[Sosfbay-discuss] George Bush and Bill Clinton Do Toronto:

[Carol Brouillet]

http://www.communitycurrency.org/bushandclinton.html


George Bush and Bill Clinton Do Toronto: Pepsi 
versus Coke meets Republican versus Democrat

Anthony J. Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge
29 May, 2009

 From Calgary to Toronto

Just as fresh revelations keep oozing out about 
the broad extent of the international criminality 
perpetrated by the regime of the former US 
president, Canada is becoming the main site of a 
corporate-driven effort to re-brand George W. 
Bush as a legitimate political pundit. On May 29 
Mr. Bush joins Bill Clinton on the stage of the 
Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre in an 
event hosted by the TD Financial Group and 
several other sponsors. The hosts include the 
Calgary-based Bennett Jones law firm, the global 
accounting giant Ernst and Young, the Toronto 
Board of Trade as well as the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.

The Clinton-Bush gig in Canada’s biggest 
metropolis is happening about a month after the 
former president “tested the waters” as a public 
speaker by addressing an audience of 1,400 
executives of mostly Texas-based oil 
conglomerates in an event hosted by Calgary’s 
Chamber of Commerce. Bush’s luncheon address was 
accompanied by the protests of several hundred 
demonstrators who advanced the case that there is 
a huge body of evidence already in the public 
domain that should be sufficient to prohibit Bush 
from entering Canada or, failing that, to 
necessitate his arrest on Canadian soil. In a 
widely published article, which I introduced in 
early March at an invited lecture at the 
University of Winnipeg, I outlined the legal and 
political terrain underlying Bush’s first major 
public foray outside the United States. That 
paper, which has proliferated widely on many 
Internet sites, is entitled “Bush League Justice: 
Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary 
Alberta and Tried for International Crimes.” (1)

My academic intervention was one part of a larger 
collective effort aimed at advancing the case 
that the international crimes of George W. Bush 
and many of his ministers and advisers have been 
so obvious and gigantic that citizens must 
mobilize globally to insist that the rule of 
international criminal law should be made to 
prevail over the rule of force and political 
expediency. (2) Many of the core legal principles 
awaiting enforcement are those that coalesced in 
the course of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. 
Its chief prosecutor, the renowned US jurist 
Robert Jackson, initiated the proceedings in 1945 
by insisting that humanity’s future depended on 
removing “immunity for practically everyone 
concerned in the really great crimes against 
peace and mankind.” No longer could “so vast an 
area of legal irresponsibility” be “tolerated” 
because “because modern civilization puts 
unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men.” (3)

In advancing the legal conception of universal 
jurisdiction the Canadian government, like that 
of many other countries, has internalized many 
elements of international criminal law into 
domestic legislation. Invoking key provisions of 
both the Immigration Act and Canada’s War Crimes 
and Crimes Against Humanity Act, Gail Davidson of 
Lawyers Against War informed Crown Ministers and 
law enforcement officials prior to the Calgary 
event that “the former President of the United 
States and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed 
Forces, is a person credibly accused of torture 
and other gross human rights violations, crimes 
against humanity and war crimes.” A number of 
other prominent jurists, including Ramsay Clark, 
former Attorney General of the United States, 
backed and extended Davidson’s legal intervention. (4)

Clark’s friend and client, Splitting The Sky, was 
handed the responsibility of representing the 
legendary US jurist’s position in the Calgary 
protests. This prominent Mohawk veteran of the 
American Indian Movement, the Attica prison 
debacle of 1971 and British Columbia’s Battle of 
Gustafsen Lake was charged and briefly jailed in 
Calgary as a result of his concerted effort to 
conduct a citizen’s arrest. (5) As Clark’s 
controversial client will argue in an important 
trial that has been set to take place in Calgary 
in March of 2010, citizens have a responsibility 
to intervene proactively when law enforcement 
officials refuse to do their duty and thereby end 
up aiding and abetting criminality. (6) As the 
Nuremberg rulings make clear, law enforcement 
officials cannot evade their own responsibility 
for aiding and abetting international crimes by 
claiming that they are simply following orders.

