Bush’s War Crimes Legacy Confronts Obama as a Public Health Nightmare



While prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo continue to be force-fed today
as they were while George W. Bush was in office, contrary to medical ethics, the
practice is part of a pattern of neglect of public health that has
long pervaded the “war on terror.” Whereas violations of medical ethics are
banned by Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 (WC#98),* similar war
crimes have occurred since the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and are
so well known in Afghanistan and Iraq that the people are understandably bitter
about how they have been treated.
As commander-in-chief of the military, former President George W. Bush was
responsible, directly or indirectly, for U.S. attacks on hospitals in Iraq and
Afghanistan (WC#7,8,11), the mistreatment of their personnel (WC#13) and
patients (WC#76-94), and the denial of medical supplies to them and to the
general populations of those nations (WC#264).
In 2001, the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, and the hospital in
Herat (both in Afghanistan) was targeted, resulting in about one hundred deaths.
The al-Nouman Hospital in Baghdad was hit in the initial bombing in 2003,
resulting in the deaths of five persons, and the Central Health Center in
Falluja (Iraq) was bombed in November 2004, killing 35 patients and 24 hospital
employees. 
Moreover, the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in Falluja, run by a Saudi Arabian
Islamic charity, was reduced to rubble (WC#7,8,11,14,16). When U.S. troops
entered Falluja’s General Hospital, they forced all hospital employees and
patients to lie on the ground and tied their hands behind their backs. 
The above acts violated the Red Cross Convention of 1864, which requires that
“ambulances and military hospitals shall be acknowledged to be neutral . . .
and shall be protected and respected by belligerents so long as any sick or
wounded may be therein” (WC#7). The acts also violate the 1929 Geneva
Convention that says personnel ministering to the sick “shall be respected and
protected under all circumstances” (WC#13).
On March 4, 2007, U.S. marines left the Jalalabad, Afghanistan, battlefield
without attending to those whom they had wounded, and in July 2008 U.S. soldiers
blocked Afghan villagers from rescuing wounded civilians they sought to take to
the hospital. Violation of Article 1 of the First Geneva Convention of 1949,
which states “The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for,” is a
war crime (WC#25).
From December 2, 2002, to January 15, 2003, Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld
issued an order denying prisoners the right to see a physician for six weeks,
even though the Geneva Convention of 1949, Article 15, states, “The Power
detaining prisoners of war shall be bound to provide free of charge for their
maintenance and for the medical attention required by the state of health”
(WC#86). 
Prisoners suffering from asthma, diabetes, heart conditions, hepatitis, leg
wounds, and other maladies went untreated in the two countries invaded by the
United States (WC#94). In Iraq, medical facilities, medicines, staff, and
supplies were inadequate for the large number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Whereas the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, Article 55, states, “the
Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the
population,” American and British vetoes in the Security Council blocked the
release of $500 million in funds from the UN’s Iraqi oil-for-food account
(WC#250,265). Instead, they diverted the money to the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) which failed to purchase needed medical supplies
(WC#243,263-264).
Although the Geneva Convention of 1949, Article 56, states “Medical personnel
of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties,” on May 23,
2003, the CPA fired top-level Iraqi government employees, including medical
personnel (WC#246,265). The best hospital in Baghdad was converted into an
American military hospital, and the health administrator sent by the U.S. Agency
for International Development, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was fired after one week
because he lacked political connections.  His replacement failed to authorize
funds for emergency rooms to treat victims of the insurgency, the most important
medical problem at the time and cut down the number of medicines available.
Burkle even charged Iraqis for medical treatment, which had been free under
Saddam Hussein. All these actions are war crimes (WC#264-266).
A Belgian physician that visited twenty-five medical facilities in April 2004
concluded, “Nowhere had any new medical material arrived since the end of the
war” and that there was no sterile treatment at Al Nour Hospital, “as a
result of which all patients with major burns are doomed to die.”
The main result of the misoccupation of Iraq is an actual reduction in the state
of public health (WC$263). Children continue to be stricken with leukemia
because the U.S. military refuse to use Geiger counters to locate and dispose of
ordnance containing depleted uranium despite pleading from the World Health
Organization (WC#267).
In matters of public health, therefore, the Americans descended like a plague of
locusts on Afghanistan and Iraq. Guantánamo became a venue for medical
experimentation (WC#84) in which medical treatment was a privilege, not a right,
in order to induce cooperation among prisoners who either had no connection with
al-Qaeda or were so committed to an extremist cause that they refused to provide
intelligence. Although remedial action could be applied today to reverse the
situation, which recent visitors to Iraq report is even worse than what is
described above, no such plans have been trumpeted under the administration of
President Barack Obama.
*Asterisked numbers are war crimes (WC) based on the numbering delineation in
the book by Michael Haas, George W. Bush, War Criminal? The Bush
Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes (Praeger, 2009). The above essay
was edited from a draft by Sherwood Ross.
 
http://www.uswarcrimes.com/




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