Gashad said:
Recently with the release of the torture memos, some debate has arisen if the people who were responsible for the torture should be tried for there crimes. Now I would argue that while modern law of war would mean that people are responsible for there own actions, it would be profoundly unfair to try those who committed the actions but not those who ordered them(Indeed by the law of war officers are responsible for the actions of their soldiers, especially if they order them). This would probably bring the guilt all the way up to the top (even if George Bush wasn't aware/didn't authorize the torture [which I at least believe he did/was], as commander in chief he has responsibility to have control over the actions of the soldiers). Hence as torture is specifically forbidden in both the law of war and the universal declaration of human rights there is no doubt that George Bush has committed a criminal offence.
Even if you dispute the torture claims one cannot deny that George Bush has committed war crimes. By declaring the entire Taliban army "illegal combatants"(a term which for the record does not exist in the laws of war, it was just something George Bush made up), he has denied the Taliban fighters their rights as either combatants or civilians (The Geneva Conventions stipulates that all people in a conflict area must be one or the other) and hence clearly committed a war crime.
To try him there can be three possible authorities. Either the US which has signed both the Geneva Convention and the universal declaration of human rights can initiate proceedings against him. Moreover torture counts as a crime against humanity in which countries have universal jurisdiction, meaning that any country which George Bush visits can try him for it. Finally the international court of justice can step in and try a person for war crimes provided that the government the person belongs to (The U.S government in this case) is unable or unwilling to initiate proceedings against the person. While the US hasn't joined the ICC, most of the rest of the world have, and hence these could all send him to the ICC should he visit that country (some of the ICC members signed papers promising the US they will not send US citizens to the ICC however).
So do you think any of these authorities should try George Bush? Personally (in case you didn't catch the tone of this text) I am hoping for him being tried.
First of all, you have to define torture, and water boarding is not torture. Neither is anything else the Bush administration did. All of it was within the confines of the Geneva convention. People are just upset because it wasn't with in the confines of liberalism (not necessarily the political ideology as known of in America, but the idea that each man should be given certain universal rights - an ideology that, in it's basic statutes, I have both agreements and disagreements with: a man shouldn't be tortured till his wits end, yet he shouldn't be given certain rights provided for citizens of a nation he's not apart of).
As far as the "illegal combatants" are concerned, that's a term that arose because of the nature of Talibani insurgency. They didn't fight according to the geneva convention. They would hide in school yards to prevent an air force bombing, they'd use pregnant women (INNOCENT women scared into blowing themselves up) as suicide bombers, they'd rape and pillage those who disagreed with their ideology, etc. etc. They couldn't be treated within the literal confines of what the geneva convention stated because they acted outside of those confines. When somebody breaks the law, they forfeit whatever right they had that enabled them to break that law. If you murdered someone, you forfeit your right to live. When you rape a child, you get blacklisted and sent to jail. When you commmit economic fraud, odds are you will never be involved with economics again. If you don't abide by a military treaty, that treaty no longer applies to you, and the enemy of that treaty-breaker no longer should have to abide by that treaty.
But to make matters worse, President Bush took these enemy combatants (who gave up their rights to live, much less fight a humane war), flew them around the world, put them in a military prison where they had free range to partake in religious studies/services, free food, a bed, television, literature, contact with the outside world (in some cases...), recreational activities, etc. And then, gosh darn it, wouldn't you know the nerve of Bush? He only locked these people (on a Caribbean island no less... only a few miles away from some very favorable vacation spots) because they preached "death to America," and stopped at nothing to kill US and NATO troops, as well as the afghani sympathizers. And oh, can you believe that Bush authorized mild interrogation (not torture...) techniques when they believed someone had knowledge that could prevent thousands of people from dying at the hands of some terrorist extremist? God forbid Bush attempting to protect innocent CIVILIANS (I'm sorry, didn't you say that the geneva convention required you to list ppl as such? And doesn't that same treaty state that, in war, both sides should do all they can to minimize the damage to the civilian populace? I'm glad that at least one side in the war on terror attempted to do that...)
