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Did George W Bush commit war crimes to the american standard

gumboot said:
The problem with the prohibition on waging a "War of Aggression" is that no one has ever bothered to define what a "War of Aggression" is, essentially making the prohibition meaningless.
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Yes, it gets into a very sticky situation where the winners can declare the losers to be "criminals."

Virus said:
Oh yeah. Three 9/11 linked al-Qaeda terrorists had water poured up their nose. That's the critical human rights issue of the age. Next to a few college kids getting pepper sprayed.
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Hyperbole presented as fact.
 
gumboot said:
The problem with the prohibition on waging a "War of Aggression" is that no one has ever bothered to define what a "War of Aggression" is, essentially making the prohibition meaningless.
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Not quite true.

Any sustained war against another country not in defense against immediate and ongoing attack, or without the expressed consent of the UN Security Council, is a war of aggression.

The problem is less what a WoA is, but the legal process of who gets to determine when an aggression becomes a war of aggression, or which war is aggression, vs. self-defence.
 
Virus said:
Oh yeah. Three 9/11 linked al-Qaeda terrorists had water poured up their nose. That's the critical human rights issue of the age. Next to a few college kids getting pepper sprayed.
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Why bother to waterboard someone if it REALLY is just "water poured up their nose"? What effect woukld that have?
 
If Bush is guilty of acts of which we previously charged others in the past with war crimes for, how is this different? Is a war crime not a war crime if you think the victim deserved it? Is a war crime not a war crime if you had a good reason to do it?

Virus said:
Oh yeah. Three 9/11 linked al-Qaeda terrorists had water poured up their nose. That's the critical human rights issue of the age. Next to a few college kids getting pepper sprayed.
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Hyperbole. If it's not torture, why use it as a form of torture? What makes torture bad, if torture even is something you consider bad?
 
gumboot said:
The problem with the prohibition on waging a "War of Aggression" is that no one has ever bothered to define what a "War of Aggression" is, essentially making the prohibition meaningless.
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Not quite, Nuremberg and Tokyo are useful precedents.

The lesson of course is don't lose, or be weak enough afterwards to allow other nations to grab your leaders.
 
Halfcentaur said:
If Bush is guilty of acts of which we previously charged others in the past with war crimes for, how is this different? Is a war crime not a war crime if you think the victim deserved it? Is a war crime not a war crime if you had a good reason to do it?



Hyperbole. If it's not torture, why use it as a form of torture? What makes torture bad, if torture even is something you consider bad?
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Because the only way we will prosecute our torturers is to have evidence released publically. That is why Obama backed down on his campaign pledge to release photos of americans torturing its prisoners.

We only charged the abugraib people because the pictures got out.
 
WildCat said:
No, those incidents were being investigated prior to the pictures getting out.
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And nothing would have been done with out the political pressure. It also did not do anything to those in charge. As the abuse was obvious from the situation, asking untrained soldiers to soften up prisoners will easily lead to abuse check out the Stanford prison experiment.

Of course there is also the question of how they learned such culturally specific abuses.
 
Halfcentaur said:
If Bush is guilty of acts of which we previously charged others in the past with war crimes for, how is this different? Is a war crime not a war crime if you think the victim deserved it? Is a war crime not a war crime if you had a good reason to do it?
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The argument is that many war crimes (killing civilians, pillaging, etc) are laws governing the tactical and strategic choices of people directing the military. In America, the constitution declares the president the commander in chief, and restricts congressional authority to funding. captures on land or sea, the declaration, and the UCMJ.

The last one is important. Does it apply to the ability to create war crimes? If we assume it doesn't, then congress cannot regulate the tactical and strategic decisions of the president. Then, none of those war crimes could ever apply to the president if tried in an american court.
 
gumboot said:
I think you could make a case that implementing a policy of torturing detainees is a warcrime, and on that grounds you could claim Bush committed warcrimes. Other than that? No.
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No such case could be made. Bush sought legal counsel on the issue of aggressive interrogation techniques, and approved only those techniques that were deemed legal. Bush also informed congressional leaders of both parties on the approved interrogation techniques.

No one said a word. Not one word. Until it became politically expedient to raise a stink. Then numerous political hacks of various stripes began to raise their usual dishonest stinks.

Nothing is a 'war crime' until it is defined as such by some legal authority. Vague definitions of 'torture' which can be retroactively interpreted to mean anything that's useful for scapegoating purposes simply won't cut it. It is hardly credible that waterboarding was defined as 'torture' when it was routinely being used on Army Special Forces trainees as part of their training.
 
Virus said:
Apparently the civilized world wants overthrowing a genocidal fascist regime to be a war crime.

