Arrest Bush: From Calgary, Alberta to Surrey, British Columbia

By Joshua Blakeney

On Monday May 2^nd 2011, a coalition of activists and civil resisters, myself included, marched on Surrey City Hall in an attempt school Mayor Dianne Watts on the voluminous domestic and supranational legislation which exists pertaining to credibly accused war criminals and other violators of human rights. Mayor Dianne Watts’ ill conceived invitation to George W. Bush to come to Surrey, British Columbia to attend the annual Surrey Regional Economic Summit this October 20^th stimulated the demonstration, which was organized by Mohawk activist and author Splitting the Sky, who led the procession which marched peacefully in the direction of the mayor’s office chanting “Arrest George Bush! Enforce the law!”

Splitting the Sky presented Mayor Watts’ communications specialist Tara Foslien with documents demonstrating the correspondence between Bush’s self-admitted misdeeds and the Canadian laws explicitly prohibiting such crimes. The civil resister cited domestic legislation such as the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act as examples of two legal bodies enshrined to prevent Canada from becoming a safe haven for war criminals. Splitting the Sky informed Ms. Foslien that: “at one point he [Bush] was a credibly accused war criminal but now he’s a self-confessed war criminal…the mayor of Surrey B.C. here, Dianne Watts, has invited George Bush…for an economic summit on October 20^th of this year…and we’re saying that this is totally unacceptable…We cannot allow a war criminal into Canada. This guy’s a self confessed war criminal. He violated Article III of the Geneva Conventions against the use of torture in warfare…[Bush] admitted in his book that he in fact allowed his judiciary, the justice department, [and] his lawyers…to bend the law and break the law…George Bush technically should be charged with torture and murder.”

Also in attendance was Professor Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge. Hall emphasized the need for law enforcement officials to transcend politics and implement the law equitably, regardless of the status of the offender. Hall confronted the many police officers present with the following question: “when there’s a street person drunk and disorderly…does the police officer say “I have to phone the mayor…I have to phone the Prime Minister to ask if I can arrest him?” ” continuing “the police will be told…[Bush] is an “Internationally Protected Person.” That is not true! [Bush] is a civilian. He is no longer a head of state.”

The attempts to elucidate the illegitimacy of the proposed visit of Bush to British Columbia in October ought to be viewed as an extension of the citizens’ mobilizations which began with Bush’s controversial visit to Calgary, Alberta on March 17, 2009.[i] That visit was Bush’s first visit to a foreign country without diplomatic immunity. After the failure of law enforcement officials to do their jobs and arrest the then credibly accused war criminal – now self-confessed torturer – Splitting the Sky courageously and selflessly attempted to breach the police lines and conduct a citizen’s arrest on the former US president.[ii]

During the subsequent trial in Calgary which some dubbed The Trial of Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark – Splitting the Sky’s former lawyer – and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney flew in to the oil-patch city to participate in the proceedings.[iii] The trial culminated with Splitting The Sky being given a conditional discharge by Judge Manfred Delong allowing him to avoid immediate incarceration. Some read this comparative leniency as a tacit acknowledgement by Judge Delong that Splitting the Sky was, as he submitted, being a conscientious citizen when he attempted to uphold the rule of law by seeking to arrest Bush.

The “I was only following orders” Defence

According to a report in The Province Norm Stowe, the manager of the annual Surrey Regional Economic Summit to be attended by Bush, stated via email that “the city respected the rights of protesters to present their views but will have RCMP support to ensure the event is not disrupted…The RCMP have responsibility for security and we know they’ll find a balance that allows people to express their views without risking the safety of our speakers or those attending the summit”.[iv]

These comments, by the organizer of the economic summit, show a distinct failure to grasp the main contention of those protesting the impunity afforded to credibly accused war criminals in Canada. It is the law enforcement agencies themselves, including the RCMP, who are being objected to as it is they who are failing to do their jobs. How is it that Norm Stowe can be so positive that the RCMP will protect, rather than arrest, the self-confessed torturer during the October 2011 summit? Who gave the orders to the RCMP to reassure those organizing the event that their guests – even if they’re culpable for the most murderous of crimes – will be protected on that day? All those police officers who opt to protect, rather than arrest, George W. Bush when he comes to British Columbia are putting themselves in a position where they can be accused of complicity in the break down of the rule of law in Canada.

