Washington Post
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 6, 2011

A planned trip to Switzerland this week by George W. Bush was canceled after human rights activists called for demonstrations and threatened legal action over allegations that the former president sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and several European human rights groups said they were planning to file a complaint against Bush and wanted Swiss prosecutors to open a criminal case against him once he arrived in the country.

In what would have been his first European trip since leaving office, Bush was scheduled to speak in Geneva on Feb. 12 at a dinner in honor of the United Israel Appeal. A lawyer for the organization said that Bush's appearance was canceled because of the risk of violence, and that the threat of legal action was not an issue. "The calls to demonstrate were sliding into dangerous terrain," the lawyer, Robert Equey, told the Swiss daily Tribune de Geneve. A spokesman for Bush said the former president regretted that his speech was canceled.

"President Bush was looking forward to speaking about freedom and offering reflections from his time in office," David Sherzer said in an e-mailed statement. Sherzer said that Bush has traveled to Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East since leaving office. Organizers of a rally outside the Hotel Wilson, where the speech was scheduled to take place, had called on demonstrators to each bring a shoe, an effort to echo the assault on Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in 2008 when an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at him.

The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that they had planned to bring the complaint under the Convention Against Torture on behalf of two of men, Majid Khan, who remains at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Sami al-Hajj, a former al-Jazeera cameraman who was released in May 2008. The 2,500-page complaint will not be filed in court, but will be released Monday at a media event in Switzerland. "Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he canceled his trip to avoid our case," the center's statement said. "The message from civil society is clear: If you're a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It's a slow process for accountability, but we keep going."

A Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman told the Associated Press that the country's Justice Ministry had concluded that Bush would have immunity from prosecution for any alleged actions while in office. The Center for Constitutional Rights disputed that interpretation, arguing there is no such immunity under the Convention Against Torture. The center and its European partners earlier filed suits against former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials in Germany and France. Those cases were dismissed.

UNITED NATIONS, March 4 -- The International Criminal Court's pretrial judges issued an arrest warrant for former U.S. President George Walker Bush on Wednesday, charging that he directed the mass murder of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It is the first time the Hague-based court has accused an American head of state of war crimes.

A three-judge panel upheld a request by the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, to charge Bush on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it ruled that prosecutors had not provided enough proof to charge Bush with orchestrating a campaign of genocide. Moreno-Ocampo, the panel said, was free to pursue the genocide charge later if he obtained additional evidence....The judges' ruling was detailed in a news conference at the court's headquarters in the Netherlands. Laurence Blairon, the tribunal's spokeswoman, said Bush exercised full control over the country's security and military apparatus as it carried out a brutal invasion and counterinsurgency against Iraqi rebels from March 2003 to January 2009.

The crimes included the "murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring of large numbers of civilians and the pillaging of their property," Blairon said. Blairon said that Bush's status would not shield him from criminal responsibility, "nor does it grant him immunity." Skippy Johnson, a spokesman for former President Bush, said Mr. Bush does not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague-based court and will never surrender himself for prosecution.

"For us, the ICC doesn't exist," Johnson said. "We are not going to be bound by any decision they make. We are in no way going to cooperate with it." The ICC prosecutor charged that Bush ordered the American military, backed by British, Polish, Australian and other forces, to carry out a genocidal campaign against Iraqis. The resulting violence has left an estimated 1 million people dead from violence, and caused hunger, disease, fear and chaos that have displaced more than 4 million people from their homes.

Oh wait; sorry. It looks like there was some detritus in the internet tubes, and the Post story was slightly garbled in transmission. It seems it was a mass-murdering leader named Bashir, not Bush, who has been charged by the International Criminal Court. We apologize for this mistake -- not only to our readers, but especially to Mr. Bush, who of course is not in the slightest danger of being charged by the International Criminal Court, but is instead enjoying a peaceful, comfortable, well-deserved retirement in his pricey new digs in Dallas.Having made such an egregious error, we feel we should say no more on the subject. Thus, we will leave the last word to Professor As'ad AbuKhalil:

This arrest warrant is a joke, of course and will not be taken seriously outside of the offices of the New York Times. I mean, let us say that Bashir (a lousy dictator with very low intelligence level and a skill in turning into a buffoon before a crowd, with a history of cooperation with Western governments--overt and covert) is responsible for much of the bloodshed in Darfur, his record pales by that (if you count the numbers of victims) of George W. Bush. I mean, will that body issue an arrest warrant for Bush or any American president if he/she were to drop a nuclear bomb on an entire country or continent? Of course not. But then again: how can the White Man resist the temptation to preach and sermonize? The White Man can't resist that opportunity.

