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Lawyer Seeks to Hold Bush Administration Accountable for Iraq War
Without endorsing any specific cause, this blog occasionally makes space for a guest article. Today, the writer is D. Inder Comar, a San Francisco lawyer who is seeking to do what the Obama Administration refuses to do, hold the Bush Administration accountable for the unnecessary invasion of Iraq and its ongoing, horrific, aftermath. Here’s what Comar has to say:
On March 13, 2013, I filed two lawsuits in the Northern District of California against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz on behalf of an Iraqi client and on behalf of myself as a United States citizen.
My Iraqi client, Ms. Sundus Saleh, alleges that these defendants planned and waged a “war of aggression” in violation of laws set down at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. She has exercised the jurisdiction of the court through the Alien Tort Statute, a law passed by the first Congress in 1789. She seeks to hold these defendants personally liable for their actions.
My case seeks to set new precedent regarding the obligations of government leaders. I am asking the court to acknowledge that I have a common law and/or constitutional right (premised in the First Amendment) to receive honest and candid information from government officials with respect to war and peace. I have also alleged that the defendants violated California’s false advertising law in planning and waging the Iraq War.
I am handling these cases completely pro bono. I have litigated numerous cases in the federal courts, both as an associate for a major law firm and now on my own. I want to win these cases, both for my client and for myself.
But these lawsuits won’t go anywhere without the help of people like you.
First, the more people who care, the more likely the courts will care. Take the Prop 8 litigation: that legal case has acted as a spearhead for a larger movement that is recognizing that the Constitution cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation. These lawsuits need similar support for the idea that leaders cannot deceive and mislead the public, particularly in matters of war and peace, and remain unaccountable. With the Supreme Court tightening access to the courts (even with the Alien Tort Statute in the very recent Kiobel decision), the courts need to know that people want to hold leaders accountable under law.
Second, my firm is a small San Francisco boutique that is primarily involved in corporate counseling and court appointed trial and appellate work. I will shamelessly admit that I cannot handle these cases alone! I need the support of passionate, intelligent and thoughtful people to secure the court orders that I want for myself and for my client.
As Americans, we are fortunate to have a functioning judiciary. Today, there are millions of people living in other countries who would be killed if they dared to question their leaders. In America, we are heirs to an 800 year tradition extending back to Magna Carta that says no one is above the law – not even the king. And George W. Bush was no king.
Please join me to make this trial a reality. You can help by supporting our fundraising campaign at indiegogo, by spreading the word about the lawsuits, and by reaching out to me (inder at comarlaw dot com) if you want to get involved.
Please help me hold our leaders accountable to prevent another Iraq War.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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Rich Bauer said...
1Comar seeks to do “what the Obama administration refuses to do, hold the Bush administration accountable…”
1. Comar should add the other guilty parties, including Hillary Clinton, to his lawsuit.
2. If Comar wins his lawsuit, he can sue the Obama administration to hold it accountable for its own war crimes, something the Hillary Clinton administration refuses to do.
04/23/13 2:42 PM | Comment Link
JVC said...
2…Will be about as effective as trying to ban war. Bush, Cheney, Clinton… Clinton, Gore, Reno…Bush, Cheney, Baker…Reagan, Bush, Weinberger…Kissinger…LBJ….Stalin, Hitler, Tojo….ad naseum. War is hard-wired into human genetic makeup. We love it. In fact, I’ll wager we have peace just to break up the monotony of war & re-hab & lick our wounds before going right back at it. Good luck!
04/23/13 3:41 PM | Comment Link
meloveconsullongtime said...
3PVB, your guest wrote:
“As Americans, we are fortunate to have a functioning judiciary. Today, there are millions of people living in other countries who would be killed if they dared to question their leaders. In America, we are heirs to an 800 year tradition extending back to Magna Carta that says no one is above the law…”
And as an American lawyer (an ANGL0-American no less!) who in my first Judicial Clerkship (long ago) proudly enjoyed the picture of the signing of the Magna Carta above my Judge’s bench, it pains me to say:
“Not any more, you’re not. And one of the MANY overlapping, complicated causes of how and why the USA has repudiated its – in your words (with which I would LIKE to agree) “800 year tradition extending back to Magna Carta” – is because in the past 30 years or so it has become politically incorrect for Americans to acknowledge any national identity based principally upon the customs AND THE PEOPLE of England.
Instead, Americans have chosen to become “America the Abstraction”, cf (and no I didn’t write the following essay, but I agree with it):
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/america-the-abstraction/
04/23/13 4:43 PM | Comment Link
meloveconsullongtime said...
4PS, some “money quotes” (a GOOD American phrase!) from the essay I linked to in my above comment:
“Increasingly, America was defined according to the most expansive, abstract reading of the Declaration of Independence, combined with a version of market economics well-suited to the unrestricted “pursuit of happiness.” Anything that did not fit that formula tended to fall down the memory hole: the Anglo-Celtic roots of the Founding, the specifically Christian (mostly Protestant) identity of America, the very existence of the Confederacy, and the profoundly Western roots of our culture…
…To conservatives schooled in this mode of argument, restrictions on immigration are simply insane; anyone, anywhere who will sign on to the Declaration of Independence is already an American. Keeping him out makes no more sense than building a Berlin Wall to divide Manhattan’s East Side from its West. Embittered blacks, or religious conservatives, or leftists who do not accept the Cold War ideology of America are not real Americans. An ideological litmus test becomes the standard of citizenship. American foreign policy must cease to pursue the concrete interests of a concrete, national community and become the tool by which an abstract creed is imposed across the world—hindered only by the resistance of the benighted and bigoted, who are fated to end on the ash-heap of history.