Only days after Bush was in Calgary the very same 
law laws that were overtly violated in permitting 
the credibly accused war criminal to enter the 
country were invoked in barring from entry George 
Galloway, a long-serving British parliamentarian, 
an untiring peace activist and one of the world’s 
most eloquent champions of Palestinian rights. 
This decision serves to highlight the propensity 
of Bush’s friend and ally, Prime Minister Stephen 
Harper, to replicate his role model’s zeal in 
placing himself as well as his Office on the 
wrong side of the rule of law when it comes to 
the pursuit of political objectives.

Left versus Right as a Substitute for Law versus Criminality,
Peace with Justice versus War Without End
The so-called “conversation” between former 
presidents comes at a time when hundreds of 
millions of global citizens have developed the 
view of George W. Bush as the very embodiment of 
the rampant criminality that has been spewing 
unchecked and without accountability from the 
highest echelons of political, military and 
financial power especially since the explosive 
events of September 11, 2001. Al Capone’s Chicago 
was a mere kindergarten of lawlessness compared 
to the amount of corruption and violence 
generated on a daily basis primarily by those 
states and corporations that have become chief 
protagonists in building up and exploiting the 
lethal yet lucrative terror economy.

In the eyes of the huge and growing constituency 
who can no longer stomach the maelstroms of 
murder and mayhem wrought in our name, the 
lecture circuit is not the appropriate place for 
George Bush to tell his side of the story about 
his actions while controlling the world’s most 
formidable arsenals of military and psychological 
warfare. Along with the likes of Dick Cheney, 
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza 
Rice, Bush should be presenting his 
self-justifications as the principle defendant in 
a properly constituted war crimes tribunal.

The role of Bill Clinton in the Toronto event 
raises a host of significant issues that should 
not be evaded. While the former Democratic 
president enjoys a far rosier public image than 
that of the discredited Republican president, the 
reality is that Clinton too is a fugitive from 
the decrepit and ineffective agencies of 
international law enforcement. Clinton’s most 
serious infractions involve his leading role in 
1999 in NATO’s illegal bombing of Serbian 
Yugoslavia, his tightening of the financial and 
trade embargo on Iraq resulting in the 
preventable deaths of over half a million 
children, and his genocidal decisions concerning 
how and when to intervene or not intervene in the 
bloody clashes of ethnically-based proxy armies 
and militias in Central Africa. Now a decade 
after Clinton helped sabotage the legitimacy of 
the United Nations by ignoring the Security 
Council’s jurisdiction in the US-led military 
dismemberment of multinational Yugoslavia, Hilary 
Clinton’s husband is lending the cache of his 
family dynasty to efforts to rehabilitate the 
reputation of the former Republican president who 
has made himself one of the most reviled individuals on the planet.

There is something fundamentally perverse in 
presenting Bush and Clinton on the same Toronto 
stage as if the main options facing humanity are 
available within the narrow and flawed framework 
of the two main political parties in the United 
States. In trying to come to terms with the 
largely unbroken legacies of the war crimes and 
crimes against humanity that will forever remain 
the main hallmark especially of Bush the Younger, 
we find ourselves poised between a range of 
alternatives pointing towards either global 
cataclysm or eleventh-hour redemption of human 
civilization. The magnitude of these choices call 
on all of us to confront hard choices and 
realities of a much higher order of magnitude 
than the mythology of Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal.

The two-dimensional flatness inherent in this way 
of viewing a world composed of three or more 
dimensions results in the trivialization of 
democracy as a mere extension of the kind of 
marketing competition that pits Pepsi against 
Coke. (7) The managed and constrained competition 
in the political arena disguises the vast 
entitlements of a tiny minority that exercises 
near monopolistic control over the world’s 
largest concentrations of wealth as well as over 
the huge political power that accompanies the 
concentrated ownership of propertied capital. The 
impoverishment of genuine pluralism to feed to 
monopolistic dichotomies of left versus right 
props up a rigged system that corruptly rewards 
the masters of spin and deceit even as it tends 
to discredit those seeking to point humanity 
towards pathways of justice, equity and 
self-determination. These high roads of justice 
and law offer the only reliable routes in the 
journey towards collective security through 
shared adherence to a genuine rule of 
international law enforced uniformly even on 
those at the very pinnacle of political, military and financial power.

