Why Should We Shield the Killers?

[ashling]

Because of its hostility to the International Criminal Court, the Bush administration is trying to block prosecution of Sudanese officials for genocide. By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Two weeks ago, President Bush gave an impassioned speech to the world about the need to stand for human freedom.

But this week, administration officials are skulking in the corridors of the United Nations, trying desperately to block a prosecution of Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity.

It's not that Mr. Bush sympathizes with the slaughter in Darfur. In fact, I take my hat off to Mr. Bush for doing more than most other world leaders to address ethnic cleansing there - even if it's not nearly enough. Mr. Bush has certainly done far more than Bill Clinton did during the Rwandan genocide.




But Mr. Bush's sympathy for Sudanese parents who are having their children tossed into bonfires shrivels next to his hostility to the organization that the U.N. wants to trust with the prosecution: the International Criminal Court. Administration officials so despise the court that they have become, in effect, the best hope of Sudanese officials seeking to avoid accountability for what Mr. Bush himself has called genocide.

Mr. Bush's worry is that if the International Criminal Court is legitimized, American officials could someday be dragged before it.

***
more: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,339802,00.html

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. American officials could someday be dragged before it.

As well they should be.... the sooner the better.



www.brusselstribunal.org

The BRussells Tribunal is a hearing committee composed of academics, intellectuals and artists in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal, set up in 1967 to investigate war crimes committed during the Vietnam War. The hearing is scheduled for 14-17th April 2004 at The Beursschouwburg and Les Halles in Brussels. It will be presided by Professor François Houtart, who participated in the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal on US Crimes in Vietnam in 1967, and one of the founding fathers of the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre. It is directed against the war in Iraq and the Imperial war policies of the Bush II administration. Its main focus will be the ‘Project for the New American Century’, the think tank behind this war, in particular three of the co-signatories of the mission statement: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, as they are the physical link between the discourse and the brutal practice of the New Imperial World Order as designed by PNAC. Read more...

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Shrub has a hard on for the truth and the U.N end of story.

[NJCher]

3. the work of the Tribunal

Reading some of the pages at the BRussels Tribunal site brought back many memories. I recall reading about the VietNam tribunal and remembering how, even as a freshman and sophomore in high school, the works of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attracted me. How I admired them for what they did in forming the VietNam tribunal.

Now, to think that this latest action by the Tribunal has gone virtually without comment by the world's English-speaking press. From the Tribunal's Web site:

It is probably a testimony to how far we have left behind the Enlightenment tradition of the Republic of Letters and how far we have advanced into the era of the postmodern market-state that almost one week after the conclusion of the opening session of the BRussells Tribunal in our media-saturated world, the findings of the Brussells Tribunal have -- unless I am mistaken -- been the object of not a single significant journalistic commentary in the English language.

Not one.

It makes me want to cry. Instead, however, I will write each person who participates and tell them about DU and that there are many people in the U.S. who support their work.


Cher

[Jack Rabbit]

4. War criminals fear the ICC

Ergo, the Bushies are trying to undermine it. It isn't because they fear GI Joe is going to be charged with war crimes. That is very unlikely.

No, it's their own skin they're worried about.