By Steve Hynd
A US human rights group has called on foreign governments to prosecute George W Bush and some of his senior officials for war crimes if the Obama administration fails to investigate a growing body of evidence against the former president over the use of torture.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday that the US authorities were legally obliged to investigate the top echelons of the Bush administration over crimes such as torture, abduction and other mistreatment of prisoners. It says that the former administration's legal team was part of the conspiracy in preparing opinions authorising abuses that they knew to have no standing in US or international law.
Besides Bush, HRW names his vice-president, Dick Cheney, the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the ex-CIA director, George Tenet, as likely to be guilty of authorising torture and other crimes.
HRW notes that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" has recently been applied "in prosecuting individuals responsible for crimes in Rwanda, the Balkans and Africa" and that the U.S. itself made use of the concept to prosecute the son of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, who is now himself on trial before the ICC.
The author of the HRW report, Reed Brody, says the issue also deserves renewed scrutiny because the Obama administration has all but abandoned its obligations. "It's become abundantly clear that there is no longer any movement on the part of the Obama administration to live up to its responsibilities to investigate these cases when the evidence just keeps piling up. Just this year we have the different admissions by President Bush that he authorised waterboarding," he said.
I think it's a great idea - and that Obama should now also face prosecution, as an accessory after the fact. It's not going to happen, unfortunately. The tale of an American hegemonic world is that only the weak and American enemies face justice.
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