ICC, indict Bush, not Sudan

Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney caught the right spirit when she called for impeaching President George Bush. The real war criminals are at home. And if the International Criminal Court were really independent of the imperialists, it would put Bush on trial—and first.

Starting in the 1990s, U.S. imperialism and its allies used the Security Council of the United Nations to create special tribunals to hold trials for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. The most publicized concerned civil wars in Cambodia, Rwanda and especially the former Yugoslavia, whose president, Slobodan Milosevic was indicted as U.S.-NATO bombs were dropping on his country.

Each of these cases shared more or less the same characteristics. Imperialist countries had either instigated or intervened in civil wars. No imperialist politicians or soldiers were indicted. Those convicted were mainly from the side of the civil war that was most independent of the imperialists. The courts were specially created to impose a political judgment against whatever forms of resistance existed.

The International Criminal Court was supposed to change this pattern. It was supposed to judge all possible criminals equally. But the ICC held true to the old form by targeting the head of state of Sudan in Africa regarding on-going civil conflict in the Darfur region where the imperialists hope to grab Sudan’s oil reserves.

We have a suggestion for the ICC. If you want to punish war criminals, start at the top. That would be George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their whole entourage.

By now the whole world knows this criminal gang plotted a war of aggression against Iraq, occupied Afghanistan and committed a series of war crimes.

Even retired Major General Anthony Taguba, who led the U.S. Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, has accused the Bush administration of “a systematic regime of torture” and war crimes.

Celebrity lawyer-author Vincent Bugliosi wrote the new book “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” which quickly became a best-seller though the corporate media ignored it. Bugliosi’s point is Bush misled the country into the war in Iraq. Thus Bush should be tried in the U.S. for the deaths of the 4,000-plus U.S. troops killed there.

Lawrence Velvel, the dean and founder of the Massachusetts School of Law, would like the administration tried for an even greater crime: the murder of 1.3 million Iraqis. “For George Bush, Richard Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger to swing, or even for them to spend years in jail, would be a powerful lesson to future [U.S.] American leaders,” said Velvel, whose school is located in Andover, Mass., near Bush’s old prep school.

If Taguba, Bugliosi and Velvel can raise this issue, it’s an idea whose time has come. Let the Africans resolve the problems of the Sudan. ICC, it’s time to indict Bush and Cheney.