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War Crime Shock: ICC Charges Leader With Mass Murder |
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Incredible news in the Washington Post today:
 UNITED NATIONS, March 4 -- The International Criminal Court's pretrial judges issued an arrest warrant for former U.S. President George Walker Bush on Wednesday, charging that he directed the mass murder of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It is the first time the Hague-based court has accused an American head of state of war crimes.
A three-judge panel upheld a request by the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, to charge Bush on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it ruled that prosecutors had not provided enough proof to charge Bush with orchestrating a campaign of genocide. Moreno-Ocampo, the panel said, was free to pursue the genocide charge later if he obtained additional evidence....
The judges' ruling was detailed in a news conference at the court's headquarters in the Netherlands. Laurence Blairon, the tribunal's spokeswoman, said Bush exercised full control over the country's security and military apparatus as it carried out a brutal invasion and counterinsurgency against Iraqi rebels from March 2003 to January 2009.
The crimes included the "murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring of large numbers of civilians and the pillaging of their property," Blairon said.
Blairon said that Bush's status would not shield him from criminal responsibility, "nor does it grant him immunity."
Skippy Johnson, a spokesman for former President Bush, said Mr. Bush does not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague-based court and will never surrender himself for prosecution.
"For us, the ICC doesn't exist," Johnson said. "We are not going to be bound by any decision they make. We are in no way going to cooperate with it."
The ICC prosecutor charged that Bush ordered the American military, backed by British, Polish, Australian and other forces, to carry out a genocidal campaign against Iraqis. The resulting violence has left an estimated 1 million people dead from violence, and caused hunger, disease, fear and chaos that have displaced more than 4 million people from their homes.
Oh wait; sorry. It looks like there was some detritus in the internet tubes, and the Post story was slightly garbled in transmission. It seems it was a mass-murdering leader named Bashir, not Bush, who has been charged by the International Criminal Court. We apologize for this mistake -- not only to our readers, but especially to Mr. Bush, who of course is not in the slightest danger of being charged by the International Criminal Court, but is instead enjoying a peaceful, comfortable, well-deserved retirement in his pricey new digs in Dallas.
Having made such an egregious error, we feel we should say no more on the subject. Thus, we will leave the last word to Professor As'ad AbuKhalil:
This arrest warrant is a joke, of course and will not be taken seriously outside of the offices of the New York Times. I mean, let us say that Bashir (a lousy dictator with very low intelligence level and a skill in turning into a buffoon before a crowd, with a history of cooperation with Western governments--overt and covert) is responsible for much of the bloodshed in Darfur, his record pales by that (if you count the numbers of victims) of George W. Bush. I mean, will that body issue an arrest warrant for Bush or any American president if he/she were to drop a nuclear bomb on an entire country or continent? Of course not. But then again: how can the White Man resist the temptation to preach and sermonize? The White Man can't resist that opportunity.
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