Those law enforcement officials who shirk their duties to uphold the rule of law in Canada might well use the defense in the future that they were merely “following orders.” This was the common alibi of many officials tried at Nuremberg and it didn’t wash. If I were an ordinary bobby assigned to shield George W. Bush from the law during his upcoming visit I would ask myself serious questions as to whether my role might have personal ramifications for me down the line.

[youtube 62a53enMtA0 Splitting The Sky attempts to arrest George Bush in Calgary]

If a police officer arrested Bush in Surrey on October 20^th s/he could easily justify doing so to an independent judge before a court of law. Firstly, by doing so the officer would be doing his/her job of upholding the rule of law. Secondly, by arresting the self-confessed torturer the officer would be maintaining civility and order as s/he would be eliminating any possibility of a confrontation such as that which arose in Calgary when Splitting the Sky was compelled, due to the failures of law enforcement officials, to attempt to break through the wall of immunity and impunity and arrest George Bush. During Splitting The Sky versus Bush the defense of those police officers who had obstructed Splitting The Sky from implementing the law was that they were keeping order during a lively protest. Surely the best way to maintain law and order would be simply to arrest Bush as this would remove the catalyst of the protest and maintain peacefulness on the streets of Surrey?

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The Liquidation of the Osama Bin Laden Franchise And The Increased Need To Arrest War Criminals

As the war machine continues to transform our benighted planet into a domain of never ending warfare the need for law enforcers to hold to account the protagonists of illegal wars has never been greater. An intensification of the 9/11 wars could only be prevented if Human Rights legislation began to be enforced on the organized gangsters in the highest echelons of power. The recent liquidation of the multi-billion dollar Osama Bin Laden franchise would not have arisen without some preconceived militaristic agenda. Cashing in the Bin Laden chips will serve as a smokescreen to legitimate further misery and warfare.

It is widely held that the biological Bin Laden died several years ago. Much evidence was marshalled to support this conclusion in David Ray Griffin’s book Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?[v] However, until May 2nd a virtual Bin Laden had surfaced from time to time in indecipherable camcorder-produced videos serving the function of conditioning millions of global citizens to falsely perceive a threat from Islamic terrorism. The mythical Bin Laden’s theatrics were used to justify U.S. and Israeli assaults against Arab and Muslim peoples. The unsubstantiated, ahistorical assertion that Bin Laden was killed on May 2nd has been described by author and pundit Webster Tarpley as a “completely manufactured, invented story created out of whole cloth by the US intelligence community primarily for the purpose of targeting Pakistan.”[vi] The demonization of the Pakistani security state, who stand accused of aiding and abetting Osama Bin Laden, is likely to serve as a pretext for the U.S. military to further colonize Pakistan.

That Bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALS with Obama “watching a feed [of the murder of Bin Laden] from a camera mounted on the helmet of one of the US SEALS who carried out the operation”[vii] is beyond the pale and, most importantly, completely unsupported by video or documentary evidence.

The Obama administration, which has been described by International law Professor Francis Boyle as “Zionist controlled and funded,”[viii] is on the one hand seeking to control Pakistan and on the other submitting to the Likudnik agenda of reordering and Lebanizing the Middle East. The successful Likudnik geopolitical strategy of fomenting a Big Rwanda type situation of ethnic and religious civil war could not have been visited upon the people of the Middle East without the 9/11 fraudulent trigger incident from which Israel was a prime beneficiary. Recent rhetoric of a possible NATO assault on Syria – a much emphasized priority for Likudnik foreign policy– coupled with the brutal assault on Libya (which was partially implemented to prevent the Libyan government from developing plans for a pan-African currency, the Gold Dinar) illuminates the pressing need for enforcement of international and domestic legislation pertaining to crimes against humanity and war crimes.

