A US human rights group has called on foreign governments to prosecute former US president George W. Bush and some of his senior officials for war crimes if the administration of US President Barack Obama fails to investigate a growing body of evidence against the former president over the use of torture.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released yesterday that US authorities are legally obliged to investigate the top echelons of the Bush administration over crimes such as torture, abduction and other mistreatment of prisoners. It says that the former administration’s legal team was part of a conspiracy in preparing opinions authorizing abuses that they knew to have no standing in US or international law.
Besides Bush, HRW names former US vice president Dick Cheney, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet as likely to be guilty of authorizing torture and other crimes.
The group says that the investigation and prosecutions are required “if the US hopes to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and reaffirm the primacy of the rule of law.”
HRW acknowledges the broad allegations are not new, but says they should be given fresh attention because of growing documentary evidence with the release of previously classified papers, admissions made in books by Bush and others, and from a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report that details illegal practices by the former administration.
The author of the HRW report, Reed Brody, says the issue also deserves renewed scrutiny because the Obama administration has all but abandoned its obligations.
“It’s become abundantly clear that there is no longer any movement on the part of the Obama administration to live up to its responsibilities to investigate these cases when the evidence just keeps piling up. Just this year we have the different admissions by president Bush that he authorized waterboarding,” he said.
HRW says Bush and his senior officials are open to prosecution under the 1996 War Crimes Act as well as for criminal conspiracy under federal law.
“There is enough strong evidence from the information made public over the past five years to not only suggest these officials authorized and oversaw widespread and serious violations of US and international law, but that they failed to act to stop mistreatment or punish those responsible after they became aware of serious abuses,” it said.
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