The Establishment Favorite George W. Bush Leveraged Foreign Aid to Escape War Crimes Prosecution
As the the impeachment inquiry rolls on, I was reminded about a historical fact that shows just how biased and political establishment media and politicians are in their quest to impeach President Trump over improper use of foreign aid.
While they assert Trump used military aid to induce Ukraine to investigate the Bidens (this assertion does not hold up in testimony), they embrace a president who used a variety of humanitarian and military aid to escape prosecution for war crimes. This is documented by diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
Yes, I’m talking about George W. Bush, the man who dances and relaxes with mainstream figures like Ellen DeGeneres.
Bush worked hard in the early years of his presidency to eliminate the chance that the International Criminal Court (ICC) would prosecute Americans for war crimes. He unsigned the Rome Statute, immunizing Americans against ICC prosecution unless crimes occurred within a country signed onto the Statute. To further pressure these countries, Bush banned their military (and sometimes economic) aid, which could be restored by signing a bilateral immunity agreement with the U.S., further protecting Americans against ICC prosecution.
You can read the article by Green Left, or check out the book The WikiLeaks Files for more, but basically the U.S. used economic intimidation to coerce smaller countries into signing these immunity agreements, including withholding money that Lesotho requested to fight an AIDS epidemic. And though the media might fantasize about Trump’s quid pro quo, the connection between denying Lesotho’s aid and their non-signing of the immunity agreement was explicitly stated by U.S. government officials and documented in diplomatic cables.
In school, the question often came up, why study history? The answer is presenting itself to us as the mainstream narrative attempts to cast Trump as the world’s supervillain, while the plain historical facts show his predecessors are guilty of actual documented crimes more serious even that what he is being accused of. And while WikiLeaks may never make it into high school textbooks, all the information we need to understand the world is available through other books and online sources.
With the light of education guiding the way, it’s easy to see that the forces attempting to remove Trump from office are not interested in a full discussion of the real actions of the U.S. government pre-2016. They only want us to consider hand-picked historical episodes that further their own agenda.
So we face a crossroads: will we live in a society determined by powerful people who choose which facts we can and cannot consider, or a world where the full scope of history is available to each citizen, who feels empowered to think freely and make their own decision based on their understanding of the facts? Seeing the inexorable decline of trust in the media and seeming failure of the impeachment hearings, I am more confident that we are moving toward the latter.
