Richard Clarke, the nation’s top counterterrorism official under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, accused Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney of committing war crimes in their 2003 invasion of Iraq during an interview Tuesday with Democracy Now! that will air next week.
"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have,” said Clarke, who resigned in 2003 after the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. “But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried.”
In the first-ever judgment of its kind, Bush and seven other top members of his administration were convicted in absentia of war crimes in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2012 for the unlawful invasion of Iraq.
“So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration,” Clarke continued. “It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did -- in my mind, at least, it’s clear that some of the things they did were war crimes."
If I were ever to be asked what great injustice I would want to see rectified it would be that the entire Bush administration be prosecuted for war crimes and imprisoned for life.
Or executed. I am not usually a proponent of the death penalty, but in this case I would make an exception.
How George Bush can walk among the people of this country without every other American attempting to assassinate him for sending thousands of American soldiers to their death for a lie, is something that I just don't understand.