One could imagine that if George W. Bush was arrested and prosecuted for his self-confessed crimes that subsequent presidents of the declining American Empire and prime ministers of the ascending Israeli empire might think twice before they conduct further crimes against humanity and war crimes.

9/11 Skeptics Attacked by Post-Rationalist, Psychoanalyst Jonathan Kay

As is the case with all other aspects of the 9/11 sacred myth, citizens are expected by the military-industrial-academic-journalistic complex to prescribe to the “May 2nd killing of Bin Laden” state-conspiracy-theory, relying on faith in our betters, rather than demanding substantive evidence. Invariably those of us who understand the basic tenets of deductive logic – and who are inclined to survey evidence before forming conclusions – are denounced for daring not to take at face value what the U.S. government tells us.

One such attack on scientific reasoning and Enlightenment principles is found in a recently published psychoanalysis of the 9/11 Truth Movement entitled Among The Truthers (purportedly) authored by post-rationalist journalist Jonathan Kay.

Kay, who previously produced a book with a retired Mossad agent, captures the postmodern, subjectivist academic zeitgeist in his critique of genuine skeptics. Like most postmodernists Kay distances himself from those of us who seek to construct metanarratives based on our belief in science’s ability to unmask absolute truth.  The anti-Enlightenment, epistemic relativist denounces our quest for absolute truth vis-à-vis 9/11, writing “These metanarratives [of 9/11 skeptics] are so elaborate and ambitious that they essentially describe alternate moral universes” (Among The Truthers, 15). Since when has it been advisable to abandon the quest to figure out how our world operates simply because doing so might require one to be “elaborate” and “ambitious”? Since when has it been acceptable for a metanarrative to be deemed false simply because it is elaborate and it took ambition to formulate? This kind of nonsense is not atypical. Those of us who are the attempting to save the Enlightenment’s legacy from it’s postmodern enemies encounter such hostility regularly. Truth has always been the enemy of those ideologues and public intellectuals who are servants of certain factions of the ruling class. Kay himself concedes in Among the Truthers that sometimes “I [Jonathan Kay] bend the rules of logic in the service of ideology or partisanship” (Among The Truthers, 323).

The following statement offers a quintessential example of Kay’s ideology (an ideology which is perhaps identifiable from the subject matter of his previous book) influencing how he writes about the largely philo-Semitic 9/11 skeptics community : “By teaching ourselves to recognize conspiracism’s unchanging basic structure – from its archetype in the Protocols [of The Elders of Zion] to its modern incarnation in the 9/11 Truth Movement – we can protect our brains from conspiracy theories [i.e. metanarratives pertaining to conspiracies] before they have a chance to infect our thinking” (Among The Truthers, 317).

Kay thus prefers to innoculate the subject from encountering the object (i.e. the harsh reality of the world around us). This is typical post-rationalist discourse befitting our Age of Impunity and Superstition.

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Persecuting Judges Rather Than Prosecuting War Criminals

In Canada, with the neoconservative, pro-Likud, pro-war party winning a majority in the May 2^nd elections we might expect to witness the kinds of assaults on Canada’s Human Rights legislation, such as the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (2000), that have begun to crop up in some European polities. In Britain, the country that famously set the Pinochet Precedent,[ix] the Israel lobby-influenced Conservative government has now taken steps to sanction political intervention in the judiciary. Soon judges who wish to provide arrest warrants for credibly accused war criminals will require approval from bought-and-paid-for politicians to do so which makes a mockery of any notion of judicial independence.

