia, Karadzic was quickly extradited from Serbia to the Hague to be prosecuted before the NATO-funded International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a court that had already put on trial 66 Serbs for assorted war crimes. Despite a paucity of evidence showing that Karadzic was actually involved in anything resembling genocide, the media and political elites were quick to celebrate his arrest as a triumph of international legality. Whatever Karadzic’s ultimate fate before this politically-charged tribunal, the truly odd feature of this drama is that a relatively minor figure like Karadzic could be the target of so much moralizing scorn –likened by some to another Hitler – while leaders of the most powerful war machine in history, planners of an illegal, catastrophic war and occupation in Iraq lasting almost six years, are treated with the dignity and respect of statespersons instead of being held accountable for criminal behavior dwarfing anything that took place in Yugoslavia. Within American political and media culture, of course, it has long been an article of common belief that war crimes must be the work of evil others, never Americans whose taken-for-granted noble intentions serve to immunize them legal accountability.
Might it be possible that President George Bush and his co-conspirators in military aggression will some day be held to the same international standards as the designated enemies – to the very norms that U.S. leaders themselves so righteously champion when it comes to Serbs and others? Could Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and the entire gang of neocon ideologues responsible for bringing the Iraq debacle to the world ever be judged according to the principles of Nuremberg, the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter, and other canons of international law? Within prevailing American discourse, the very idea that U.S. leaders might be prosecuted for war crimes is, more than ever, beyond the scope of tolerable debate.
A recent dissenting opinion has been cast by Vincent Bugliosi, whose book Prosecuting George W. Bush for Murder lays out a compelling, relentless argument that the president must be brought to justice for taking the U.S. to war based on a series of flagrant lies that resulted in the death of several thousand American soldiers and at least a hundred thousand innocent Iraqi civilians. A criminal prosecutor best known for his success in the Charles Manson case, Bugliosi insists he will not rest until the despicable Bush is prosecuted and convicted of first-degree murder – a charge, built exclusively around U.S. deaths, he believes will be easy to prove before any fair-minded American jury. The goal is to put the president behind bars, a well-deserved lifetime purgatory.
There is no need here to recapitulate the litany of horrors the Bush administration has unleashed in Iraq; it is enough to suggest a reading of Bugliosi’s powerful moral, legal, and political indictment of Bush that spans several chapters. Bush emerges from this book as the most dishonorable of criminals among U.S. presidents -- a shallow, mendacious, ruthless human being capable of unleashing barbaric actions as a matter of routine government policy, always with a smile. Bugliosi goes further: Bush stands as the main protagonist of the worst crimes ever committed in American history – not just the deaths of Americans and Iraqis but the purposeful destruction of an entire country that never posed a threat to the U.S. Fully aware of abundant military intelligence to the contrary, a cynical and power-mad Bush repeatedly told the American pubic of a “gathering threat”, of a vulnerable U.S. facing an imminent “day of horror” as Iraq gathered its arsenal of frighteningly lethal weapons, ready to unleash its “mushroom cloud” of annihilation at any moment. Bugliosi is unsparing in his criticism. The idea that “these young men [sic] from relatively poor families are fighting a war and dying for multimillionaires like Bush and . . . Cheney, and that companies have made billions . . . of dollars off their blood in contracts, is enough to make any decent human being sick to the stomach.” For Bugliosi, the sickness is compounded by the fact that the war and occupation have only harmed the interests of the American people while giving rise to a new generation of insurgents and terrorists fiercely hostile to those same interests. Several years of nightmarish violence, Bugliosi stresses, have yet to dent the hardening surface of Republican callousness.
Bugliosi writes that continuous death and destruction have done little to disturb Bush’s own calm, relaxed, even cheerful demeanor. In fact rising to the level of a “war president” has apparently given the commander-in-chief a special raison d’etre. He absolutely knows that the carnage is worth the prize. Through years of war and occupation, as the dead bodies pile up, Bush remains the same fun-loving, backslapping guy as during his fraternity days, incapable of feeling sorrow and pain for what he had done -- yet another sign of psychopathic disregard for life and moral arrogance bred of wealth and power. In Bugliosi’s words, “ . . . this small man of privilege has had a smile on his face through it all”, his behavior going “so far beyond acceptable human conduct that no moral telescope can discern its shape, form, and nature.” (pp. 71, 80) Only a “human monster” like Bush could carry on with his splendid lifestyle as thousands of innocent victims suffered the unspeakable terror of an immoral, illegal war planned and waged without regard for its predictable horrors.
The sad truth is that, despite a long record of criminal behavior, the political leaders and operatives of Empire has been forced to confront relatively little political dissent, much less moral outrage, today as in the past. The vast majority of Americans remain either fearful of voicing opposition or simply indifferent to the havoc their country routinely brings to other countries. Bugliosi readily acknowledges that most people cannot accept the idea that a U.S. president might be guilty of war crimes or be prosecuted for murder. After all, the ideological hold of bipartisan consensus means both Democrats and Republicans will go along with the criminality, in this case passing resolutions to demonize Iraq and allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain the occupation. It has been a simple matter for Bush and his accomplices to escape scrutiny and investigation, whether by the media or the political system, whatever the evidence of culpability. And no legal bodies have rushed to indict Bush for crimes carried out in Iraq even as comparatively minor culprits like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic – along with the aforementioned Karadzic – have been energetically prosecuted by U.S.-controlled tribunals. The question is: can the Iraqis, at least, hope for justice in the case of George W. Bush, or must superpower exceptionalism once again carry the day?
(Keep reading ...)
You can blame Pelosi and Harry Reid for thwarting the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Kucinich laid out perfectly solid grounds but they lacked the political courage. In the result, a lot of the constitutional excesses and abuses of Bush/Cheney will carry on as precedents for future administrations. The executive branch now trumps the legislative branch, even the judiciary, pretty much skewing the system of checks and balances, perhaps indefinitely. I sense John McCain wants to entrench these monarchial powers. Let's hope Obama comes straight out and repudiates them.
ReplyDeleteMoS: agreed on all counts.
ReplyDelete