War Crimes Tribunal on Iraq: the case against Bush

By Heather Cottin

Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, has charged that President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John David Ashcroft are guilty of "crimes against peace and humanity and war crimes."

Clark added that the U.S. government under George W. Bush was "assuming powers of an imperial executive unaccountable to law."

Clark’s statement was read to thousands who gathered to protest the Democratic National Convention on Boston Common July 25.

Ramsey Clark’s charges will form the basis for the Iraq War Crimes Tribunal set for August 26 from 3:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium, located at 65th St. and Amsterdam Ave. in New York City.

Dozens of leading anti-war activists from India, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy and other countries, as well as from the U.S., will be traveling to the tribunal to give testimony against the Bush administration.

"It is important," said John Catalinotto, an organizer for the tribunal, "that people coming to protest the Republican National Convention understand the international character of the anti-war movement and hear the findings of the international war crimes tribunals on Iraq."

The event will be a first in the series of protests against the Republican National Convention in the city.

The two big-business parties both promise to expand the number of U.S. troops occupying Iraq. But opposition to this brutal occupation is growing too.

Check out PeopleJudgeBush.org

Ramsey Clark is writing the indictment that will charge the Bush administration with causing the death and maiming of tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of U.S. GIs, and providing false and deceptive rationales for war.

The gravest charge is that the U.S. government is guilty of crimes against peace—a crime prohibited by the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Clark states that the U.S. is responsible for "authorizing, ordering and condoning assassinations, summary executions, kidnappings, secret and other illegal detentions of individuals, torture and physical and psychological coercion of prisoners."

The tribunal will investigate the "ordering and condoning [of] direct attacks on civilians, [and] civilian facilities." They will charge that the U.S. has threatened "the independence and sovereignty of Iraq by belligerently changing its government by force and assaulting Iraq in a war of aggression."

The International Action Center, organizing for the tribunal, has created a new web site. PeopleJudgeBush.org will collect history, statistics, testimony and pictures, and give people a concrete way to vote against the illegal war in Iraq. The website will provide information and photographs of the depredations of the war censored by the U.S. media.

The web site solicits testimony by e-mail of "photos, eyewitness accounts, research and ideas that can be used as evidence to build a case against the perpetrators of U.S. war crimes against Iraq."

It lists the crimes that expert witnesses with testify about—including war profiteering and privatizing of national resources, cultural genocide and the systematic looting of Iraq’s art, archives and cultural institutions.

Testimonies will describe the use of prohibited weapons, including cluster bombs and depleted uranium. The tribunal will expose and oppose the theft of trillions of dollars from domestic social services so that the U.S. can pursue its policy of "Endless War" that has already targeted Haiti, Iran, Palestine, the Philippines, North Korea and Cuba.

The PeopleJudgeBush.org website concludes, "We have a responsibility to hold this administration accountable for the past and continuing horrors of the war and occupation... The people of the world know that it is those in the highest echelons of the U.S. government who are responsible for the atrocities, torture, deaths and war crimes in Iraq."

http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/tribunal0812.php