You know what I would like to see?
George Bush in prison.
Our next guest on the show is trying to put George Bush in prison.
It's Professor Francis Boyle from the University of Illinois College of Law.
He's the author of Breaking All the Rules, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and the Case for Impeachment, Protesting Power, War, Resistance, and Law.
He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International and is a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee and drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Well, thank you very much for having me on, and my best to your listening audience.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
A most important story.
You have filed...
Yeah, of course, the mainstream news media refuses to cover it, as you know.
They've all been in cahoots with Bush for eight years, so of course they're not going to cover it.
So that's why I have to give interviews here to alternative news media sources like yourself.
So thanks for having me on.
Well, you know, it does kind of go without saying, doesn't it, that all the popular media stars on TV, and face it, TV is the only thing that matters, of course, same thing applies to the Times and the Post, but they're all guilty.
Each and every one of them helped lie us into war, and the last thing they can do is admit that it was the kind of thing where, well, for example, a professor of your stature would be filing papers with the International Criminal Court to have Bush and his cabinet, certainly from the first administration anyway, indicted for crimes against humanity.
Yeah, you would think they might cover it, but it doesn't really surprise me.
What else is new?
Right, for eight years they parroted everything Bush was up to, but again, thanks for having me on.
Well, in fact, as long as we're on that point here, we do have, I think, plenty of time to discuss this, but as long as we're on the media thing, Charles Goyette, a great radio host out of Phoenix, has pointed out repeatedly that the reason the American people, for the most part, are as bad as the media on this question is because they were as bad as the media on this question back then, too.
It was their war, and they wanted it, and bombing, you know, the town of Bedrock over there in Afghanistan, where there weren't even any buildings to bomb, just wasn't good enough for the American people.
They wanted an extra credit war, too, and they got it, and so they don't want to face up to the crimes against humanity, either, because they belong to a great many of us, as well as our politicians who led us into this mess.
Well, I don't know about that.
You know, I've lectured a lot all over the country, worked on a lot of cases.
Obviously, if the Bush administration, Karl Rove, and the rest of them, with the complicity of the U.S. government and the U.S. news media, lied to the American people consistently, constantly, propaganda one day after another after another, it doesn't surprise me that there might be this response, although I think there are a lot of good, commonsensical people out there in America who are just as appalled by what's going on here as you are and I am.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, so, now, let's get into the details of this here.
I guess if we had to start listing all the different war crimes of the Bush administration, we might get lost in the details.
There's so many.
So what specifically are the charges that you're seeking here at the International Criminal Court?
Well, my complaint necessarily has to be limited and focused by the jurisdiction of the court.
And for now, the court does have jurisdiction for crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice in ICC member states.
The United States is not a party to the ICC statute, the Rome statute.
So the court would only have jurisdiction for crimes they committed in ICC member states.
And that, to me, included and directly would pick up their policy of extraordinary rendition, which is really a euphemism for the enforced disappearances of human beings and their torture.
And what happened here was that there were public reports, I believe broken originally by the Washington Post, that Bush was using bases in European states for this purpose.
That then led the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe to set up a special commission under Dick Marti from Switzerland to investigate into this matter.
And there were very comprehensive investigations, and at the end of the day they produced a report based on official sources that documented the amount and extent of these extraordinary renditions in EU member states, European Union member states, almost all of which were parties to the ICC statute.
So when the Marti report came out, I realized that the ICC would have jurisdiction for that.
It does not have general jurisdiction to deal with all the war crimes committed by the Bush administration, but it does definitely have jurisdiction to deal with those.
So when that report came out, I began working on this complaint.
Prior to that report, all sorts of people were constantly contacting me and asking me to file a complaint, and I would say, yeah, but where's the jurisdiction?
But now, with the Marti report, clearly there was jurisdiction, and then second, I'm a licensed attorney, I have a professional obligation to investigate both the facts and the law before I take legal action against anyone, and I simply could not rely on news media reports to submit a complaint.
But the Marti report is an official report, there's extensive documentation, archives, and everything else, so I felt that now I had both the facts on the basis of the Marti report and the law, the jurisdiction, so I could go ahead and file this complaint.
Now, what happened, of course, was the election of Obama, and under the rules of the court, I had to wait and see if Obama was going to prosecute any of these people.
And unfortunately, as you know, Obama and his attorney general and the Vice President Biden have basically said they're not going to prosecute any of these officials for any of these crimes.
