( – promoted by buhdydharma )
All roads lead to the Rome Statute.
From Wiki:
Following years of negotiations aimed at establishing a permanent international tribunal to punish individuals who commit genocide and other serious international crimes, the United Nations General Assembly convened a five-week diplomatic conference in Rome in June 1998 “to finalize and adopt a convention on the establishment of an international criminal court”.[7][8] On July 17, 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted by a vote of 120 to 7, with 21 countries abstaining.[5] The seven countries that voted against the treaty were Iraq, Israel, Libya, the People’s Republic of China, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen.[5]
Article 126 of the statute provided that it would enter into force shortly after the number of states that had ratified it reached sixty.[3] This happened on April 11, 2002, when ten countries ratified the statute at the same time at a special ceremony held at the United Nations headquarters in New York.[9] The treaty entered into force on July 1, 2002;[9] the ICC can only prosecute crimes committed on or after that date.[10]
McClatchy has a great article that is pretty much a must-read summary of the consensus of where we are now on the subject of “War Crimes“.
Emboldened by a Democratic win of the White House, civil libertarians and human rights groups want the incoming Obama administration to investigate whether the Bush administration committed war crimes. They don’t just want low-level CIA interrogators, either. They want President George W. Bush on down.
There’s a little problem here, though.
Without wider support, the campaign to haul top administration officials before an American court is likely to stall.
In the end, Bush administration critics might have more success by digging out the truth about what happened and who was responsible, rather than assigning criminal liability, and letting the court of public opinion issue the verdicts, many say.
I strongly recommend reading the entire McClatchy article. I posted recently on the subject of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I don’t like the Reconciliation part any more than anyone else does. Pat Leahy (D – VT) predicts that there will be no criminal punishments. He’s almost certainly right. Dick Cheney has just admitted his guilt to the entire world and nothing – absolutely nothing – is being done about it. And nothing will be done about it.
There is, however, one possibility: the United States of America joins the International Criminal Court.
Are we up to it? Are we willing to join the ICC and allow any potential war criminals in our population to be tried openly and fairly on the world stage? Bust ourselves and turn ourselves in and plead for mercy? I doubt it. But it would be nice.
Our biggest obstacle to making this happen is mentioned in the McClatchy article:
Also left unanswered is whether any top congressional Democrats consented directly or indirectly to the most controversial interrogation practices after the administration disclosed them in closed-door briefings.
I think one of them said something like “impeachment is off the table” after the 2006 elections. More and better. Right. Check the dates. Scrutinize the time-lines.
Our leaders don’t lead. They follow. Sometimes they need to get shoved out front. We may have a different one now. We’ll see. Joining the ICC would be an emphatic statement that the truth will be known.
Satya.
Cross posted at Naranjanistan. GOS for the non-Spanish literate.
As a surfer, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to paddle in to shore on a big day at Waimea. That’s the shore break you usually see in photos as the gnarliest wave ever. I’ve seen some amazing photos of guys hanging in mid-air on a twenty foot face with their board flying next to them and the back of the wave is the ocean itself. The sand is just in front of and below them and they’re about to get pounded. It seems like we’re all going through that right now in so many ways and on so many levels.
Yule has begun. Midwinter, Yule, Cuidle, Alban, Arthan, Winter Rite. 19-23 Dec (winter solstice)
Enjoy. Think good thoughts. Be the change you want to see.
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Can’t happen soon enough. Thank you for bringing this further into the light.
Even if global attention may be needed to bring down maybe perhaps two, the heads of the criminal enterprise that would only be two of them and not all of them.
I have to remain anti-Globalist in true pure form.
“Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order [referring to the 1991 LA Riot]. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond [i.e., an “extraterrestrial” invasion], whether real or promulgated [emphasis mine], that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government.”
Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991
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I was just logging in again and I thought I was stuck on my own page. Had me going for a minute there. 😉 I was about to comment on Edger’s Holder essay. Looks like we have a great candidate for AG.
Obama, Biden, Holder, the Senate and the House can only go as far as we the people push them. I think it’s going to take a lot of pushing internally in the US. My instinct tells me that Pelosi and Reid are complicit along with the House and Senate members who are on the committee that gets to supposedly know everything that’s going on. I’ll dig around for the other names. Any insight on that would be appreciated.
There’s also the timeline of events in the US during the last decade and the ICC and Rome Statute. I’ll do what I can on that. Again, on instinct, I think that Bush and Co have stepped in it big time if we can get them into the Hague.
Big if.
Satya. And thx again for the promo.