The information below will not be found published in our government and corporate controlled media, but this story is out there. It is what the rest of the world knows.
Prior to this prosecutors and jurists in other nations, including Spain, Germany, and Canada, as signatories of the Geneva Conventions, made attempts at intercepting Bush and pursuing legal action as he entered their territories. However, these attempts were aborted under strong pressure from the present US (Obama) government (as documented by leaked secret cables obtained and published by Wikileaks). And the fact that Bush's crimes were mere allegations at that time. That is until just last year---in Switzerland.
In February of last year, the NY Times reported that former President Bush was forced to cancel a speaking engagement in Geneva, Switzerland for the United Israel Appeal when threats of large scale protests forced the organizer to cancel. ( See J. Risen, NYT, 2-5-11) Unfortunately for Bush,the event was scheduled just after the publication of the former President's book, "Decision Points" in which, in an attempt to rewrite history and defend his actions, he purposely or inadvertently laid out for the world his complicity in war crimes. In addition, during candid interviews he gave to boost book sales, Bush publicly and proudly stated that he had "personally authorized the use of torture" on several detainees. As a result, of his self-incriminating statements, Amnesty International petitioned the Swiss to open an investigation of Bush while he was in the country, since he could be prosecuted or these crimes in that nation--where the Geneva Accords on torture and war crimes were actually drafted. Though that petition was received and presumably evaluated by the Swiss government, the Swiss made no clear plans to prosecute Bush on his visit. (Think of the US possibility for retribution, and how difficult it might get for Victorinox to sell all those pocket knives.) However, when it became clear that protests would likely be violent, the United Israel Appeal cancelled the Geneva event. So Bush stayed home and was denied a hefty speaking fee. However, these events and self incriminating revelations set the stage for the subsequent War Crimes trail in Maylasia.
A similar scenario played out in Vancouver, Canada in October 2011, where a Bush speech again generated a wave of protests. But there, Bush picked up his fee, but he might not have felt so sanguine about the protests and controversy generated in "friendly", neighboring Canada as well as attempts at legal intervention to arrest him there.
Another revelation which put a dent in Bush's plans to exploit the talk circuit in coming months for quick dough, occurred on the BBC in England later that year on February 15, 2011. In an investigative report, the BBC interviewed Iraqi defector Rafid al Janabi, codenamed "Curveball" and sometimes credited as the source of the false evidence which led to the Iraqi War. According to al Janabi's own testimony, he lied when he claimed that he had witnessed the construction of "mobile" bacteriological weapon platforms which he claimed were to be put on truck beds and moved from place to place so they could not be detected by inspectors.. "I lied about it and I am not sorry for it" stated al Janabi. This author, only a moderatley well informed private citizen, recalled hearing the story about a mobile lab and, knowing something of bacteriology, knew that a sophisticated laboratory for weapons-grade bacteriological work could never be made to function on a truck bed. The idea was so incredible no one with any understanding of basic biology, physics and laboratory procedures could have believed it. None did. But Janabi happened to have defected to Germany (in 1999) when information on Iraq was of critically high value. The Germans could use the information (and disinformation) to ingratiate themselves with the Americans. So though he should have been sent back to Iraq, the Germans held on to al Janabi as a potential informant, even though no one in Germany took him seriously. For their own purposes they were planning to "sell" him to the US. When his story became more widely known, no one in the US intelligence and information service believed his story either. Some Americans actually worked diligently to persuade their seniors that al Janabi's information was incredulous. In fact that disbelief is what won al Janabi the epithet, "Curveball". What does it mean? A curveball looks like it is going wide but comes in for a strike. Its a "fooler" and that's what al Janabi was. But his stay in Germany and the stipend he might get for living expenses while he was there, depended on generating a story, and al Janabi supplied an imaginative one. His lies and perfidy would have had little impact on the world and we would never have heard the name "Curveball" had not a US President, George Bush, and an eager group of American neo-cons including Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld been casting around for some "evidence", any evidence, valid or not, that would serve their purpose as a casus belli for their already formulated plan to attack Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Curveball, (al Janabi) made the perfect keystone to fit the structured plan to invade Iraq. Al Janabi lied and George Bush and Dick Cheney (ignoring the CIA and intellignece services) in effect swore it was true.
