Bush should stand trial: Nuremberg prosecutor

A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said President Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than one million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting "aggressive" wars–Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq. "Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime," the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council. Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place. He said the atrocities of the Iraq war–from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by US forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs–were highly predictable at the start of the war. "Every war will lead to attacks on civilians," he said. "Crimes against humanity, destruction beyond the needs of military necessity, rape of civilians, plunder–that always happens in wartime. So my answer personally, after working for 60 years on this problem and [as someone] who hates to see all these young people get killed no matter what their nationality, is that you've got to stop using warfare as a means of settling your disputes." Ferencz believes the most important development toward that end would be the effective implementation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is located in the Hague, Netherlands. The court was established in 2002 and has been ratified by more than 100 countries. It is currently being used to adjudicate cases stemming from conflict in Darfur, Sudan, and civil wars in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But on May 6, 2002–less than a year before the invasion of Iraq–the Bush administration withdrew the United States' signature on the treaty and began pressuring other countries to approve bilateral agreements requiring them not to surrender US nationals to the ICC. Three months later, President Bush signed a new law prohibiting any US cooperation with the International Criminal Court. The law went so far as to include a provision authorizing the president to "use all means necessary and appropriate," including a military invasion of the Netherlands, to free US personnel detained or imprisoned by the ICC.