Such a creed is dangerous to the country that espouses it. It sets an impossible standard by which all its actions will be judged and invites well-founded charges of hypocrisy. It enrages and goads enemies. It alienates home-grown patriots. Most tragically, it invites the attacks of fanatical young men on American civilians—as it did on September 11, 2001, in my hometown, New York City.”
04/23/13 4:50 PM | Comment Link
meloveconsullongtime said...
5PS, just my self-indulgent note re the above essay’s words about “the specifically Christian (mostly Protestant) identity of America, the very existence of the Confederacy…”:
…and mind you, MY forefathers fought in Lincoln’s Army AGAINST General Stonewall Jackson, a bloody Protestant who according to MY Catholic Church was a HERETIC! 😉 Yet he was more of a compatriot to me, than the likes of Thomas Friedman. So I say, THREE CHEERS FOR GENERAL TJ STONEWALL JACKSON!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaFj1u-fk7I
04/23/13 5:03 PM | Comment Link
meloveconsullongtime said...
6PPS, further digressing from the original topic (but is it really a digression?)…and then I’ll shut up for tonight…
…here’s a song by Joan Baez, about THE MOST DESPISED MINORITY IN AMERICA TODAY, poor White Southerners (and Lisa, I’m looking at you as an ally in spirit, here!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnS9M03F-fA
04/23/13 5:17 PM | Comment Link
Nah7 said...
7@JVC: I do not think so. The US people was lied into the Iraq war, not cheered into it. In fact, most recent wars are based on lies (Iraq, Viet-Nam, German invasion of Poland), or at the very least tendentious presentation of bloated details (the Fan affair).
The long and steady tendency is for Human society to become less and less violent. The Second World War is impressive, but it is an abherration.
Propaganda and censorship do not need to happen if the people really consents to a policy. The existence of things like Murdoch’s media means that peace-loving people are a huge majority, that they must be lied to for wars to happen, and that there is a critical point of failure in the warmongers’ system. This heralds the importance of whistleblowers. We might be approaching the time when truth can effectively prevent wars.
04/24/13 8:14 AM | Comment Link
pitchfork said...
8The guest article notwithstanding…
quote:”We might be approaching the time when truth can effectively prevent wars.”unquote
Let’s just hope truth can prevent a civil war. Here is what TRUTH looks like to pro 2nd Amendment people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py4X0UCr-MM
Where was the Constitution when that took place, hmmmm? And speaking of Waco type militarized law enforcement..check this out…TWICE as big as Waco..and NOTHING..on MSM..
http://www.aim.org/special-report/police-militarization-abuses-of-power-and-the-road-to-impeachment/#
All of this care of BUSHOBAMA & Company’s War on Terror. Well, I’ve got news for ya pal..it’s a War OF Terror..coming to a neighborhood near you soon…after all, Watertown, Little Rock, Sharpsburg, and Los Angelas are living proof, Gibson Guitars notwithstanding.
Now, about the article. I wish I were a lawyer. I’d join in a heartbeat. I also wish them luck, although I’m not holding my breath. Knowing how Supranational sovereignty works now..I doubt if ANYONE or ANYTHING, short of a civil war or invasion by the UN, can force accountability on these war criminals. However, hope springs eternal.
04/24/13 4:43 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
9FBI agent using the Deedy defense?
http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/crime/nm-woman-shot-to-death-in-virginia
04/25/13 12:25 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
10For Nah7. The American empire’s exhortation today: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask only to be kept safe from the knowledge of what it is doing in your name.”
04/25/13 12:26 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
11Pitch, I think you and I are not expecting a Wiesenthal type movement pursuing America’s war criminals who are all living out in the open and close to the granite war- planning bunkers of DC. Americans don’t hunt down their own kind- just furren turrists.
04/25/13 12:35 PM | Comment Link
JVC said...
12@Nah 7… I don’t necessary disagree with you. The Economist over the winter reviewed several books that seem to successfully postulate what you’re saying.
The following is from Robert Kaplan’s Stratfor.Just one of many reasons why war will not go out of vogue besides… human avarice, resource scarcities, power, etc…
“The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge; where no one is the top dog, so to speak. That is why Columbia University’s Kenneth Waltz, arguably America’s pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of “anarchy” is not stability, but “hierarchy.”
Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly “more equal” than others, and it is this formal inequality — where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others — that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace.
Government is the most common form of hierarchy. It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and that requires “some coercive power.”
War is going no where. There have been more killed in the Mexican drug wars since 2007 than all the Arabs and Israeli conflicts since 1950 using numbers supplied by common media outlets and Daniel Pipes.org. There have been about as many killed in Syria since 2011.
Common perceptions of “Truth” won’t prevent wars. Winning them will.
04/27/13 4:10 AM | Comment Link
JVC said...
13Typo in my last line… Winning wars maintains peace. The Korean war is still being fought and because no one really won it the first time, we still get to finish it though next time around will probably involve splitting atoms. The European Union will relapse into war sooner or later though I believe millions there won´t/don´t want it. The Euro & EU is a great attempt at staving off genocide but… past is prologue. It´s hard-wired into our psyche.
04/27/13 5:56 AM | Comment Link
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