COMMENTARY | According to the Daily Caller, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, is pressuring President Barack Obama to formally investigate and prosecute his predecessor, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney for human rights violations during their administration, in addition to Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet, who served at the pleasure of the administration.
"There is overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration ordered the torture and abuse of various detainees," alleges the group in a 107-page report. "There are solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet for authorizing torture and war crimes," Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote in a press release. "President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime." The report suggests that if the United States does not prosecute the former president, that other countries should do so under international law.
I am of two minds on this issue. Certainly I believe the Bush administration is guilty of crimes against humanity and a variety of war crimes, in addition to exceedingly bad judgment and leadership. Were I the president, none of those men would have audience at my White House. I absolutely believe that they should be investigated and tried for their crimes.
However, the Obama administration is the wrong venue for such an investigation or prosecution to occur. Indeed, it sets a dangerous precedent for incoming administrations to investigate and or prosecute former administrations for their activities. That falls on either the United States Congress, or else, in the case of worldwide prosecution, The Hague.
In the end, despite that Bush and his cronies harmed America and made poor choices for our security, our liberty and our economy, his team's crimes, other than the deception on intelligence that lead to the war in Iraq, were against other nations -- not against his own people. As to that deception, I'm not certain that members of the Congress were not complicit in the crime, and it seems that launching an investigation from inside of the United States, any way you cut it would be fraught with difficulty and paramount to asking Bill Ayers to help investigate Ted Kazinsky.
We went to war under false pretenses. For that there must be some sort of penalty. The Bush administration spun the story to create an end to justify their means. The notion that American intelligence was as mistaken as the administration claims is absurd, and the secondary notion that Saddam Hussein was, rather than harboring weapons of mass destruction, himself a weapon of mass destruction, is nothing more than a smoke screen for a crime committed against Hussein and the people of Iraq.
Hussein was tried and killed for crimes committed before the first gulf war and he was convicted ex-post facto by a government that had no legal jurisdiction in the case of Saddam Hussein. He was not subject to those laws during his tenure in government.
A common citizen in America who kills someone that they assume is an intruder, only to find that they were mistaken and that they have just killed the love of their lives, will go to prison for manslaughter. How much more then must we demand of leaders who in error send our troops to war, killing hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of "faulty intelligence"? Bush and his cronies should be prosecuted, but we're the wrong ones to do it. Send it to The Hague.
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