One of President George W. Bush’s former top counterterrorism chiefs said in an interview this week that Mr. Bush — as well as his vice president, Dick Cheney, and defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld — committed war crimes during the conflict with Iraq.
“I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes,” Richard Clarke, the former national coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism, told Democracy Now. “Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have.”
Mr. Clarke suggested that the International Criminal Court might serve as a viable place of trial.
“We have established procedures now with the [ICC] in The Hague where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried,” he said. “So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration.
“It’s clear that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it’s clear that some of the things they did were war crimes,” Mr. Clarke said.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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