If that's what you want then that's what you want.
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If that's what they want, then they can hardly be reasonably considered "civilized".

But I assume you are using the term "civilized world" in a strictly relative sense. Compared to a genocidal fascist regime.
 
Oystein said:
Not quite true.

Any sustained war against another country not in defense against immediate and ongoing attack, or without the expressed consent of the UN Security Council, is a war of aggression.
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Please cite your source for this definition. Like I said, there exists no definition under International Law for what constitutes a War of Aggression. Some have argued that any war that is not legally sanctioned (i.e. in self-defense or approved by the UNSC) is a war of aggression, however most international law experts tend to reject that notion, arguing rather that "war of aggression" would constitute a sub-set of non-sanctioned warfare (an example of a non-sanctioned war that is not a war of aggression would include a war based around a territorial dispute).



Oystein said:
The problem is less what a WoA is, but the legal process of who gets to determine when an aggression becomes a war of aggression, or which war is aggression, vs. self-defence.
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The Rome Statute of the ICC identifies the crime of waging a War of Aggression to be under its jurisdiction, but also states that it cannot exercise said jurisdiction until the parties to the statute agree on a definition and set out circumstances under which it can be prosecuted. That hasn't happened.


Border Reiver said:
Not quite, Nuremberg and Tokyo are useful precedents.

The lesson of course is don't lose, or be weak enough afterwards to allow other nations to grab your leaders.
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Indeed. The problem with Nuremberg (aside from its questionable legal standing) is that the actual crime that was created was "Crimes against Peace" and "war of aggression" was simply given as one of a number of examples within the definition of that crime, which leaves the definition of "war of aggression" unexplained. Further, the Nuremberg crime was derived from the now defunct 1933 crime of Waging a War of Aggression which had, as one of its prerequisites, a Declaration of War against a non-belligerent state. This is, indeed, the primary reason that so few countries have formally declared war since WW2, which further complicates any accusation of war of aggression.
 
Toontown said:
No such case could be made. Bush sought legal counsel on the issue of aggressive interrogation techniques, and approved only those techniques that were deemed legal. Bush also informed congressional leaders of both parties on the approved interrogation techniques.

No one said a word. Not one word. Until it became politically expedient to raise a stink. Then numerous political hacks of various stripes began to raise their usual dishonest stinks.

Nothing is a 'war crime' until it is defined as such by some legal authority. Vague definitions of 'torture' which can be retroactively interpreted to mean anything that's useful for scapegoating purposes simply won't cut it. It is hardly credible that waterboarding was defined as 'torture' when it was routinely being used on Army Special Forces trainees as part of their training.
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Ahem...

No coercion may be used on prisoners to secure information to the condition of their army or country. Prisoners who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind whatever.

Article 6
Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929
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The first Geneva Convention is pretty explicit in defining mistreatment of detainees as a warcrime. I'm sorry Toontown, but on this point you're wrong. Waterboarding a detainee is absolutely 100% a warcrime. It is illegal under international law, it has been for 80 years, and nothing can justify it.

Whether the military waterboard their own forces or not as part of their training is totally irrelevant.
 
funk de fino said:
Investigate and charged are two different things.
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Ah... I think you need to recheck your timeline. The US military first announced an investigation was underway on January 16, 2004. In February they announced that a number of soldiers had been suspended from duty. In March they announced they had laid initial charges against six soldiers.

Through all of these announcements the media expressed very little interest at all. It wasn't until April 2004, when 60 Minutes released a documentary on the abuses, that anyone actually cared. By then prosecution was well underway. Even then, interest was muted.

Then in May 2004, when the US Military released the Taguba Report which contained the findings of Major General Antonio Taguba's investigation the firestorm really sparked into life when a number of high-profile media outlets (most notably the New Yorker and NBC ran articles. Their articles were based almost entirely on the report released by the US Government.

Abu Ghraib is actually a perfect example of the military being pro-active in identifying abuse, stopping it, and being open and honest about its existence.

(Having said that I feel like they weren't aggressive enough on the prosecution side of things, though there were procedural screw-ups like most charges against Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan being dismissed because the interviewing officer failed to read him his rights.)
 
Ahem...

"No coercion may be used on prisoners to secure information to the condition of their army or country."

1. Terrorist detaineees are not Prisoners of War. They are, at best, nothing more than 'enemy combatants', undeserving of Prisoner of War status, which is considered an honorable status, in and of itself. In fact, real Prisoners of War may not be interrogated at all, except when suspected of having committed crimes.

2. Terrorist detainees are not interrogated "to obtain information to the condition of their army or country", since they do not have an army or a country. They are interrogated for the purpose of extracting information which might save the lives of the people the terrorists intend to slaughter.
 
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