EDIT: Downvotes with no comments. Shocker. Guess it's hard to back up your opinions, huh? I guess some people are totes fine with war criminals walking free?
What it says on the tin:
Obama told the nation that we "needed to look forward, not backward" when it came to prosecuting war criminals George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
He would end up legalizing and codifying a lot of the worst excesses of the Bush administration.
His actions of letting war criminals walk without any consideration of what they had done literally set the stage for Donald Trump being treated with kid gloves. I don't see how the two aren't connected.
Both of them dealt with the question of "Can we successfully prosecute a former President?" Obama kicked the can down the road to ignore the question entirely, because it might appear "partisan" or something.
As evidenced by Trump's national security documents case, they really wanted to kick the can down the road again. They gave Trump every opportunity to just return the documents with nothing but a slap on the wrist. They only started bringing criminal charges when it became clear that he never had any intent of returning anything.
Obama is viewed so favorably by so many, but it's hard for me to do so when I think about this. Obama's unwillingness to address this question in his administration is outright why we are facing the governments inability to reign in Trump at all. He's done so many things that would have shown regular people the endless inside of a jail cell, but they just let him keep running around free.
When you allow criminals to walk free, other criminals see it as way to get away with whatever they want. That's pretty much how Trump treated the Presidency, a "get out of jail for fucking everything for free" card. He still views it as such. It's hard to imagine he didn't get this idea by watching previous Presidents get away with tons of shit that would see the rest of us behind bars.
Anyway, long story short: Thanks, Obama.
You usually send war criminals to The Hague and then it's outside the hands of the nation in question. Many nations like to do a lot of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
I guess US law trumps international law and laws governing war, huh? No wonder the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml
Oh look, shocker, torture is in there.
Pardon me, I thought this was a legitimate discussion.
So only the US can prosecute their President for war crimes, and it has to be based on US laws? That's not a legitimate discussion, I'd say.
So the people who write the laws just write it so that they didn't break the laws. That's literally what Obama did for Bush, legalizing warrantless spying, ramping up the drone war, etc.
I mean, that's literally the point of the ICC, is that governments can just be like "we didn't do anything wrong" and then continue abusing the world. So you take them to a neutral third party.... the ICC.
I mean yeah, it is all about scope. You don't let your town sheriff deal with international arms trade, because it's not what they do, nor is it in their charter.
If the international community wants to try a former president, then they need to go through their process. Anything that circumvents their process is going to be heavily scrutinized in a legitimate court.
Are you joking? There are US government documents that outline the fucking Hague invasion of they attempt to prosecute. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act#:~:text=This%20authorization%20led%20to%20the,or%20rescue%20them%20from%20custody.
The US is not a member of the ICC.
Did the international community come asking for Bush or Cheney? Why would the United States preemptively send anyone to an international court that didn't ask to be involved?
So whatβs your ideal scenario for what should have happened? US authorities apprehend the former President, charge him with no crimes, and ship him out of the country?
I am not versed in how the ICC works. Are /were there indictments or the equivalent? What grounds would a President have for detaining and removing a predecessor?