[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: Fwd: [SBM] ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team

[Spencer Graves]

I would add that the senior executives of the mainstream US media 
corporations should similarly be sued, because they conspired to 
suppress reports suggesting that the Bush administration claims were 
false.  Spencer


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Fwd: [SBM] ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team
Date: 	Sat, 23 Apr 2011 09:23:59 -0700
From: 	Betsy Wolf-Graves <betsy237 at prodsyse.com>
To: 	spencer graves <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com>



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[SBM] ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team
Date: 	Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:26:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: 	Bizhan Pouya<iaczine at yahoo.com>
To: 	SBM List<sbm at lists.riseup.net>



ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110422/ap_on_re_us/us_elbaradei_memoir

NEW YORK � Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed
ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration
officials should face international criminal investigation
for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil
servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of
"grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq
invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his
lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite
contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms
inspectors inside the country.

The Iraq war taught him that "deliberate deception was not
limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,"
ElBaradei writes in "The Age of Deception," being published
Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.

The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009 and recently a
rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his
321-page account of two decades of "tedious, wrenching"
nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly
in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear
ambitions.

"All parties must come to the negotiating table," writes
ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the
IAEA in 2005. He repeatedly chides Washington for reluctant
or hardline approaches to negotiations with Tehran and
Pyongyang.

He is harshest in addressing the Bush administration's
2002-2003 drive for war with Iraq, when ElBaradei and Hans
Blix led teams of U.N. inspectors looking for signs Saddam
Hussein's government had revived nuclear, chemical or
biological weapons programs.

He tells of an October 2002 meeting he and Blix had with
Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice and others, at which the Americans sought
to convert the U.N. mission into a "cover for what would be,
in essence, a United States-directed inspection process."

The U.N. officials resisted, and their teams went on to
conduct some 700 inspections of scores of potential weapons
sites in Iraq, finding no evidence to support the U.S.
claims of weapons of mass destruction.

In his own memoir, published last November, Bush still
insisted it was right to invade to remove a "homicidal
dictator pursuing WMD." But the ex-president also wrote of a
"sickening feeling" when no arms turned up after the
invasion, and blamed an "intelligence failure" for the
baseless claim, a reference to a 2002 U.S. intelligence
assessment contending WMD were being built.

But that assessment itself offered no concrete evidence, and
Bush and his aides have never explained why the U.S.
position was not changed as on-the-ground U.N. findings came
in before the invasion.

ElBaradei cites examples, including the conclusion by his
inspectors inside Iraq that certain aluminum tubes were
designed for artillery rockets, not for uranium enrichment
equipment to build nuclear bombs, as Washington asserted.

The IAEA chief reported this conclusion to the U.N. Security
Council on Jan. 27, 2003, and yet on the next day Bush �
in a "remarkable" response � delivered a State of the
Union address in which he repeated the unfounded claim about
aluminum tubes, ElBaradei notes.

Similar contradictions of expert findings occurred with the
claim, based on a forgery, that Iraq had sought uranium from
Niger, and an Iraqi exile's fabrication that "mobile labs"
were producing biological weapons.

"I was aghast at what I was witnessing," ElBaradei writes of
the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion,
which he calls "aggression where there was no imminent
threat," a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked
to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, "should
not the International Criminal Court investigate whether
this constitutes a `war crime' and determine who is
accountable?"

Formidable political and legal barriers would seem to rule
out such an investigation. But ElBaradei, citing the
war-crimes prosecution of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, sees
double standards that should end.

"Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and
courage to take the corrective measures needed, to ensure
that such a tragedy will never happen again?" he asks.



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