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

[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.

[Peace Patriot]

1. Hanging them will make things worse. It's THEIR remedy--killing! It's fascism

The image of Saddam Hussein's old body twitching at the end of rope is the mindfuck THEY want to inflict on us all. It is horrible. It is absolutely useless as to ridding the world of violence and evil. Capital punishment is at the heart of the fascist evil that grips us. They executed over ONE MILLION innocent people to get their oil and to straddle the Middle East with big Nazi boots. Those lives MEAN NOTHING to our leaders, and, tragically, mean nothing to many of us--to we, the people--because we have been desensitized to the horrors of torture and death. That is fascism.

How do you think that the society that defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan BECAME so like the Nazis and Imperial Japan?

We absorbed that evil--the evil that tells you that you can solve your problems by other peoples' deaths.

A very, very remarkable thing occurred in our society after WW II. For the first time in history, a society that was victorious in war sought to rebuild the countries they had conquered, in a positive, progressive way, without vengeance, and further sought to transform the entire world with institutions like the United Nations, and the Geneva Conventions (protection of prisoners of war, and civilian populations), to try to prevent war or to limit and mitigate war, and to create standards for human rights worldwide. We lavished resources onto the defeated countries--Germany, Japan--and enabled them to become economic powerhouses, as well as strong democracies. Whatever its motives--and they were mixed--it was an enlightened policy, without precedent in the history of war. We did try and execute some Nazis for genocide, but our vengeance was limited--except in the case of the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities at the end of the war, a racist act that sacrificed hundreds of thousands of civilians, in one horrendous incineration, not to end the war--as the government claimed--but rather to shape the post-war world visa vis the Soviet Union (our ally in WW II, soon to be our new "enemy").

And that motive--the determination of super-rich capitalists (made rich by war profiteering, sucking on the taxpayer tit) to defeat communism (a worldwide movement from below--a grass roots movement of peasants and workers that, in Russia and China--countries with no democratic traditions whatsoever--soon became melded with totalitarianism, very unfortunately)--was the poison that infested the post-war United States. Capitalist war profiteer poison, that has turned US--or, rather, our political establishment--into Nazis and imperialists, who torture prisoners and callously slaughter a million people to get their oil, and seek world domination, just like Hitler did.

While one segment of our society leaped forward into a progressive future--in support of the United Nations, world peace, nuclear weapons non-proliferation and disarmament, the end of racism--another part was heading back into the Dark Ages, led by the CEOs of the Medieval Church of the Corporation. The latter--sucking like vampires on the work on others--went on an "anti-communist crusade" within our own society (a witchhunt that destroyed lives, essentially broke the labor movement, and threatened anyone with liberal or leftist views with being labeled a subversive and a communist), and set about making war abroad, by assassination, subversion and dirty tricks, and in several cases, outright war and massive slaughter (TWO MILLION dead in Vietnam/Southeast Asia, before it was over), using the excuse of anti-communism in order to create an American Roman Empire, in control of the world's resources and slave labor populations. This war for empire took an especially horrible toll on South America and Africa, where democracy was literally smashed to pieces, with torture and murder, as well as on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Vietnam was country that had fought off domination by the Chinese (for 5,000 years) and then by the French, and merely wanted independence and elections! The communists would have won those elections, fair and square, so the U.S. nixed them, and began CIA prep for war. And one other place where this Nazi element in the U.S. government smashed democracy to pieces was IRAN.

What these U.S. Nazis learned from WW II was that, to solve your resource problems, your labor problems, your political problems, and any other problems that stand in the way of ungodly profits, you kill, and if that doesn't work, you kill some more. Brute power. Violence. Torture. Mass murder.

This BAD, BAD legacy of WW II, has reached full flower in the Bush Junta. And it is no accident that its titular head, the idiot president, George Bush Jr., gleefully executed hundreds of prisoners in Texas, before getting shoved upward as the puppet president front for the global monsters that our WW II war profiteers have become. And it is a supreme irony that the countries that we defeated, Germany and Japan, and countries that we liberated--all of Europe--and countries that our government has horrendously oppressed (Latin America)--all ban capital punishment. The civilized post WW II world understands that capital punishment is FASCIST. Everywhere but here--where the fascist poison continues to sicken our society.

The GOOD legacy of that WW II era--the New Deal, the forgiveness of our enemies Germany and Japan, the United Nations, the efforts at world peace and the rule of law, the human and civil rights victories, universal education, the temporary social contract with labor (1950s thru 1980--good wages and benefits for U.S. labor, to prevent a communist revolution), and other great benefits--have been undermined and nearly destroyed by the Nazi takeover of our political establishment, and, in this case (as opposed to Germany 1930) the Nazis are bloated, predatory capitalists that don't belong anywhere. They are not like German nationalists. They are NOT pro-American. They are the CEOs and big investors in multinational entities with loyalty to no one. They FAKE patriotism, and associate patriotism with TORTURE and KILLING.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld & co. are their front men. Executing them--after duly convicting them of war crimes--will NOT solve our problems. They SHOULD BE prosecuted and punished. They are war criminals and traitors. But the image of "the gallows" is wrong, and it is wrong to assert that execution is rightful, just, moral punishment for human beings. It is not. It is fascism. It is THEIR poisonous idea.

How to punish them?

1. Make them give all the money back.

2. Community service. (My favorite: a lifetime sentence of cleaning bedpans in veterans hospitals.)

And then we go after the corporate rulers who put them in power--pull their corporate charters, dismantle them, and seize their assets for the common good. We have the sovereign right, as a people, to dismantle corporations. It can all be done within the framework of democracy. And we need to start with ridding ourselves of the electronic voting machines that these corporate rulers have been selling to us, for BILLIONS of dollars, that are run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--code that we have no right to review, according to them (and the laws they've written). That is the most important bit of corporate/fascist bullshit that we need to undo. And after that, we rid ourselves of their putrid police state, prison system and capital punishment, and start building the civilized nation that we SHOULD HAVE become after WW II.

[tekisui]

2. I am with you.

I don't believe in killing anyone. No death penalty. No killing through war.

But, I think they should be locked up for the rest of their natural lives, stripped of their wealth and forgotten in a cell.