George W Bush has had to call off a trip to Switzerland next weekend amid planned protests by human rights groups over the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and the threat of a warrant for his arrest. David Sherzer, a spokesman for the former US president, confirmed the move in an email to the Associated Press. "We regret that the speech has been cancelled," he said. "President Bush was looking forward to speaking about freedom and offering reflections from his time in office."

The visit would have been Bush's first to Europe since he admitted in his autobiography, Decision Points, in November that he had authorised the use of waterboarding – simulated drowning – on detainees at Guantánamo accused of links with al-Qaida. Whether out of concern over the protests or the arrest warrant, it is an extraordinary development for a former US president to have his travel plans curtailed in this way, and amounts to a victory for human rights campaigners. Since the arrest of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, international leaders can no longer be confident of immunity. Israeli politicians have cancelled trips to London and elsewhere for fear of arrest warrants.

Bush had been due to deliver a speech at a dinner in Geneva organised by the United Israel Appeal, a US-based organisation that helps Jews move to Israel. Robert Equey, the organisation's lawyer, was quoted by the Swiss daily Tribune de Genève at the weekend saying that the decision to abandon the speech was because of concern that the protests might lead to violence, not fear of an arrest warrant. "The calls to demonstrate were sliding into dangerous terrain," Equey said. "The organisers claimed to be able to maintain order, but warned they could not be held responsible for any outbursts." The threat of an arrest warrant had not been a factor in the decision. The Centre for Constitutional Rights, the human rights group seeking an arrest warrant, said: "Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid our case."

It added: "Anywhere in the world that he travels, President Bush could face investigation and potential prosecution for his responsibility for torture and other crimes in international law, particularly in any of the 147 countries that are party to the UN convention against torture." Organisers of the protest had called on participants to bring a shoe, commemorating the Iraqi journalist who threw one at Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad, to a rally outside the hotel where Bush was due to speak.

Human rights groups had planned to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in Geneva tomorrow over the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. The Bush administration claims that waterboarding does not amount to torture, but human rights organisations and the Obama administration have said it does. The document will no longer be filed in court but will be released at a media event. It focuses on two former Guantánamo Bay detainees, Majid Khan and former al-Jazeera correspondent Sami el-Hajj. Speaking before the cancellation of the visit, lawyers for the two said the trip was the first opportunity for the former president to face the legal consequences of authorising waterboarding and other techniques.

"What we have in Switzerland is a Pinochet opportunity," said Gavin Sullivan, lawyer for the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, backing the claim together with the US-based Centre for Constitutional Rights. "Bush enjoys no immunity from prosecution. As head of state he authorised and condoned acts of torture, and the law is clear – where a person has been responsible for torture, all states have an obligation under international law to open an investigation and prosecute." He added: "Bush will be pursued wherever he goes as a war criminal and torturer." Legal proceedings under way in Spain accuse White House legal advisers, known as the Bush Six, of criminal wrongdoing for advising that the techniques were legal.

"Nobody – from those who administered the practices to those at the top of the chain of command – is under a shield of absolute immunity for the practices of secret detention, extraordinary rendition and torture," said Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on human rights and professor of public international law at the European University Institute. "Legally this case is quite clear. Bush does not enjoy immunity as a former head of state, and he has command responsibility for the decisions that were taken."

Wanted: politicians who faced arrest The arrest of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 ended the immunity leaders had largely enjoyed. Britain had no choice but to act on an extradition request by Spain over the murders of Spanish citizens in Chile when he was in power. The targeting of US politicians began in earnest during the Bush administration after the opening of Guantánamo Bay detention centre, the invasion of Iraq and revelations of secret CIA prisons overseas and rendition flights. In 2005, the then US secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld, was threatened with arrest in Germany for war crimes relating to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Rumsfeld threatened to pull out of a prestigious defence conference in Munich until German prosecutors assured him that he would not be apprehended.

Israeli politicians have also been the subject of arrest attempts on visits to Europe. A British court issued a warrant in 2009 for Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, below, on behalf of Palestinian victims. But she postponed her trip to London, saying scheduling problems were to blame.Another Israeli politician, deputy prime minister Dan Meridor, cancelled a trip to London last year after being told he may face an arrest warrant or some other legal action, apparently over the Israeli killing of Turkish activists on a ship bound for Gaza.