So that fulfilled the last element of my complaint, known as complementarity, namely, the ICC must give a sovereign nation state the first opportunity to prosecute for crime, either based on territoriality or its own national.
So when Obama made it clear late last spring that he wasn't going to prosecute, that was really the last element I needed.
And that's clear in the, I take it you probably have the cover letter I sent for the complaint to the ICC prosecutor, Moreno Ocampo.
Right, it's here at afterdowningstreet.org.
So that then was the final piece.
I couldn't really go ahead and file, because if Obama said he was going to prosecute, then that would satisfy the ICC requirement of complementarity, and that would have been that.
There would have been nothing for me to do except wait for the Obama prosecution.
But regretfully, they're not going to prosecute.
And unfortunately, the Obama administration has publicly stated they are continuing the Bush policy and practice of extraordinary rendition.
So I also made it clear in my complaint with the ICC that, you know, if Obama did not cease and desist, eventually I would have to file a complaint against him and Biden and the rest of them.
But right now I don't have any evidence as to precisely what Obama has done.
They've announced the policy will continue, but so far the evidence is not there.
So I figured, fine, let's start with Bush and his people, close that chapter, see if I can get them indicted and arrest warrants issued, and then hopefully that would send a message to Obama to cease and desist, but also holding in abeyance the threat of a complaint against Obama and the rest of them if they continue this policy of extraordinary rendition.
All right.
Now I've got a few legal questions here for you.
First of all, you're going for the rendition policy entirely, or in your papers, do you cite specific cases of people who were renditioned to these European states and provide basically grand jury-worthy material on specific cases, right?
That is correct.
The complaint itself is 50 pages long, and I go through all of the people who have been rendered through the European Union states and what was done to them and how, and where they were located and things of that nature.
I also have several in Afghanistan, Bagram, Afghanistan is a party to the ICC statute, and one or two from Jordan, which I believe is also a party.
But the great majority of these states, the vast bulk of them, are European states.
And again, I've relied primarily on the Marty Report, although there are news media accounts that I've used to supplement this information.
But most of it is on the basis of the Marty Report.
And Marty Report was focused on the European states.
Right.
Now, here's the thing about this.
Well, as has been the case since the policy of the unitary executive and the lawless commander in chief started, we've had a conflict, a major conflict between politics and the law.
And the reality of the situation is, correct, that the ICC was created for the major powers to use against small states.
You can't really indict and prosecute a president and a cabinet from the U.S., the most powerful state on the U.N.
Security Council, and really expect that...
You don't really expect that these guys could be prosecuted, do you?
At the ICC?
I'm expecting something, yeah.
You know, Ocampo, this is dealing with the disappearances of human beings.
He was a human rights lawyer down in Argentina, dealing with the enforced disappearances of human beings and tortured by the Argentinian junta at that time.
So as I made clear in my cover letter, he, above anyone, has direct personal experience with enforced disappearances and torture.
So I was appealing to him as a fellow human rights matter to open this investigation.
So if he's a fair, honest man, a human rights lawyer, I would expect him to move forward.
But we'll just have to see what happens.
And there's more than enough evidence in the archives of the Marti report for him to operate on.
I'm not just talking about mainstream news media, which we've already agreed is pretty unreliable, but I'm talking about official documentation by the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe.
All right, now, there seem to be some different attempts by different lawyers in different places to pursue sort of the same ends here.
Of course, there's the judge-slash-prosecutor in Spain who has begun investigations, if not into Bush, at least into Donald Rumsfeld and some of the other cabinet members, I believe.
And then there's a lawyer from Britain named Philip Sands, and he's pursuing charges against the lawyers who advised the officials.
Right.
I have two lawyers in there, John Yu, Professor John Yu, and Judge Bybee, specifically by name.
I just don't list them as the kingpins.
Where exactly is that, that Philip Sands is pursuing that case?
That's separate from what you're doing in the ICC, right?
I think that's some type of civil action.
I'm aware of his activity.
I don't really coordinate with him one way or the other.
But to the best of my knowledge, this is the first complaint filed with the International Criminal Court that establishes jurisdiction to go after these people.
I'm sure all sorts of people would send letters there into the ICC saying, you know, why don't you prosecute Bush for war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan or torture or whatever.
But that doesn't do the trick.
You have to establish a sufficient basis to proceed by the ICC prosecutors on both the facts and the jurisdiction.
And I believe I've done that, and I think I'm the first one to have done it with respect to Bush and the others.
So there we stand.
I just filed it two weeks ago.
I've now set up an international campaign in support of this.