The consequences of not following this high road 
of justice-- of allowing instead the rule of 
political expediency to trump the rule of law by 
failing to identify, arrest, try and punish those 
most responsible for perpetrating the highest 
order of international crime—is to continue our 
descent into an increasingly pervasive state of 
warfare, chaos and kleptocracy. Those currently 
overseeing this descent may misrepresent what is 
really going on with the rhetoric of hope, change 
and collective empowerment. But without a genuine 
determination to make the rule of law prevail 
over the rule of force we shall continue see our 
individual and collective rights and freedoms 
subjected to unbridled militarism, intimidation 
and gross exploitation of fear’s political 
economy. Nowhere does the convergence of threats 
with the tyranny of unregulated violence find 
fuller expression than in the proliferation of state-sanctioned torture.

Torture, Ethics, Law and the Future of Human Civilization

 From the criminal justice system of Spain to the 
talk show circuit in the United States, the 
Toronto event is taking place just as the 
abomination of torture is emerging as an issue of 
central importance on many juridical and 
political fronts. The growing chorus of voices 
insisting on some sort of public reckoning with 
the horrors inflicted by agents of the US 
executive branch in the torture chambers of 
Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and a host of 
other secret dark sites has been long gathering 
force. As evidenced by the Geneva Conventions and 
the detailed UN laws devoted to the subject, the 
crime of torture has engendered an especially old 
and elaborate body of international jurisprudence 
as well as a significant political constituency 
whose members are prone to press hard for its enforcement.

Those who insist on extending the instruments of 
legal accountability to the commanders and 
operatives of state-inflicted torture well 
understand that the descent into this hell of 
violated human dignity animates whole systems for 
the institutionalized imposition of abusive and 
illegitimate power. The proliferation of torture 
generally signals the sharp deterioration in the 
quality of the perpetrators’ moral universe. A 
dereliction of law to pursue the travesty of 
torture must be understood for all that this 
consequential shift has to do with the further 
empowerment of the most powerful at the primary 
expense of the most disempowered and dispossessed.

The understanding that state-inflicted torture is 
the persistent hallmark of the most ruthless 
forms of tyranny has coalesced again and again in 
the genesis of the international law for the 
prevention and punishment of torture. In the late 
1950s and early 1960s, for instance, the civil 
harmony of France was obliterated as the likes of 
Henri Alleg, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus 
helped report and interpret the depravity of 
officialdom in their resort to torture as an 
expedient to maintain French imperial rule in Algeria.

In recent weeks the many interventions of Dick 
Cheney have helped to inflame the debate as the 
former US Vice-President has commandeered great 
quantities of air time in his zeal to prevent the 
type of probing investigations that might very 
well land him and his cronies in jail. Cheney’s 
campaign to justify state-inflicted torture as a 
necessary and evil expedient of the post-9/11 
world constitutes a classic case of a former 
public official protesting too loudly and too 
belligerently. There is ample reason to suspect 
that the bravado of this former CEO of 
Halliburton Corporation is meant to cloak 
Cheney’s appreciation of his own vulnerability as 
the official who best epitomizes the unchecked 
gangersterism that thrived in the dark shadows of 
George Bush’s White House. The depth of Cheney’s 
thinly disguised desperation is suggested by his 
willingness to put his own daughter Liz in harm’s 
way. The former vice-president has effectively 
deputized her as his advocate in his dubious 
campaign to prevent the rule of law from being 
enforced on his own his actions and those of 
cronies. The lawlessness of their conduct took 
place over a eight-year period when Cheney and 
company were extended virtually unlimited 
latitude to act in their own self-interest in the 
name of the US Commander-In-Chief.

The Cheney family’s efforts have probably been a 
factor in the decision of President Barack Obama 
to invoke his own executive power to slow the 
flood of new information coming to light about 
the scope and extent of US torture perpetrated in 
the name of the Global War on Terror. Obama’s 
decision to favour cover up over transparency was 
underlined in his recent determination to prevent 
the open dissemination of a number of 
still-unreleased photos and videos documenting 
the precise nature of the human rights violations 
that have taken place in the United States’ own 
torture chambers and as well as in those of the 
failing superpower’s well armed puppet regimes. 
While the current US president has suggested 
there is nothing new or remarkable in the 
suppressed images, his reassurances have not put 
a lid on continuing allegations that the US 
executive branch is hiding the pictoral record of 
children in US custody being brutally sodomized in front of their parents. (8)

