Benjamin Ferenccz, a Nuremberg chief prosecutor, has made two things absolutely crystal clear for anybody that was in any doubt:

1. Aggressive war is the supreme international crime

2. The Bush administration committed that crime with the invasion of Iraq in 2003

So, not even neocons will attempt to argue with either of those statements. Instead, they just ignore them and do what they can to keep it out of the mainstream media. How convenient.

By the way, Ferenccz is not the tin-hat wearing conspiracy nutcase that neocons wish he were. No, he is the CHIEF PROSECUTOR FROM THE NUREMBERG TRIALS. This man personally secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for taking part in the murder of over 1,000,000 people. I don't suppose you'll be attacking his credentials, will you, Bear? I guess you could say that this man knows a war crime when he sees one!

He also points out that the United Nations Charter specifically states that no nation can used armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council, something, which most people are surely aware, the US did not get. Quite the opposite in fact, the UN Security Council rejected the waging of an aggressive war against Iraq DESPITE all the lies that Colin Powell was sent to tell on YOUR behalf.

War Crimes - It's Not Just Torture

As Allied armies advanced into Germany, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared captured Nazi leaders outlaws subject to summary execution. But U.S. President Harry Truman, a former small-town judge, insisted instead on formal trials with "notification to the accused of the charge, the right to be heard, and to call witnesses in his defense." The result was the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal and the start of a revolution that, in U.S. Justice Robert Jackson's words, replaced a "system of international lawlessness" with one that made "statesmen responsible to law." It is this revolution that may be catching up with the administration of George W. Bush.

During the Cold War era, Nuremberg was little more than a dimming memory. Charges by Richard Falk, Marcus Raskin, and others that U.S. actions in Vietnam constituted war crimes helped swell opposition to the war, but U.S. officials were never held to account for their actions. Starting in the 1990s, however, the revolutionary principle that government officials must be responsible to law became an integral part of the human rights and democratization movements that swept much of the world. Milosevic was driven out of office and turned over to an international war crimes tribunal. Pinochet was captured in Spain and eventually sent back to Chile to face charges as a torturer. The International Criminal Court was established to try war crimes. Henry Kissinger wrote in alarm in 2001 that "In less than a decade an unprecedented movement has emerged to submit international politics to judicial procedures" and has "spread with extraordinary speed."

Critical to this unprecedented movement has been an evolved relationship between national and international law. In the past, international law was seen as a potential infringement on national sovereignty. (The Bush administration is trying to resuscitate that view - for example, in its attacks on the International Criminal Court.) But today the two are increasingly intertwined and mutually reinforcing, much like state and national law in the United States. Many new democracies see institutions like the International Criminal Court as bulwarks against the restoration of tyranny in their own countries - such as the U.S. Constitution guarantees that its member states will be republics, not monarchies. Toward this end, many countries have incorporated aspects of international law into their national statutes - the U.S. War Crimes Act, for example, makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions a crime under U.S. law, punishable in some cases by death.

Several overlapping strands have coalesced into a body of law regarding war crimes. One is the prohibition on aggressive war. As the Nuremberg Tribunal put it, "to initiate a war of aggression" is "the supreme international crime." A second strand is humanitarian law, which protects both combatants and civilians from unnecessary harm during war. The devastation associated with World War II led to the recognition of "crimes against humanity," which involve acts of violence against a persecuted group. War crimes were codified in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and have been further developed in subsequent protocols and agreements.

The Nuremberg Tribunal was criticized on the grounds that it represented not impartial justice but "victor's justice," that it provided impunity for the bombing of civilians and other heinous acts committed by the victors, and that it prosecuted people "ex post facto" for acts that had not been declared crimes when they were committed. These charges had considerable justification. But today there is a body of national and international law that clearly defines war crimes and a set of procedures for applying them comparable to the procedures used to judge other crimes. Those are the standards by which allegations of American war crimes must be judged.
Law must - and the international law of war crimes now does - provide a single standard of judgment that can be applied without discrimination to different cases. If an act is a war crime, then it is a war crime whether it is perpetrated by Saddam Hussein or by George Bush.

American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond

The charge that the U.S. attack on Iraq was a war crime was raised even before the war began. More than 1,000 law professors and U.S. legal institutions organized in opposition to the U.S. war crime of launching an "aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter" against Iraq. Violation of international law was also a central theme in worldwide demonstrations against the war. The attack on the illegality of the war has been revived by the leak of the Downing Street memo; 130 members of Congress joined Rep. John Conyers in demanding that the Bush administration come clean about the invasion - supported by a half million citizen signatures gathered in barely a week. "Scootergate" is fundamentally about the cover-up of White House lies justifying the war.

Illegal detention and torture are also war crimes. Starting with the exposure of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, cascading revelations have established that these cases exemplify a pattern of abuse authorized at the highest levels of government. Human rights groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights First sued in U.S. and foreign courts against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others for breaching the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. The Senate's 90-9 vote to restore the military's traditional prohibition against torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners - prompting the Bush administration to threaten a veto - sets the stage for a major confrontation over adherence to both the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution.