The website is bushtothehague.org, and we're trying to mobilize as much support as we can to get the ICC to open an investigation.
And I've also asked for a meeting with Moreno-Ocampo to go through all this.
And, you know, they've acknowledged receipt of my complaint.
They've given me a docket number, and they said they would get back to me.
So right now, that's fine with me.
So I have a lot of documentation certainly to get through the Marty report.
They'll have to get through all of that.
But I think at the end of the day, hopefully they will agree with me.
Well, it's a major test for the rule of law, but I guess that's kind of the premise.
Like James Madison said, you make ambition, check ambition.
And if the law says what it says, and there's a prosecutor who wants to do what he wants to do, then, you know, presumably that decision can't be influenced or, you know, it shouldn't be able to be influenced by politics.
It's simply a matter of the law.
And I guess, you know, that's the myth of America that I was brought up with.
I sure would like to see it apply here.
But then again, I got to try to kind of pick a fight with you here, Professor Boyle, about American independence.
And, you know, believe me, I'm completely with you on the fact that George Bush has been, you know, spent his eight years denying the independence of many nation states and many, many more individuals and in a great many different criminal ways.
However, I really want to see him indicted in, I guess, Virginia or something and prosecuted by an American court.
Because after all, even if he does, you know, I don't know, get arrested on a vacation to France one day or something like that and get hauled before the ICC, then that means he's tried without a bill of rights.
He may be tried by judges who don't even speak the same language as him.
He may.
And that that sets a precedent.
In fact, you look at the torture.
The highest level guy that got prosecuted was a sergeant.
So what I would expect would be to see sergeants brought up before the ICC and the politicians to always get away with bloody murder.
And that, you know, if sergeants are torturing people, I want to see them prosecuted.
But, you know, it would be a shame if we just I guess if it's a consequence of our lawlessness and our giving up on the theory of doing this ourselves here in America, that it has to come to us losing our independence and having precedent set for prosecution of Americans by foreign courts.
I mean, isn't that kind of problematic to you as well?
Well, yeah, I'd rather see Bush prosecuted here in America.
That's why I don't know, about two years ago, I started a campaign to get him indicted for murdering U.S. troops and to try to get a state's attorney or district attorney to indict him for murdering a U.S. troop served in Iraq, who was killed over in Iraq.
And if you're interested, the basis for that is in my book, Tackling America's Toughest Questions.
But so far, I haven't been able to find a state's attorney or district attorney with the guts to indict Bush.
So I tried that.
So what do you expect me to do?
He'll get a fair trial.
The ICC statute is set up.
Indeed, the United States government did participate in the drafting of the statute.
As for sergeants, the ICC is not set up to go after low-level people.
It's set up to go after the kingpins.
That's it.
So you're not going to, you know, sergeants will be tried in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is fine with me.
But the kingpins here are not going to be tried in the UCMJ.
And it doesn't appear that any of the state's attorneys or district attorneys here in the United States have the guts to try them, which is unfortunate.
If they were tried here in the United States, that then would satisfy the requirement of complementarity, and then the ICC prosecutor would stay his hand.
He'd be obliged to stay his hand.
So I'm glad I had the opportunity to bring up that red herring for you to smack it down there.
That's good.
Well, no, it's not a red herring.
Well, it is in the sense that, like you said, the ICC cannot indict a sergeant.
It's only geared for top-level officials.
That's correct.
And that's important.
And as I said, are the kingpins in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
That's who they go after.
And as I said, I've tried here all over the country, and I guess I'll continue to try very much.
You know, I firmly believe we Americans should be able to clean up our own mess and indict our own war criminals and prosecute them and put them in prison.
But unfortunately, we never did that for the Vietnam War.
Henry Kissinger is still out there running around being petayed, even by President Obama.
It's an outrage.
That man should be in jail now.
Bob McNamara was a celebrity and was never prosecuted at all.
I tried to get Kissinger up in Canada once and, you know, was unable to do that.
You know, they murdered 58,000 men of my generation, some of whom were friends of mine in Vietnam, and exterminated 3 million Vietnamese.
We never held them to account.
So I'm very sorry.
You know, if the U.S. prosecutors don't have the guts and the courage to apply the law, I've decided to take my complaint now to the ICC, and I guess we'll see what Moreno-Ocampo does.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much for your time and good luck.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for the interview.
Everybody, I really appreciate it.
Everybody, that is Professor Francis Boyle from, well, you can find his complaint, first of all, Bush to the Hague, at afterdowningstreet.org.
He's a professor of law at the University of Illinois.