The growing controversy over the law and politics 
surrounding the international crime of torture 
adds acid to the steady corrosion of the official 
narrative underlying the so-called Global War on 
Terror. This process finds especially clear 
expression in the revelations surrounding the 
case of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi. As revealed by 
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief staff of the 
US State Department under Colin Powell, al-Libi 
was tortured in Egypt in April and May of 2002, 
“well before” the Justice Department had rendered 
any legal opinion” on the character and content 
of torture. The objective of this resort to 
torture was not to gain information about another 
terrorist attack on the United States but rather 
to force the victim to declare a connection 
between the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein 
and those already blamed for the 9/11 attacks. (9)

After being constrained in a coffin for seventeen 
hours and subjected to a “mock burial,” al-Libi 
finally put a stop to his suffering by uttering 
the falsehoods that his torturers were 
sadistically empowered by the White House to 
extract. Al-Libi told them that the Iraqi 
government had trained al-Qaeda operatives in 
biological and chemical warfare. This falsehood 
emanating from al-Libi’s bloodied and quivering 
lips provided the basis for the dishonest 
international representations made by the Bush 
White House at the United Nations and elsewhere 
during the winter of 2003 in the run up to the 
Bush-led invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi has recently 
turned up dead in a Libyan prison. The Libyan 
government has made the claim, questioned by 
many, that the prisoner took his own life. (10)

This episode puts yet another nail in the coffin 
of the argument that the US government’s resort 
to illegal torture was all about saving civilians 
from catastrophe. The al-Libi case demonstrates 
that torture was embraced by the Bush White House 
not to save the innocent but rather to produce 
the fraudulent propaganda deployed to justify 
military invasions abroad and police-state 
incursions at home. The failure to identify 
torture as integral aspect of the lies and crimes 
entailed in Iraq’s invasion adds to the 
complicity of the media conglomerates in 
reporting as truth the Bush government’s lies 
that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The role of corporate media as enablers and sugar 
coaters of the highest order of international 
crime could not be made clearer than in the 
sponsorship by the Globe and Mail of the Toronto 
encounter between Clinton and Bush. What 
credibility does the Globe and Mail retain after 
the Toronto event in its coverage of the fast 
breaking story of the global movement to enforce 
the rule of law on credibly accused war criminal 
George W. Bush? How likely is it that the 
journalists at the Globe and Mail will report 
fairly and objectively on the intervention of Lawyers Against War.

On May 26 LAW responded to news of the 
Bush-Clinton event by forwarding evidence of 
Bush’s authorization of torture to Prime Minister 
Stephen Harper, Justice Minister Rob Nicolson, 
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Public Safety 
Minister Peter Van Loan and the chief officers of 
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In that letter 
Canada’s top law enforcement officials are 
informed that the failure to enforce the domestic 
War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act 
“violates Canada’s international law 
obligations.” The lawyers continue, “Such 
inaction denies remedies to victims, ensures 
impunity for perpetrators, and encourages other instances of torture.”

The zeal of those at the top echelons of power in 
the Bush White House to deploy the coercive crime 
of torture in order fabricate the story of a 
connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein 
finds a further possible extension in contested 
reports about the existence of an executive 
assassination squad said to have been answerable 
directly to Dick Cheney. These contested reports 
point to the possibility that one of the reasons 
that the Pakistani presidential candidate, 
Benazir Bhutto, was murdered had to do with her 
blunt public statement to British broadcaster Sir 
David Frost that Osama bin Laden has been killed 
by the double agent Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Regardless of how and why Bhutto was 
assassinated, her bold and unequivocal assertion 
in November of 2007 that bin Laden is definitely 
dead would, if it had been properly reported 
rather than censored at the source by the BBC, 
have severely undermined the dark psyops which 
remain, with the involvement and complicity of 
the mainstream media, the primary stock in trade 
of the so-called War on Terror’s main promoters 
and protagonists. News of bin Laden’s death at 
the hands of a notorious double agent would not 
have served the interests of those seeking to 
build up the US military presence in the border 
region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Accordingly, 
regardless of whether or not Bhutto’s elimination 
was engineered by Cheney’s hit squad or some 
other covert branch or contractor of the US 
government, her assassination helped ease the way 
for the new rounds of aggressive warfare being 
mounted in the Pakistan’s Swat Valley under the 
leadership of President Barack Obama. (11)

