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On the other hand, the intensity of rage against Bush in
America has been such (it never came remotely this close with Clinton because,
at bottom, there was nothing of any real substance to have any serious rage
against him for) that if I heard it once I heard it ten times that "someone
should put a bullet in his head." That, fortunately, is just loose talk, and
even more fortunately not the way we do things in America. In any event, if an
American jury were to find Bush guilty of first degree murder, it would be up to
them to decide what the appropriate punishment should be, one of their options
being the imposition of the death penalty.
Although I have never heard
before what I am suggesting — that Bush be prosecuted for murder in an American
courtroom — many have argued that "Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes"
(mostly for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) at the
International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But for all intents and
purposes this cannot be done.
*Even assuming, at this point, that Bush
is criminally responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people in the Iraq war,
under federal law he could only be prosecuted for the deaths of the 4,000
American soldiers killed in the war. No American court would have jurisdiction
to prosecute him for the one hundred and some thousand Iraqi deaths since these
victims not only were not Americans, but they were killed in a foreign nation,
Iraq. Despite their nationality, if they had been killed here in the States,
there would of course be jurisdiction.
**Indeed, Bush himself,
ironically, would be the last person who would quarrel with the proposition that
being guilty of mass murder (even one murder, by his lights) calls for the death
penalty as opposed to life imprisonment. As governor of Texas, Bush had the
highest execution rate of any governor in American history: He was a very strong
proponent of the death penalty who even laughingly mocked a condemned young
woman who begged him to spare her life ("Please don't kill me," Bush mimicked
her in a magazine interview with journalist Tucker Carlson), and even refused to
commute the sentence of death down to life imprisonment for a young man who was
mentally retarded (although as president he set aside the entire prison sentence
of his friend Lewis "Scooter" Libby), and had a broad smile on his face when he
announced in his second presidential debate with Al Gore that his state, Texas,
was about to execute three convicted murderers.
In Bush's two terms as
Texas governor, he signed death warrants for an incredible 152 out of 153
executions against convicted murderers, the majority of whom only killed one
single person. The only death sentence Bush commuted was for one of the many
murders that mass murderer Henry Lucas had been convicted of. Bush was informed
that Lucas had falsely confessed to this particular murder and was innocent, his
conviction being improper. So in 152 out of 152 cases, Bush refused to show
mercy even once, finding that not one of the 152 convicted killers should
receive life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Bush's perfect 100
percent execution rate is highly uncommon even for the most conservative
law-and-order governors.
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