Guilty

[thrutch]

Would or should a person consider Bush and the rest of his cabinet to be equally guilty of atleast some of the war crimes in which they have accused Saddam of, or Milosevic?

What about Tony Blair?

 

Discuss....

[Lars]

[scott_harpell]

Would or should a person consider Bush and the rest of his cabinet to be equally guilty of atleast some of the war crimes in which they have accused Saddam of, or Milosevic?

What about Tony Blair?

 

Discuss....

 

If you are talking about genocide, shooting random people and mailing the cost of the bullet to their wives, and allowing people to starve to death in their country while they are essentilly billionaires... then no.

[EWolfe]

[Mal_Con]

These are the counts in the Nurhnberg Trials

 

Count One: Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War

The "common plan or conspiracy" charge was designed to get around the problem of how to deal with crimes committed before the war. The defendants charged under Count One were accused of agreeing to commit crimes.

 

Certainly a case could be made that Bush and Blair agreed to invade Iraq who had not attacked them. The main question was if they knew the WMD and terrorism charges were false.

 

Count Two: Waging Aggressive War, or "Crimes Against Peace"

This evidence was presented by the British prosecutors and was defined in the indictment as "the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances."

 

This charge created problems for the prosecutors. Although Hitler had clearly waged an aggressive war, beginning with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Count Two was based on allegations that the Germans had violated international agreements such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. Signatories to that agreement had renounced war as an instrument of national policy (as opposed, say, to defensive war), but the pact did not define "aggressive war" and did not spell out the penalties for its violation.

 

Here there seems little doubt that the war was in violation of several international treaties notably the UN charter which prohibits unprovoked attacks. The argument that Iraq was in violation of UN esolutions would not be persuasive because individual states do not have the right to unilaterallly enforce such resolutions.

 

Count Three: War Crimes

The Russian and French prosecutors presented evidence on atrocities committed in the East and West, respectively.

 

Count Three was intended to deal with acts that violated traditional concepts of the law of war -- e.g. the use of slave labor; bombing civilian populations; the Reprisal Order (signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a defendant, this order required that 50 Soviet soldiers be shot for every German killed by partisans); the Commando Order (issued by Keitel, it ordered that downed Allied airmen be shot rather than taken captive).

 

War crimes were defined under the London Charter (the document drafted by the Allies before the trial began) as "murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners-of-war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages or devastation not justified by military necessity."

 

This is probably the clearest violation present in the Iraq war. There has been clear mistreatment of prisioners and civilians.

 

Count Four: Crimes Against Humanity

The Russians and the French again divided responsibility along East-West lines.

 

Count Four was applied to defendants responsible for the death camps, concentration camps and killing rampages in the East.

 

Here I would say not guilty. The crimes do not rise to this level.

[snoboy]

[snip], and allowing people to starve to death in their country while they are essentilly billionaires... then no.

 

Hmmm.

[scott_harpell]

[snip], and allowing people to starve to death in their country while they are essentilly billionaires... then no.

 

Hmmm.

 

huh...

[markinore]

What about Tony Blair?

 

I say give Blair a pass. All he did for Bush was what Monica Lewinsky did for Clinton.