Wollowing in an Era of Elite Gangsterism

The organizers and sponsors of the talk given by 
George W. Bush in Calgary advertised the supposed 
achievements of their invited guest in a 
colourful pamphlet distributed to those who had 
paid the $400 entry fee to hear the former US 
president. In this document the claim is advanced 
that Bush built “global coalitions to remove 
violent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that 
threatened America—liberating more than 50 
million people from tyranny.” This 
characterization of history, whose sponsors 
include the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, the 
Bennet Jones law firm, Ernst and Young as well as 
the Frank McKenna, the Deputy Chair of the TD 
Bank, stands as blasphemy especially to the 
families of the 1.5 million killed in Bush’s wars 
in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 6,000,000 internally 
or externally displaced Iraqis, and the many 
millions more who have been maimed, tortured and 
forever damaged by the violence committed in the 
name of an implausible and specious official 
interpretation of what transpired in New York and 
Washington on September 11, 2001.

No amount of corporate fluff and propaganda can 
change the reality that both George Bush and Bill 
Clinton are both guilty of leading aggressive 
wars. Their wars were clearly not expressions of 
self-defense nor were they authorized by the 
Security Council of the United Nations, the sole 
agency with the capacity to sanction legal 
warfare. As belligerents both Clinton and Bush 
have wallowed in the shame and depravity of the 
supreme international crime. I draw the language 
of this accusation from the most important war 
crimes tribunal ever assembled. In sentencing 
some of the convicted Nazis the judges at 
Nuremberg established the principle that “to 
initiate a war of aggression
. is not only an 
international crime. It is the supreme 
international crime differing from other war 
crimes in that it contains within itself the 
accumulated evil of the whole.” (12) [my emphasis]

The Nuremberg rulings were refined and distilled 
in 1950 at the United Nations into principles 
that point with precision to exactly the kinds of 
illegal acts that have proliferated in the name 
of the Global War on Terror. One of the Nuremberg 
Principles stipulates, “The fact that a person 
who committed an act which constitutes a crime 
under international law acted as a Head of State 
or responsible government official does not 
relieve him from responsibility under international law.”

The many international crimes that are already 
known to have taken place at Abu Ghraib, Bagram 
and Guantanamo Bay under George W. Bush’s signing 
authority stand at the proverbial tip of an 
as-yet-largely-uninvestigated iceberg. Images of 
the cruel lawlessness that thrived in these 
violent sites of attempted empire building do not 
conform well with the wall-to-wall spin doctoring 
producing the massively replicated lies, 
distortions and strategic omissions that 
constitute the mental staple of the media 
conglomerates at the core of the global infoentertainment industry.

The lawlessness being confronted by Lawyers 
Against War and many hundreds of other 
organizations in civil society have nothing to do 
with the doctrinaire marketing of so-called law 
and order as regularly glorified in the gutter 
media by fear’s political merchants. The crimes 
being addressed, rather, are part of a global 
epidemic of elite gangsterism that has been 
allowed to go unchecked in the bombing missions, 
torture chambers and concentration camps whose 
governance often leads back to the corporate 
board rooms where many of the core decisions of 
the military-industrial complex and the national security state are made.

________________________________________________________________________________________ 


Footnotes

(1) http://911blogger.com/node/19540

(2) http://www.peoplevbush.ca/

(3) Robert Jackson, Nuremberg Trials, Opening 
Arguments for the United States at 
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/Resource/DOCUMENT/DocJac15.htm

(4) http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/424240.html

(5) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62a53enMtA0

(6) http://www.splittingthesky.net/

(7) 
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1367260784754864363&ei=lEAcSrGgOIn-qAPzipS5Ag&q=Pepsi+Coke+Pilger&hl=en 


(8) http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/07/15/hersh/index.html

(9) 
http://www.prisonplanet.com/media-ignores-real-controversy-behind-torture-photos-they-show-prison-guards-raping-children.html 


(10) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22684.htm

(11) Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, “The Ruth 
About Richard Cheney,” 13 May, 2009, The 
Washington Note, at 
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/

(12) Peter Finn, “Detainee Who Gave False Iraq 
Data Dies in Prison in Libya,” The Washington 
Post, 12 May, 2009 at 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html 


(13) 
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/digst-fin-and-state-terrorism-may2009.html 


(14) Cited in Toram Dinstein, War, Aggression, 
and Self-Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2005), 120. The judges were quoting the 
British jurists Lord Wright [of Dursley], “War 
Crimes Under International Law,” The Law Review 
Quarterly, Vol. 62, January, 1946

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