UN Rapporteur Says Obama Bound by International Law to Prosecute

Courtesy of the ever reliable Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

In an interview on Tuesday evening with the German television program “Frontal 21,” on channel ZDF Professor Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Rapporteur responsible for torture, stated that with George W. Bush’s head of state immunity now terminated, the new government of Barack Obama was obligated by international law to commence a criminal investigation into Bush’s torture practices.

“The evidence is sitting on the table,” he stated. “There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture.” He pointed to the U.S. undertakings under the Convention Against Torture in which the country committed that it would criminally prosecute anyone who tortured, or extradite the person to a state that would prosecute him. “The government of the United States is required to take all necessary steps to bring George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld before a court,” Nowak said.

I wanna see them in the Hague, because I think that you will have too many people willing to be a mole in the jury in the US.

Figure 20%+ dead-enders, that's two per jury, and, because it's going to be a long and complex trial, people who aren't die hard Bush supporters won't want to sit on the jury.