Canadians want Dick Cheney arrested for war crimes
October 31st, 2013
Later this week former Vice President Dick Cheney is planning on visiting the 2013 Toronto Global Forum in Canada, but he’s not getting a hero’s welcome. Lawyers Against the War (LAW), an international volunteer organization, urged Canadian authorities to arrest him for war crimes, specifically for “authorizing, counseling, aiding, abetting and failing to prevent torture.”
Gail Davidson, an attorney from LAW argued that Toronto Police Chief William Blair and Ontario Attorney General John Gerretsen have a legal obligation to arrest Cheney once her enters Canada. In the letter he wrote, “Canada must ensure that Dick Cheney is either investigated and prosecuted for the indictable offence of torture in Canada or extradited to another country willing and able to do so.” The letter contends that they have a duty to prevent him from “escaping to the United States.”
Cheney admitted to being “a big supporter” of waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques during his vice presidency. He and former President George W. Bush were convicted in absentia for war crimes in Malaysia.
I love these kind of stories. When President Barack Obama traveled to South African in June, attorneys in Johannesburg called for him to be arrested and investigated for war crimes. In 1999 Amnesty international sent out a press release calling for an investigation of war crimes in the Clinton administration during the Kosovo war.
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These calls are largely symbolic. After all, how can we count on governments to police each other’s war crimes when they are all complacent? And we certainly can’t trust them to police themselves. But I am not without hope.
When Dick Cheney visited Vancouver in 2011 Protesters kept him trapped inside the exclusive Vancouver Club where he had been scheduled to speak. He was stuck there for seven hours until police had to be called in to evacuate him.
In 2012 Dick Cheney’s trip to Toronto was canceled a trip to Toronto in March 2012 because “He felt that in Canada the risk of violent protest was simply too high,” according to Ryan Ruppert, president of promotions company that booked his visit.
I say good. Make these monsters feel like pariahs everywhere they go. Right and left alike. Anyone who takes helm of the death machine known as the US military, and doesn’t do their damnedest to deconstruct the military industrial complex, should spend the rest of their life hiding in their ivory tower terrified that the peasants will charge their gates with pitchforks the moment they set foot outside.
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