Is G.W. Bush a War Criminal?

Ok, the picture is from the liberal "Common Dreams" (along with the article) but the article,The Torture Tape Fingering Bush As a War Criminal, was published in the Times Online and it's by conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan. Here is the take home message:

The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.

And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.

And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.

I'm probably wrong, but I haven't seen too many places that outright call Bush a war criminal. Although, from my experience, the British have far less reverence for their heads of state than do US citizens. Bush does not deny previous knowledge about the existence or destruction of the torture tapes. The article points out that he has claimed "he does not recall" knowledge of them.

Here is Sullivan's conclusion:

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.