Why Bush Regime War Criminals Must Be Tried

The crimes committed by Dick Cheney makes Tookie Williams look like a choirboy. Yet, now we want to simply walk away and expect the world to believe that America stands for justice?

[Beneath The Spin]

Many people have suggested to me that the only reason I’m so passionate over having members of the Bush Administration charged with war crimes is because I’m a liberal, and therefore, harbor some sort of deep-seated hatred for George W.
Bush. But that’s not true.

The fact is, I neither hate Bush, nor the conservatives. I’m a progressive, not an ideologue, so I have no ideological motive to see any adversity brought into his life. My passion stems from the fact that as a progressive, I have a progressive’s lust for justice.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, progressives have but one guiding philosophy–and that philosophy entails the primacy of humanity; justice for all. And the search for truth, wherever it may lead, and regardless to whose ox is gored.

It’s just happens that in this case, the ox that must be gored is our own. It’s not lost on me that many people who claim to be progressives today are actually quite partisan–they’re ideologues, and they view politics from the perspective of a sports fan – our team against theirs.

But I want to assure you that’s not the case here. I’m only looking at this situation from the perspective of what is just, and what is just in this case, is for Bush and his cohorts to be held strictly accountable for their conduct.

Consider our response to 911, for example. Look at how crazy we went over the murder of 3,000 of our citizens. We’ve been fixated on it for close to a decade now. But we’ve never once stopped to consider that if we feel that strongly over the murder of 3,000 of our people, how the Iraqis must feel about our killing hundreds of thousands of theirs?

Now take a moment to consider how we would take it if some country came over here and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, then simply said, “You know, now that we think about it, that wasn’t right. But what the hell–what’s done is done. We can’t bring ’em back, so we need to look forward, not backwards.”

If one of the people that they killed was your mother, father, sister, or brother, would you be willing to accept that? I don’t think so. So the mere fact that the U.S. expects the world to simply allow us to casually walk away from that atrocity without any accountability speaks volumes about both our arrogance, and why people want to kill us.

Dick Cheney claims that terrorists want to kill us because they’re jealous of our freedom. That’s complete bullshit. They want to kill us because we won’t mind our own business, and we keep trying to steal their oil.

America has got to learn two things: First, if you keep slapping your neighbor and picking his flowers, eventually he’s going to hit you back. And secondly, if you break into your neighbor’s home and wipe out his family, then you get caught with a pocketful of his valuables, trying to plead self-defense won’t fly. Any court in the world will convict you of being a
murderer and a thief.

We’ve never executed one criminal in the history of America whose crimes even approached the seriousness of the crimes committed by Bush and Cheney—and many, against our own troops. The crimes committed by Cheney makes Tookie Williams look like a choirboy.

Yet, now we want to simply walk away and expect the world to believe that America stands for justice? I don’t think so.

As long as we continue to think the rest of the world is beneath us, and the lives of others aren’t as valuable as our own, we’ll never be just, we’ll never be safe, and we’ll continue to move farther away from what it means to be Americans.

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