Bush 'War Crimes Conference' to Convene in Mass., Plan Prosecution of Admin. Officials [View All]

[tekisui]

On September 13-14, 2008, Lawrence Velvel, the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, plans to convene a 'convention' at the school's facilities; the attendees of which will plan strategies to prosecute members of the Bush administration for war crimes.

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," stated Velvel in a press release. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth.

"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice. And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940's."

The dean specifically criticizes Justice Department officials who wrote legal opinions designed to provide political cover for administration figures to carry out torture. However, Velvel's sharpest words were saved for President Bush, according to a passage from ABA Journal.

"The man ultimately responsible for the torture had a unique preparation and persona for the presidency," wrote Velvel. "He is a former drunk, was a serial failure in business who had to repeatedly be bailed out by daddy's friends and wanna-be-friends, was unable to speak articulately despite the finest education(s) that money and influence can buy, has a dislike of reading, so that 100-page memos have to be boiled down to one page for him, is heedless of facts and evidence, and appears not even to know the meaning of truth."

link: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Bush_war_crimes_conference_to_convene_0622.html

link to Press Release: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20118.htm

From Pres Release:
He noted in the years since the prosecution and punishment of German and Japanese leaders after World War Two those nation's leaders changed their countries' aggressor cultures. One cannot discount contributory cause and effect here, he said.

"For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders," Velvel said.

The conference will take up such issues as the nature of domestic and international crimes committed; which high-level Bush officials, including Federal judges and Members of Congress, are chargeable with war crimes; which foreign and domestic tribunals can be used to prosecute them; and the setting up of an umbrella coordinating committee with representatives of legal groups concerned about the war crimes such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, among others.