Mar 06 2009

Obama’s ICC Move Does Not Go Unnoticed

Via Think Progress

The International Criminal Court (ICC) yesterday issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Today, the AP reports that, based on the legal principles the ICC used to arrest al-Bashir, former President George W. Bush could be next on the list:

  David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects.

   Crane is a former prosecutor of the Sierra Leone tribunal that indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor and put him on trial in The Hague.

   Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, said the al-Bashir ruling was likely to fuel discussion about investigations of possible crimes by Bush Administration officials.

More on the ICC

ICC Now by: RUKind

International Criminal Court – second of an unending series by: RUKind

13 comments

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  1. Photobucket

  2. sorry for the random…

    “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” ~Galileo

  3. community sounds so sweet. The whole answer if you think about it. Globalism the brain child of the neo-liberals, is a double edged sword. Lets move to use what they abused. Truths are self evident and global as regards to human behavior. It is in Disney talk a small world after all. If the problems are global so are the answers. Our inside is out and our outside is in…. But everybody is hiding from what the world and us knows. Let it out. Somehow the door will open.

  4. Certainly the cabal is international in scope, so why shouldn’t the solution be? It seems we can’t do our own dirty laundry. Someone’s gotta do it, and I welcome that effort, as shameful as it has to be that those nations who followed our once sterling example have now got to be the ones to school us.

    • urtica on March 8, 2009 at 01:03
    • #

    I was just reading that article and thinking, again, about some of the facts of the “case”: Clinton signed onto the ICC, Bush immediately rescinded the US as signatory; because neither the US, nor Iraq were ICC signatories, there is no ICC jurisdiction over matters (crimes committed) in Iraq. Under these circumstances, only if the US illustrates unwillingness or inability to investigate alleged war crimes under various international conventions will there be any patina of jurisdiction with the ICC. Yet, the authority

    [T]he only other way Bush could be investigated is if the [UN] Security Council were to order it, something unlikely to happen with Washington a veto-wielding permanent member,”

    Even if the US or Iraq became signatories, would jurisdiction act retroactively? More pointedly:


    The Hague – In 2002, Congress passed a law enabling United States forces to unilaterally storm into peaceful Holland to liberate American soldiers held for war crimes.

    Coming in the early days of the war on terrorists, and as the International Criminal Court was being formed here, the measure provoked controversy and seemed to the Dutch – stout US allies – an absurd example of America’s “with us or against us” foreign policy.

    The law is still on the books.

    Formally titled the American Service Members Protection Act, the measure is widely and derisively known here as the Invasion of The Hague Act.

    Odd as it may seem, the law allows the US to constitutionally send jack-booted commandos to fly over fields of innocent tulips, swoop into the land of wooden shoes, tread past threatening windmills and sleepy milk cows into the Dutch capital – into a city synonymous with international law – and pry loose any US troops.

    Today, the Dutch mostly treat the issue as a joke, a cowboy American moment. But it is widely felt that if President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team wants to achieve a symbolic break with the previous White House, it could rescind the invasion law.

    Intent. Intent to circumvent jurisdiction, consequences, and avenues of recourse, with force, if necessary. Intent to become a recalcitrant rogue state.

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