KUALA LUMPUR WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
Case No. 1 - CP - 2011
The Kuala Lumpur War
Crimes Commission
Against
1. George W. Bush
2. Anthony L. Blair
Submission of AMICUS CURIAE on behalf of both the Accused at the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal sitting from 19 - 22 November 2011
Honourable members of the Tribunal,
I apply now to Court to have marked as exhibit the memoir of George Bush entitled “Decision Points” and the memoir of Tony Blair entitled “A Journey”. This is their answer to the charges levelled against them; in their own words.
I also apply to Court to note on the record that I adopt our earlier submission, that there was no case to answer, for this stage of the proceedings.
As Amicus Curiae appointed by the Tribunal to assist the Tribunal, I am but a friend of the Court. Only a friend. Strictly speaking, I am not a party. I am here to humbly “[educate] the court on points of law that are in doubt, gathers or organizes information, or raises awareness about some aspect of the case that the court might otherwise miss. ... An amicus curiae must not be a party to the case, nor an attorney in the case, but must have some knowledge or perspective that makes her or his views valuable to the court.” http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/amicus+curiae
And I have tried to be a true friend of this Tribunal. To speak the truth gently, and politely, even though it may have hurt. And for the times that it has hurt, in the past 3 days, I apologize, to all parties who may have been offended.
This Tribunal has found that the prosecution has made out a prima facie case. With the Tribunal’s leave, I wish now render one final assistance and tender this submission on behalf of both Accused. My colleagues have submitted on the law. The Tribunal has ruled. There is a prima facie case. That is that. I have adopted their submission and would like to add the following:-
No one in this room, not one of us, (save one), knows what it feels like to have the weight of a nation upon his shoulders.
Both the Accused were heads of their nations - Bush for 8 years, Blair for 10. The United States of America is about 300 million people; the United Kingdom, about 60 million.
They took their respective nations to war. That is a fact. The question now is: Were their actions a “crime against peace”?
Did they “planned, prepared and invaded the sovereign state of Iraq on 19 March 2003 in violation of the United Nations Charter and international law”? (from the Charge)
Was there any “just cause whatsoever”? (Particular 1 of the Charge)
BACKGROUND
9/11 changed things. It really did. Those of us old enough to have lived through it, who saw it, who could understand it at the time ... we knew instantly that the world would forever be a different place. In our hearts, we knew things would never be the same. And changed they did.
9/11 changed EVERYTHING[1].
People did unthinkable things on that day: Illogical, insane, stupid and desperate things.
Fear was the rule from that day on. Fear and anger, oftentimes irrational, gripped the world for years after that day. Even till today.
Judgment most assuredly fled to brutish beasts. “Havoc!” cried out.
How I wish that were not the case. How I wish Bush; maybe, just maybe, at the opportune moment would have said, “We know who you are. We know you did this to us. And we forgive you.” Makes me wonder sometimes what might have happened. I’d like to think that that may have made this world a much different place. A much better place.
But he did not.
What happened after that was, well, Afghanistan happened. Iraq happened. Guantanamo happened.
All because stupid people did stupid things.
We are who we are. Fallible[2] human beings.
It is so easy for us to forget that human being are fallible. We make mistakes. We say the wrong things. We act the wrong way. We type the wrong things.
And we have ego. We have pride. And for a multitude of other reasons, we often choose not to say, “I don’t know. I am not sure. I am scared.”
That is us. Even ordinary us, when looking terror in the face still want to say, “I am not scared of you! I will beat you.”
Imagine what might have gone through the minds of Bush and Blair; leaders of large, rich and powerful nations to see before their very eyes the proof that someone, some group, could “get them”, could hit them where it hurts most: At the pride of America’s economy, the Twin Towers, in New York, once the tallest buildings in the world.
I can’t imagine. You can’t imagine. Only one here can.
Bush is human. Blair is human.
This is what they have to say, in their own words:-
LOGIC
BUSH
“They left trotted out a new mantra: ‘Bush Lied, People Died.’ The charge was illogical. If I wanted to mislead the country into war, why would I pick an allegation that was certain to be disproven publicly shortly after we invaded the country? The charge was also dishonest. …. Nobody was lying. We were all wrong. The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat.” (Decision Points: page 262, paragraph 2)
THE 5 QUOTES read during ORAL SUBMISSION
QUOTE 1 - BLAIR
“I understood the importance of the second resolution in terms of political survival and so forth. I confess I always thought it a bit odd in terms of the moral acceptability of the course of action or not. It bestowed more legitimacy, it was true, but whether we got a second resolution or not basically depended on the politics in France and Russian and their calculation of where their political interests lay. We had acted without UN authority in Kosovo. It would have been highly doubtful if we could ever have got UNSC agreement for either Bosnia or Rwanda. I never ever thought about it for Sierra Leone. Yet it would be hard to argue that morally, in each of those situations, we should not have intervened. What’s more if the going got tough, as we have found in Afghanistan, the mere fact of UN authority does not necessarily bind people in.”
(Blair, A Journey : page 430 2nd last line to page 431 whole of paragraph 1)
QUOTE 2 - BUSH
“In the summer of 2002, I received a startling piece of news. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who had experimented with biological weapons in Afghanistan, was operating a lab in northeastern Iraq. ‘Suspect facility in this area may be producing poisons and toxins for terrorist use,’ the briefing read. ‘Al-Zarqawi is an active terrorist planner who has targeted U.S. and Israeli interests: Sensitive reporting from a [classified] service indicates that al-Zarqawi has been directing efforts to smuggle an unspecified chemical material originating in northern Iraq into the United States.”
