7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Now they're out of office, and can be prosecuted. Let the trials begin!, August 6, 2009
This review is from: George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration's Liability for 269 War Crimes (Hardcover)
Author Haas presents a most helpful list of all of the statutes members of the Bush/Cheney administration (or Cheney/Bush administration, depending on which person you think was actually running things) can be charged now with having violated.
As with most of these current works on the rogue nature of our prior administration (the habits of which are now being picked up by the Obama administration, just as so many people had predicted would be the case if congress failed to impeach and remove these miscreants from office and thus put successive administrations on notice that these were "high crimes and misdemeanors," if not downright treason), Haas overlooks the lynch-pin, the ne plus ultra, the sine qua non of this Cheney/Bush administration. Namely, 9/11/2001. Haas assumes that there was "an attack" on the United States (or on the white-elephant, asbestos-laden World Trade Center towers 1, 2 and 7, the heavily fortified Pentagon wall, and, allegedly, a field in Shanksville, PA).
The evidence that the three World Trade Center skyscrapers were taken down with demolition explosives is now pretty conclusive--especially now that fragments of nano-thermite have been recovered from dust at the site--a "high energetic" compound/product
Effects of Gas Generation on Nano-Al Fueled Energetic Materials: A comparative study of two nano-thermites that has been invented, patented, worked on, experimented with, by our very own military laboratories (Los Alamos, maybe Sandia, the Naval Weapons lab(s)--similar to the fact that the anthrax sent around to terrorize network news programs, one grocery-store tabloid in Florida, and US Senators Tom Daschle and Jim Leahy was sourced back to our biological warfare lab at Ft. Detrick, Maryland.
Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (Talk about WMDs! The US has 'em all--chemical, biological, radiological and thermo-nuclear. No wonder our government gets away with the horse-puckey it gets away with internationally! And, like Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is US"--our government, that is. Freedom of Information inquiries have yielded only responses that "we've destroyed all our files, 'cuz we only keep stuff for seven years." It will no doubt take court action to pry loose the G2 on this stuff.) So that's another 3,000 or so murders that will need to be factored into the Bush/Cheney prosecutions. Although, if this stuff actually close to a prosecution, I'd expect that Cheney's heart would "give out" and Shrub would "strangle on a pretzel" to avoid facing death sentences. Dunno about the Gonzales, Rice's, Rumsfelds, Tenets, Addington, Yoo, Bybee, Feith, Gen. Myers, Bremer III, Zelikow, Kean, Hamilton,
The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Miers, Rove, Libby, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Mukasey, etc. Haas has some nice lists of folks in the chain of criminal command.
Of most interest is the US War Crimes Statute (18 USCode §2441), which provides criminal penalties for violating the Geneva Conventions (Ratified by the Senate and thus, along with statutes signed into law by the President, "the supreme law of the land"). (see pp 222-231)
The War Crimes Act provides that, in cases where death to prisoners of war is the result of violations of the Geneva Conventions, the death penalty can be sought. The latest information I've heard is that some 125 individuals died in US custody, and that, of that number, some 26 or so, as of last December, had been held, by military authorities, to be homicides--or murders, if you prefer a less Latinate vocabulary.
As I see it, there are, then, roughly 125 death sentence invitations floating out there--minimally 25, which is surely enough to cover the top 25 members of the Cheney/Bush administration.
Haas mentions the growing significance of jus cogens, or compelling, universal law. "In 1998, when Chile's Augusto Pinochet was served a warrant in England from a Spanish judge for offenses committed while he was president of Chile from 1973 to 1990 [a position our very own little shop of horrors, the CIA, supported putting him in, with its overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Isabelino Allende Gossens. On September 11, 1973. Does our CIA have something special about 9/11, I wonder? A talismanic date? Best time to launch a new product?], the world suddenly awoke to the principle of universal crimes. Although Pinochet eventually returned to Chile for trial and died before he was convicted, the case alerted the world to a new era in world justice.
"Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger rarely travels out of the United States nowadays, as authorities in France and elsewhere want him for questioning in regard to the coups that brought Pinochet and other dictators to power in Latin [or Aladdin?] America. Baltazar Garzón, the judge who asked Britain to extradite Pinochet to Spain, now publiclyu accuses Bush of war crimes and apparently is preparing such a case."
And, Haas notes, "it was reported that Rumsfeld had to sneak out of France after giving a talk there because legal papers had been filed about his war crimes and he was then subject to arrest." Interesting, if true.
Finally, Haas notes the theory of LA attorney Vincent Bugliosi, in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, that would allow Bush to be prosecuted for conspiring to commit murder because he lied to the nation that Saddam was an "imminent threat" to the US in order to send our troops into Iraq, thereby causing the deaths of 4,000 (and counting) US troops. The prosecution could be brought by the US attorney general, the attorney general of any state in which such soldiers had resided, and/or the county district attorney of any county in which a deceased soldier had resided before being sent to die in "Bush's War." "Since there is no statute of limitations for murder, Bush may thus live out his life under a Damoclean sword." (228). [Since George was so enamored of judicially-ordered executions, I'm rooting for a judicial slaying, "Texas Execution-Style," as the MSM so frequently say. But in public, lest the full impact and value of such an unusual "teaching moment" be lost.
PS: It sure would be nice if Amazon implemented a couple of form attributes, like bold, italic, underscore on this service. [b]Or does it, but I don't know how to use the tags?[/b]
PPS: For anyone who thinks this is "self-hating Americana" or "partisan rhetoric," I would urge you to read the US Constitution. Carefully. Read Bruce Fein,
Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy Glenn Greenwald
Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican PoliticsHow Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, Thomas Paine
Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine (Signet Classics), Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations : Books 1-3 : Complete And Unabridged The Wealth of Nations, Books IV-V, The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers. And, while you're at it, go get a law degree, or at least take a course in Constitutional Law
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the U.S. Constitution. These days, living in an information vacuum is hazardous to your and our nation's health. Everyone needs to learn to "thimk" for him- and her-self. These are parlous times, and our enemy is, I'm assured, criminal elements within our own (and other) government(s), and the sort of bankers who both backed the US and Germany in WWI and WWII. I think I can safely assert that we have nooo idea how far our We the People power has been usurped. Also read James Bamford's The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America--he asserts that virtually every bit--literally, BIT, for BInary digiT--of US and world communications has been tapped into by the National "Security" Administration, with the "splitter boxes" on all trunk fiber optic lines of the major (and minor) telecom carriers. The microwave stuff was already captured by Echelon, I think it's called--satellites grabbing all line-of-sight microwave telecommunications out in their geosynchronous (or asynchronous) orbits. And who uses wig-wag, semaphore or smoke signals any more? The only thing that gives us even the hint of privacy any more is that the amount of bits, of data, is so great that it's like trying to drink not from a garden hose, or fire hose, but rather from a 16-foot-diameter aqueduct. This stuff's all down on a huge disk farm in Texas (and apparently the israelis have a duplicate system, but Trojan Horsed into telecom billing software they're peddling all over the world). This old report's not too shabby, either: Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans: 1976 US Senate Report on Illegal Wiretaps and Domestic Spying by the FBI, CIA and NSA.
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