[youtube DTC4jbZ7hTY Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby]

British politicians made overtures to circumscribe the autonomy of the judiciary after a British judge issued an arrest warrant for the former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni who was largely responsible for the 2008/2009 massacre in Gaza. This rare but potent application of Human Rights law to Israeli credibly accused war criminals in the British courts continues to instill fear among those who have guilty consciences. According to a recent report by Press TV one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aides Yohanan Locker refrained from visiting Britain in recent weeks for fear of being arrested.[x] Any renaissance of judicial neutrality and universal jurisdiction could be short lived however. The locus of power labeled by Professor James Petras as “The Zionist Power Configuration,” via it’s stooges in the British parliament, is incessantly attempting to attain immunity for all Israeli credibly accused war criminals.

Likewise in Spain, home of the pugnacious activist Judge Baltasar Garzon, there have been moves to circumscribe the latitude judges have to prosecute credibly accused war criminals. On November 4, 2009 the Spanish parliament added three conditions to Spanish laws pertaining to war criminals. Credibly accused war criminals can now be prosecuted only if (i) the alleged perpetrators are present in Spain, (ii) the victims [of the alleged war crime] are of Spanish nationality, or (iii) there is some relevant link to Spanish interests.

The subtext of these politically motivated restrictions on the enforcement of international law is that political elites in Spain and Britain are themselves deeply complicit in the same war crimes and crimes against humanity that the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney stand accused of. Thus, the co-guilty have a vested interest in minimizing the agency objective Third Parties have to prosecute credibly accused war criminals.

Legal Apartheid and The Genocide Industry

“Law enforcers” in Canada have demonstrated that the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act is only to be invoked to prosecute tin pot tyrants from Third World countries, such as Désiré Munyaneza, who was prosecuted in May 2009 for his participation in the CIA-sponsored Rwandan genocide.

It was perhaps not coincidental that less than 12 months after citizens exposed the double standards and politically motivated complacency of the Calgary law enforcement milieu during Splitting the Sky versus Bush that a Guatemalan accused war criminal was apprehended in the Southern Albertan city of Lethbridge. Jorge Vinicio Orantes Sosa, who stands accused of complicity in genocidal acts in Guatemala in 1982, was tried in the very same Calgary Courts Centre in which the convincing case had been made that law enforcement officials had illegitimately shielded Bush from the law. Time and time again political (and economic) expediency militates against the supposedly politically neutral application of the law. The result is that the most murderous war criminals on the planet enjoy impunity.

Having laws that only apply to war criminals emanating from Third World countries is intolerable. This legal apartheid is buttressed by the pseudo-scholarship and politicized analyses pumped out by the apparatchiks of the Genocide Industry. The Genocide Industry is expressed most egregiously in the disproportionate amounts of scholarship and journalism dedicated to demonizing politically expendable perpetrators of genocide, such as Rwandan Hutus like Munyaneza, whilst at the same time diminishing the modern day genocides being perpetrated against Arabs and Muslims. At the core of the Genocide Industry is the insistence that Israel’s extremist politicians be allowed to cynically play the worn and tattered Nazi holocaust card to immunize themselves from accusations of being pro-genocide.

Nuclear armed Israel in 2011 is characterized too often as a victim of non-existant genocidal forces whilst the Palestinians’ status as victims of genocide is deemphasized in the vast preponderance of scholarship on the subject of genocide.

Bush Should Be Arrested in Canada

There is still much uncertainty for law enforcers, political elites, general citizens and the millions of victims of the 9/11 wars about how the relatively new Canadian domestic legislation pertaining to war criminals will be applied over the coming months and years. Thus far there have been gross inconsistencies exhibited by Canadian law enforcers who are willing to prosecute Rwandans and Guatemalans but not Texans or Israelis. Whether the Age of Impunity & Superstition will be compounded or desisted in Canada will be determined by those law enforcement officials who will be confronted with a self-confessed war criminal, George W. Bush, seeking entry into Canada this October.

2011 copyright – Joshua Blakeney