If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. - Noam Chomsky.II.
A new investigation of 9/11 will cement the fact that both the Bush and Blair administrations intended to invade the Middle East despite the non-existent threat posed by either Saddam Hussein or Al Qaeda. It is shocking that they have gotten away with murder for this long because what they have staged is the greatest political scandal in history. And as a result of their maniacal actions a million human beings have died for no good reason. An innocent people were victims of the ambitions of evil men. If you have trouble believing that evil exists in the world, maybe a confirmation by Obama will help persuade you: "For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world."
Moreover, American prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has laid out documented evidence that proves the Bush administration lied to the world to get the United States into an illegal war in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder." Mr. Bugliosi does not, however, make a firm decision about what the correct punishment should be if President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are found guilty of war crimes in an American courtroom. In an op-ed that appeared in The Huffington Post in May 2008 Mr. Bugliosi stated:
In any event, if an American jury were to find Bush guilty of first degree murder, it would be up to them to decide what the appropriate punishment should be, one of their options being the imposition of the death penalty.It is important to note that war crimes were also committed in the execution of the war, as the rights of detainees were dismissed outright by the White House legal counsel. Innocent men were found guilty without charge, and subsequently tortured in secret prisons in America's off-shore colonies. And this pattern of prisoner abuse and general lawlessness was prevalent throughout the period that Bush and Cheney were in power. Over a year ago, a 370 page report by the US Department of Justice Inspector General concluded that torture was ordered from inside the White House, and followed through by the Pentagon, and other high-level departments of the US government. The report was based on an FBI "war crimes" file that was documented by a number of FBI agents about ongoing torture taking place at Guantánamo.
The case for prosecution of high-level US government officials, starting at the very top of the Bush administration, has never been doubted by top constitutional lawyers, or a significant majority of the public, but charges have not been pressed because of the lack of political will. But that will most likely change because the political landscape across the ocean has heated up as a result of a new admission by former prime minister Tony Blair that he would have ordered British troops into Iraq regardless of the fact that Iraq didn't possess any weapons of mass destruction.
Next year, Blair is set to appear in front of a war inquiry to be conducted by John Chilcot, where it is being suggested that Blair could face legal action. The repercussions for such a move in the United States are uncertain, but there is no doubt that an indictment of Blair for war crimes by a British jury would put extensive pressure on the American justice system to present the same charges to Bush and Cheney. The likelihood of such a thing happening, however, are unrealistic as long as the current American political establishment stays in power. If President Obama is not challenged from below by Americans across the political spectrum, then the chances for the recovery of justice in the world would be zero.
III. A Digression on Obama: Guilty or Innocent?
Obama's refusal to investigate the Bush Administration's crimes against humanity is certainly not done out of ignorance of the facts, but a representation of his own moral cowardice and lust for power. His choice at the beginning of his term to look forward instead of righting the wrongs committed by the previous administration proved that he is not above Bush and Cheney, and his most recent expansion of the war Afghanistan reveals an even more terrifying truth for the world - that he belongs, sadly, beside the two men, and based on the Nuremberg principles, he must be hanged alongside them as a traitor and war criminal.
Let me be clear, I value the power of forgiveness, without which humanity wouldn't be the loving and brave creation that it is. But I also think justice is not possible without pinning responsibility on men in power, so to absolve Bush and Obama of what they've been a part of would be extremely foolish. One potential line of defense would go as follows: these two men were acting merely as agents of a greater design that was put in effect long before they arrived on the historical scene, and which would have been executed without their contribution, but this rests on the false assumption that individuals lack free will, which I can't accept. Moral conscious demands that if presidents are aware of treacherous and illegal activity then they need to bring their worries to light, and warn the public that such crimes are transpiring in their elected government. One president, JFK, tried his best to alert the press and the people, he even took direct action on the economic front by signing executive orders that would banish the money-printing powers of the Federal Reserve, but was assassinated in broad daylight, perhaps a message to all incoming presidents that acting independently of the power elite will get you killed.
A second line of defense would be: both presidents were not made aware of the explosives facts about 9/11 during their tenor by any of their close advisers or by US officials involved in National Security. The defense of ignorance is made often by war criminals, and due to the reality of compartmentalization in government this defense would be believable if it was made by other US government officials, but the president of the United States? It can't be possible that the "Commander-in-Chief" could be kept ignorant of the real facts about such a delicate manner as 9/11. It is highly unlikely that the president is not given classified information about past and current government secret projects. The president of the United States is probably told about the reasons for the US government staging such a bloody event, some of which deal with the country's national long-term interest in Central Asia. Another thing the president could be told is that the nature of the war on terrorism requires governments to abandon previous moral principles and 'get ahead' in the fight so as to be better prepared, i.e. developing a homeland security, performing preemptive strikes against perceived threats, establishing new laws that allows government forces to do anything necessary to keep the public secure, and so on. Obama being an agreeable and grateful man, would understand the thinking behind purposely inflicting such a national tragedy on the American people, and without question accept the explanations for it. Let's not forget that he would not have been made president if he was not fully sympathetic to the interests of the rulers of America.
To pardon error is the correct thing to do, but what proof do we have that presidents of the United States unknowingly commit error instead of knowingly committing war crimes? What evidence is there that suggests Obama is only making mistakes, as opposed to deliberately cheating the American people on behalf of the banking, military, and insurance corporations? The man is not misguided, he navigated himself for the benefit of the despotic oligarchs since the start of his political career. And as president he has sought the advise of the same men whose economic policies enriched the connected few on Wall St. but put the rest of the country into enormous debt. So Obama is not innocent. Rather, he is a betrayer, a war criminal, a two-faced seducer, and a first-rate ass-kisser.
Those who blame his ineffectiveness as a leader on Washington's power dynamics and political partisanship forget that Obama was given a clear mandate by the people of the country, the majority of whom were behind him in the beginning of his term. Obama had all the political capital to demand Wall St. bankers accept new regulations on the derivative market and other areas of the global economy, but he has proven to be a betrayer at every opportunity. He also had the political backing to pass a substantial health care reform bill in Congress, and if particular lawmakers refused to comply then he could have used the bully pulpit to encourage Americans to put on pressure on those individuals, to threaten to vote them out of office in the next election. In other words, these reforms were not politically inconvenient, the president's approval ratings would be above seventy percent had he attempted to do the right thing. Instead, at every occasion he has guarded the political and economic interests of the status quo. All the campaign talk of "yes we can" was a cheap ploy, meant to deceive the eager and delusional. And for that, Obama deserves the same punishment as Bush, Cheney, and Blair.
