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Is Bush Trying To Dodge the Gallows?

By Dave Lindorff @ This Can't Be Happening!
7-28-6

Could George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and maybe Alberto Gonzales all end up sucking poison gas?

That, apparently, is a concern now being taken seriously by Attorney General Gonzales, who is quietly working with senior White House officials and friendly members of Congress to do what murderous dictators in Chile, Argentina and other bloodthirsty regimes have done as their future in office began to look uncertain: pass laws exempting them from prosecution for murder.

At issue is a growing legal threat of the president and other top administration officials facing prosecution for violations of the U.S. War Crimes statutes, which since 1996 have made violation of Geneva Conventions adopted by the U.S. violations of American law, too.

Gonzales knows the seriousness of this threat. As he warned the president, in a January, 25, 2002 "Memorandum to the President" (published in full in the appendix of Barbara Olshansky's and my new book, The Case for Impeachment), "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section [the US War Crimes law]." In another part of that same memo, Gonzales notes that the statute "prohibits the commission of a `war crime'" by any U.S. official, with a war crime being defined as "any grave breach of" the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War or of the Geneva Convention's Article 3. That article extends protection to combatants in other than official wars or formal armies. Gonzales, in that memo, also pointedly notes that the punishments for such violations, under U.S. law, in the event that mistreated captives die in custody, "include the death penalty."