“Crimes against Peace”: Historic Class Action Law Suit against George W. Bush | Global Research

“Crimes against Peace”: Historic Class Action Law Suit against George W. Bush | Global Research

On March 13, 2013, my client, an Iraqi single mother and refugee
now living in Jordan, filed a class action lawsuit against George W.
Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz in a federal court in California.

 She alleges that these six defendants planned and waged the Iraq
War in violation of international law by waging a “war of aggression,”
as defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, more
than sixty years ago. (The current complaint can be found here). 

At the Nuremberg Trials,
American chief prosecutor and associate justice of the US Supreme Court
Robert H. Jackson focused his prosecution on the planning and execution
of the various wars committed by the Third Reich. Jackson aimed to show
that German leaders committed “crimes against peace,” and specifically,
that they “planned, prepared, initiated wars of aggression, which were
also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, or
assurances.”

For Jackson, the Nuremberg Trials were a high watermark of legalism.
In his report regarding the negotiations of the treaty that would set up
the Nuremberg Tribunal, Jackson wrote that the Tribunal “ushers
international law into a new era where it is in accord with the common
sense of mankind that a war of deliberate and unprovoked attack deserves
universal condemnation and its authors condign penalties.” He
concluded, “all who have shared in this work have been united and
inspired in the belief that at long last the law is now unequivocal in
classifying armed aggression as an international crime instead of a
national right.”