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<a href="http://www.communitycurrency.org/bushandclinton.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.communitycurrency.org/bushandclinton.html</a> <br><br>
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<h2><b>George Bush and Bill Clinton Do Toronto: Pepsi versus Coke meets
Republican versus Democrat </b></h2>
</ul>
</ul>Anthony J. Hall<br>
Professor of Globalization Studies<br>
University of Lethbridge <br>
29 May, 2009<br><br>
From Calgary to Toronto<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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) <br><br>
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) <br><br>
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) <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
Left versus Right as a Substitute for Law versus Criminality,<br>
Peace with Justice versus War Without End<br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
Torture, Ethics, Law and the Future of Human Civilization<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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) <br><br>
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) <br><br>
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)
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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)
<br><br>
Wollowing in an Era of Elite Gangsterism<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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] <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
________________________________________________________________________________________
<br><br>
Footnotes <br><br>
(1)
<a href="http://911blogger.com/node/19540" eudora="autourl">
http://911blogger.com/node/19540</a> <br><br>
(2)
<a href="http://www.peoplevbush.ca/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.peoplevbush.ca/</a> <br><br>
(3) Robert Jackson, Nuremberg Trials, Opening Arguments for the United
States at
<a href="http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/Resource/DOCUMENT/DocJac15.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/Resource/DOCUMENT/DocJac15.htm</a>
<br><br>
(4)
<a href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/424240.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/424240.html</a> <br><br>
(5)
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62a53enMtA0" eudora="autourl">
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62a53enMtA0</a> <br><br>
(6)
<a href="http://www.splittingthesky.net/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.splittingthesky.net/</a> <br><br>
(7)
<a href="http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1367260784754864363&ei=lEAcSrGgOIn-qAPzipS5Ag&q=Pepsi+Coke+Pilger&hl=en" eudora="autourl">
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1367260784754864363&ei=lEAcSrGgOIn-qAPzipS5Ag&q=Pepsi+Coke+Pilger&hl=en</a>
<br><br>
(8)
<a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/07/15/hersh/index.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/07/15/hersh/index.html</a>
<br><br>
(9)
<a href="http://www.prisonplanet.com/media-ignores-real-controversy-behind-torture-photos-they-show-prison-guards-raping-children.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.prisonplanet.com/media-ignores-real-controversy-behind-torture-photos-they-show-prison-guards-raping-children.html</a>
<br><br>
(10)
<a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22684.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22684.htm</a> <br><br>
(11) Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, “The Ruth About Richard Cheney,” 13
May, 2009, The Washington Note, at
<a href="http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/</a>
<br><br>
(12) Peter Finn, “Detainee Who Gave False Iraq Data Dies in Prison in
Libya,” The Washington Post, 12 May, 2009 at
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html</a>
<br><br>
(13)
<a href="http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/digst-fin-and-state-terrorism-may2009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/digst-fin-and-state-terrorism-may2009.html</a>
<br><br>
(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
<br>
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