Despite massive cover-ups, the evidence is emerging: the Bush administration planned an illegal war of aggression against Iraq, conned the American people and their representatives into supporting it, conducted an illegal occupation marked by massive violation of Iraqi human rights, and justified and promoted systematic torture. Now the White House seeks opportunities for further criminal attacks against Iran, Syria, and other countries around the world, issuing threats to use death squads and nuclear weapons at will. These acts violate American law, international law, and the basic values of the American people. They are crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. They are outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, and treaties against torture and other human rights abuses. They are war crimes, and those who ordered and condoned them are war criminals.

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/2970
Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on July 10, 2006, Printed on September 18, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/38604/
The extent to which American exceptionalism is embedded in the national psyche is awesome to behold.

While the United States is a country like any other, its citizens no more special than any others on the planet, Americans still react with surprise at the suggestion that their country could be held responsible for something as heinous as a war crime.

From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn't feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis -- most certainly not. Howard Zinn recently described this as our "inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."

Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis are our "gold standard of evil," as author John Dolan once put it.

But the truth is that we can, and we have -- most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz's biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or "aggressive" war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a "prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

It's that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a "clear breach of law," and dismissed the Bush administration's legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn't have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, "So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive."

Writing for the United Kingdom's Guardian, shortly before the 2003 invasion, international law expert Mark Littman echoed Ferencz: "The threatened war against Iraq will be a breach of the United Nations Charter and hence of international law unless it is authorized by a new and unambiguous resolution of the Security Council. The Charter is clear. No such war is permitted unless it is in self-defense or authorized by the Security Council."

Challenges to the legality of this war can also be found at the ground level. First Lt.

Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse to serve in Iraq, cites the rules of the U.N. Charter as a principle reason for his dissent.

Ferencz isn't using the invasion of Iraq as a convenient prop to exercise his longstanding American hatred: he has a decades-old paper trail of calls for every suspect of war crimes to be brought to international justice. When the United States captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003, Ferencz wrote that Hussein's offenses included "the supreme international crime of aggression, to a wide variety of crimes against humanity, and a long list of atrocities condemned by both international and national laws."

Ferencz isn't the first to make the suggestion that the United States has committed state-sponsored war crimes against another nation -- not only have leading war critics made this argument, but so had legal experts in the British government before the 2003 invasion. In a short essay in 2005, Ferencz lays out the inner deliberations of British and American officials as the preparations for the war were made:

U.K. military leaders had been calling for clear assurances that the war was legal under international law. They were very mindful that the treaty creating a new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague had entered into force on July 1, 2002, with full support of the British government. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the defense staff, was quoted as saying "I spent a good deal of time recently in the Balkans making sure Milosevic was put behind bars. I have no intention of ending up in the next cell to him in The Hague."
Ferencz quotes the British deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry who, in the lead-up to the invasion, quit abruptly and wrote in her resignation letter: "I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution ?[A]n unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances that are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law."

While the United Kingdom is a signatory of the ICC, and therefore under jurisdiction of that court, the United States is not, thanks to a Republican majority in Congress that has "attacks on America's sovereignty" and "manipulation by the United Nations" in its pantheon of knee-jerk neuroses. Ferencz concedes that even though Britain and its leadership could be prosecuted, the international legal climate isn't at a place where justice is blind enough to try it -- or as Ferencz put it, humanity isn't yet "civilized enough to prevent this type of illegal behavior." And Ferencz said that while he believes the United States is guilty of war crimes, "the international community is not sufficiently organized to prosecute such a case. ?There is no court at the moment that is competent to try that crime."

As Ferencz said, the world is still a long way away from establishing norms that put all nations under the rule of law, but the battle to do so is a worthy one: "There's no such thing as a war without atrocities, but war-making is the biggest atrocity of all."

The suggestion that the Bush administration's conduct in the "war on terror" amounts to a string of war crimes and human rights abuses is gaining credence in even the most ossified establishment circles of Washington. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling by the Supreme Court suggests that Bush's attempt to ignore the Geneva Conventions in his approved treatment of terror suspects may leave him open to prosecution for war crimes. As Sidney Blumenthal points out, the court rejected Bush's attempt to ignore Common Article 3, which bans "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

And since Congress enacted the Geneva Conventions, making them the law of the United States, any violations that Bush or any other American commits "are considered 'war crimes' punishable as federal offenses," as Justice Kennedy wrote.

George W. Bush in the dock facing a charge of war crimes? That's well beyond the scope of possibility ?or is it?
Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.

2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/38604/
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime
http://www.starttherevolution.org/ar...arCriminal.htm

Not even worth reading............WAY TO LONG.

Make your point instead of posting someone elses...

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Those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority. --Gerald Massey