(Bush,Decision Points: page 236, paragraph 2)
QUOTE 3 - BUSH
“For my first eight months in office, my policy focused on tightening the sanctions- or, as Colin Powell put it, keeping Saddam in his box. Then 9/11 hit, and we had to take a fresh look at every threat in the world. There were state sponsors of terror. There were sworn enemies of America. There were hostile governments that threatened their neighbours. There were nations that violated international demands. There were dictators who repressed their people. And there were regimes that pursued WMD. Iraq combined all those threats.
Saddam Hussein did not just sympathize with terrorists. He had paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and given sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Nidal, who led attacks that killed nineteen people at an Israeli airline’s ticket counters in Rome and Vienna, and Abu Abbas, who hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an elderly, wheelchair-bound American.
Saddam Hussein was not just a sworn enemy of America. He had fired at our aircraft, issued a statement praising 9/11, and made an assassination attempt on a former president, my father.
Saddam did not just threaten his neighbours. He had invaded two of them, Iran in the 1980s and Kuwait in the 1990s.
Saddam Hussein did not just violate international demands. He had defied 16 UN resolutions, dating back to the Gulf War.
Saddam Hussein did not just rule brutally. He and his henchmen had tortured innocent people, raped political opponents in front of their families, scalded dissidents with acid, and dumped tens of thousands of Iraqis into mass graves. In 2000, Saddam’s government decreed that people who criticized the president or his family would have their tongues slashed out. Later that year, an Iraqi obstetrician was beheaded on charges of prostitution. The woman’s true crime was speaking out about corruption in the Iraqi health ministry.
Saddam Hussein did not just pursue weapons of mass destruction. He had used them. He deployed mustard gas and nerve agents against the Iranians and massacred more than five thousand innocent civilians in a 1998 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja. Nobody knew what Saddam had done with his biological and chemical stockpiles, especially after he booted inspectors out of the country. But after reviewing the information, virtually every major intelligence agency in the world had reached the same conclusion: Saddam had WMD in his arsenal and the capacity to produce more. One intelligence report summarized the problem: ‘’Since the end of inspections in 1998, Saddam has maintained the chemical weapons effort, energized the missile program, made a bigger investment in biological weapons, and has begun to try to move forward in the nuclear area.’’
Before 9/11 Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage. Through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed. I had just witnessed the damage inflicted by nineteen fanatics armed with box cutters. I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists. With threats flowing into the Oval Office daily- many of them about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons- that seemed like a frighteningly real possibility. The stakes were too high to trust the dictator’s word against the weight of the evidence and the consensus of the world. The lesson of 9/11 was that if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited too long. I reached a decision: We would confront the threat from Iraq one way or another.”
(Bush, Decision Points. Page 228-229).
QUOTE 4 - BUSH
“Whenever I heard someone claim that we had rushed to war, I thought back to this period. It had been more than a decade since the Gulf War resolutions had demanded that Saddam disarm, over four years since he had kicked out the weapons inspectors, six months since I had issued my ultimatum at the UN, four months since Resolution 1441 had given Saddam his ‘final opportunity,’ and three months past the deadline to fully disclose his WMD. Diplomacy did not feel rushed. It felt like it was taking forever.”
(Decision Points: page 247, paragraph 2)
QUOTE 5 - BUSH
“I’ve always wondered why many critics of the war did not acknowledge the moral argument made by people like Elie Wiesel. Many of those who demonstrated against military action in Iraq were devoted advocates of human rights. Yet they condemned me for using force to remove the man who had gassed the Kurds, mowed down the Shia by helicopter gunship, massacred the Marsh Arabs, and sent tens of thousands to mass graves. I understood why people might disagree on the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. But I didn’t see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced the cause of human rights.”
(Decision Points: page 248, paragraph 1)
OTHER QUOTES THAT AMICUS BELIEVES WOULD BE OF ASSISTANCE TO THE TRIBUNAL (edited out)
This is a Tribunal of law. There is no need for name-calling. There is no need for grandstanding[5].
I would urge this Tribunal, before returning a verdict, to carefully consider all the cases and authorities cited in the 4 defence bundles, all the exhibits marked in toto, and this humble submission; and to return a verdict which accords with law, justice, and conscience.
Fiat justitia ruat caelum[6]
Dated this 22nd day of November, 2011.
_________________
Jason Kay Kit Leon
Amicus Curiae
[1] USA Today article about people jumping from the twin towers - http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-09-02-jumper_x.htm
[2] liable to be erroneous; capable of making a mistake - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fallible
[3] For the back story on the 2 sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein, please see New York Times - Iraqi Defectors Killed 3 Days After Returning - February 24, 1996 http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/24/world/iraqi-defectors-killed-3-days-afterreturning.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm – exhibit D2, Defence Documents, Volume 2 - Crimes against Peace
[4] For the back story on the 2 sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein, please see New York Times - Iraqi Defectors Killed 3 Days After Returning - February 24, 1996 http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/24/world/iraqi-defectors-killed-3-days-afterreturning.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm – exhibit D2, Defence Documents, Volume 2 - Crimes against Peace
[5] to play or act so as to impress onlookers - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grandstanding?show=0&t=1321912971
[6] "Let justice be done though the heavens fall." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_justitia_ruat_caelum
