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Non-governmental organizations and individuals from sixty-six different countries have filed 499 "communications" – or complaints – with the International Criminal Court (ICC), between July 2002 and July 2003. Many of them urge the ICC to investigate the United States conduct in the war on Iraq. The primary charge is that the U.S. committed an act of aggression against Iraq. The ICC has jurisdiction to punish the crime of aggression.
Cohn describes actions against the Bush administration in the ICC by Belgium and Greece’s Athens Bar Association:
In June, Belgium indicted Bush, Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft, and Condoleezza Rice for war crimes…. Belgium isn’t alone in indicting Bush and Blair for war crimes. In July, Greece’s Athens Bar Association filed a complaint in the ICC against the two for crimes against humanity and war crimes, this time in connection with their war on Iraq.
International Commission of Inquiry on “Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration The International Commission of Inquiry on “Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration of the United States” has charged Bush with “wars of aggression” and “torture, rendition, illegal detention and murder”. Discussing the conduct of the Iraq War, Howard Zinn states in the preamble to the Commission’s report that it:
has now reached the point of crime, crimes against humanity… a charge that peoples all over the world, and now more and more people in the United States, are beginning to level against this administration… The Bush administration has been reserving to itself the right to act unilaterally… presumably in the interests of democracy and liberty, but actually in the interests of business, big business, the oil business in this instance.
The Constitution provides for impeachment for what it calls “high crimes and misdemeanors.” … This is a clear case for the removal of a president for committing “high crimes”. What could be a higher crime than sending the young people of a country into a war against a small country… which is no danger to the United States, and in fact a war which is condemned by people all over the world and a war which results in, not only the loss of American lives and the crippling of young Americans but results in the loss of huge numbers of people in Iraq? These are high crimes.
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