Bur Bush was not finished until he coerced his Secretary of State, Colin Powell to swear to these "facts" at the infamous UN assembly. Al Janabi's lies and those of Bush's 'trustworthy' Secretary of State, at the UN, helped make the shaky case for a horribly destructive war for both Iraq and the US. [A war which caused the deaths of a minimum of a hundred thousand innocent Iraqis (but most statistically-valid independent analyses estimate Iraqi deaths at between 300,000 to 600,000), and nearly five thousand American troops killed, thirty-three thousand wounded, and millions of Iraqis turned into refugees, as well as that nation's once substantial infrastructure revengefully "bombed back into the Stone Age" as Bush ordered. This is to ignore economic impact at home and the massive debt incurred in the US (the three trillion dollars this war would cost) and the subsequent economic depression which it helped initiate.] Powell, playing his role as a weak, but loyal underling, without the strength, wisdom or courage to oppose his way-ward President, used up his previous sterling reputation for honesty with the American people to convince the UN and USA of the necessity to go to war. Powell lied. Incredibly, this formerly honorable man even got his White House staff to work up "more believable" diagrams of al Janabi's imaginary mobile WMD labs for his UN presentation, and to top it off, used as a phony prop a vial of innocuous white powder to further frighten his UN audience into agreement. When he appears in public somewhere, someone should throw a shoe at him too.
Al-Janabi was revealed by the BBC as a deceitful, purveyor of lies, scheming only for his own benefit and acting as a tool of the Bush-Cheney crowd to be used to further their war plans.
But today, twelve years after these troubling events, the inevitable millstones of justice, of which it is said, "grind very slowly but exceedingly fine" are doing their inevitable 'pulveriser' best. Today, in America we are faced with the embarrassment of harboring a former President who is convicted as a torturer and war criminal--(but yet we have no stomach to confront him, and our government at peril to its reputation as a nation of laws continues to ignore his crimes). Today, we also know that "Curveball", the perfidious, unprincipled, schemer, upon which Bush knowingly hung his plans for an illegal, immoral war, has himself confessed to his lies.
Thus, still not able to achieve justice for those we tortured at least we now know 'how' we were deceived. After these events we may garner some satisfaction that Bush's reputation is permanently scarred. His travels are confined (less as a result of his fear of potential arrest and trial as a war criminal, due to the protection he still gets from the US,) but more as a result of the disdain and hatred he arouses in foreign populations as a torturer and war criminal. Perhaps more significantly for him, Bush's ability to earn speaking fees on the anticipated, lucrative, post-presidential speaking circuit are now restricted and will not meet his expectations. At least that is some satisfaction to those Americans who opposed Bush and his illegal policies and suffered under his administration.
Perhaps other heads of state, even here in the US, (such as Mr Obama,whose extra-juridical assassination policies by unmanned drones in Afghanistan and elsewhere are under scrutiny now as war crimes) and those leaders in less powerful nations (with fewer levers to pull to protect their criminal element than the USA), will remember Bush who lied his nation into a disastrous three-trillion dollar war, maimed and caused the deaths untold innocents, and sanctioned torture, and war crimes. The pain on Bush's face as demonstrators throw their shoes at his head wherever it pops up, may give other potential war criminals and torturers pause!
Let us hope that America, which has such a poor collective memory, has finally learned something from its recent history...enough perhaps to avoid revisiting mistakes of way-ward leadershiip and in disastrous foreign entanglements made over and over again. My late good friend Dr. Jim Sosnowski, aged 26 years old, died in Vietnam in a forward MASH unit in another senseless war only 46 years ago. How can we forget his sacrifice and those of so many many others so quickly?
Get the picture?
rjk
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