4/23/2004 01:29:00 PM

I really like Google News. It makes a deep diversity of sources accessible to us normal folks. Whether you agree with it or not it is amazing that something like this would be on the Google News front page: Again, Why George W. Bush Must be Tried as a War Criminal -The Tehran Times. A generation ago this would have been nearly treasonous. Today it is delightfully and transformatively subversive.

Subversion without direct intention. That is one of the second-order effects of hyper-literacy and the tools that enable it.

In a September 23, 2003 speech to the United Nations, President Bush noted that both the UN Charter and American founding documents "recognize a moral law that stands above men and nations, which must be defended and enforced by men and nations." Following World War II, just such action was taken at the Nuremberg trials and American, British, French and Soviet jurists established Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter, which legally defines "Crimes Against Peace."

To commit a crime against peace, one must engage in "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war." Bush is guilty on all these counts....

Bush, supported by the mainstream corporate media, has hidden behind the semantics of "pre-emption." Under international law, a pre-emptive strike is allowed when a nation is preparing for an imminent attack. Bush would be hard pressed before any tribunal, short of a Texas kangaroo court, to establish that the Iraqi military was an imminent threat to the U.S. Iraq was a defeated, heavily impoverished nation, under economic sanctions and restricted by U.S.-enforced no-fly zones in both its north and south....

The so-called "Bush doctrine" is in reality an echo of the illegal Nazi doctrine of "preventive" war, which asserted that any country that may pose a future non-specific threat can be attacked and occupied. This is not "higher moral law," rather it is a repugnant Nazi doctrine last heard when Germany attacked Poland prior to World War II. Add to the mounting evidence against Bush's criminality the fact that his key advisors are the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who have been publicly waging a campaign to attack Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. A quick visit to the Project for a New American Century website (www.newamericancentury.org) establishes their blatant disregard for both the UN Charter and Nuremberg principles.