The week in war crimes was a busy one. As the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about creating a truth commission to probe the wrongdoing of the Bush administration, the Obama Justice Department released the first set of secret Bush DOJ memos which effectively eradicated constitutional and other legal protections for American citizens and suspected terrorists alike. And while the CIA revealed it had destroyed 92 videotapes of detainee interrogations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity in Darfur.
And it was that last development which created the ironic if unlikely possibility that George W. Bush himself could end up before the very International Criminal Court he long opposed.
The specter that President Bush "could be next on the war crimes list" was raised by the AP Friday:

David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects.
Crane is a former prosecutor of the Sierra Leone tribunal that indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor and put him on trial in The Hague.

To be sure, George W. Bush's relationship with the ICC is a long and tortured one (pun intended). While President Clinton signed the Rome Statute in December 2000 creating a permanent war crimes tribunal, Bush and his allies made reversing that American commitment a priority.
That agenda, however, was not immediately clear during the 2000 campaign to replace Clinton. During an October 12, 2000 discussion led by Charlie Rose, Condoleezza Rice claimed that candidate Bush had not yet made up his mind about the ICC:

"Governor Bush has not yet taken a position on the International Criminal Court. I will tell you that I think there are concerns for a country like the United States because we are a target of ... I was deeply disturbed that someone would think it necessary to investigate whether NATO had committed war crimes in the bombing of Kosovo. I just found that appalling. And to the degree that we open ourselves up to indictments of American military personnel for political purposes, I think we have a problem. So he's not taken a position. He'll want to look at it. I don't want to preempt him in taking a position."

But with the Court poised to begin its work, President Bush "unsigned" the agreement in May 2002. Casting his lot not with Canada and America's NATO allies, Bush instead sided with the likes of Iran, China, North Korea, Yemen and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As senior U.S. diplomat Pierre-Richard Prosper put it, "What we've learnt from the war on terror is that rather than creating an international mechanism to deal with these issues it is better to organize an international mandate that authorizes states to use their unilateral tools to tackle the problems we have."
During his 2004 reelection campaign, President Bush was much more blunt about his motivation. Asked about the Court during a September 30 debate with John Kerry, Bush explained:

"I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. It's a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial."

A week later in St. Louis, President Bush made the same point, with a jab at the "French" Kerry thrown in:

"I made a decision not to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is where our troops could be brought to -- brought in front of a judge, an unaccounted judge...You don't want to join the International Criminal Court just because it's popular in certain capitals in Europe."

Over time, the Bush administration added more teeth to its opposition to the ICC. The U.S. threatened to withhold military aid from countries refusing to sign bilateral agreements providing immunity to U.S. personnel operating in their nations. Later, GOP allies in Congress led by George Nethercutt (R-WA) tried to extend that lever to include economic assistance as well.
Still, the Bush administration's hard line against the ICC began to bend as the pressure mounted to respond to the bloodbath in Sudan. In June 2005, President Bush finally followed Secretary of State Colin Powell's lead and declared that the slaughter in Darfur constituted genocide. And as his tenure in the White House wound down last October, Bush signaled the U.S. would not oppose the International Criminal Court's prosecution of the Sudanese president. As one anonymous senior Bush administration official put it:

"It's well known that we're not big supporters of the ICC, but the court is the only game in town right now to bring accountability for the Darfur genocide, and we don't want to let Bashir off the hook quite so easily."

For his part, long-time ICC foe and former UN ambassador John Bolton proclaimed himself "disturbed" by the change of heart in the Bush White House. "If you allow this to happen, you legitimize the ICC," Bolton said, adding, "My preferred policy is to isolate it and hope it will eventually wither."
With the warrant for Bashir's arrest issued this week and the new Obama administration apparently reconsidering American endorsement, the International Criminal Court may be far from withering away. In response, right-wing commentators predictably blasted "self-loathing Americans whose minds are confined in the cult of globalism."
In any event, the prospect of war crimes prosecutions for George W. Bush and his key advisers either here or overseas remain remote. In all likelihood, President Bush will not follow in Omar al-Bashir's path. Still, as human rights lawyer and Torture Team author Philippe Sands has suggested, George W. Bush and his administration lawyers should think twice before they travel abroad in the future.