It's been a very busy week for war crimes and war criminals. In some good news for the cause of justice and the upholding of international law, Bosnian Serb mass murder Radavan Karadzic was finally captured in Belgrade, just days after the International Criminal Court charged Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity in Darfur. But for Americans, those positive developments were offset by news that the Bush administration's own war crimes trials - and potential pre-emptive pardons - put the United States in the same discussion with Sudan and the Republica Serbska.
To be sure, the long-overdue capture of Karadzic is a cause for celebration. On the run from peace-keeping forces in Bosnia since 1996, Karadzic had been hiding in plain sight in Serbia's capital. Between 1992 and 1995, the butcher of Srebrenica was responsible for ethnic cleaning and massacres in the Balkans that claimed at least 100,000 lives.
Which puts him in the same class as the killer in Khartoum, Sudan's al-Bashir. A week ago Monday, the ICC charged the Sudanese president on three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes for his campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that has killed as many as 300,000 people in Darfur.
As ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo acknowledged, the strategy risks ending any prospect of cooperation between the government in Khartoum and the international community for bringing peace-keeping forces and humanitarian relief to Darfur. But as its ambassador to the UN Abdalmahoud Abdalhaleem Mohamad made clear to CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Sudan - like the United States - will not subject its officials to the jurisdiction of the Court:

ZAKARIA: But of course, you know that other governments that did not recognize the Criminal Court were still forced to extradite their leaders. I'm thinking of Yugoslavia.
MOHAMAD: No. I don't care about them.
As far as we are concerned, we are not members. We have been told these days repeatedly that the ICC is an independent body. And so, OK, if it's an independent body, I am not a U.N. organ.
We have full right to be part of it or not. And we choose not to be part of it, like the United States.

Sadly, Mohamad is right about the company Sudan keeps. In May 2001, President Bush renounced the ICC treaty signed by Bill Clinton the previous December, claiming "This is a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors could pull our troops, our diplomats up for trial." During a 2004 debate with John Kerry, Bush taunted American allies supporting the Court, arguing, "You don't want to join the International Criminal Court just because it's popular in certain capitals in Europe." By that November, the Republican Congress was threatening to cut off economic aid to governments who refused to sign immunity agreements which would shield U.S. personnel from being surrendered to the Court.
Insistent on avoiding accountability for potential crimes abroad, the Bush administration may now be acting to prevent it at home as well. As the New York Times reported on Saturday, key conservative figures are urging the White House to "grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs." The President, they argue, can and should move proactively to shield wrong-doers in his administration:

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance...
...Several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons - whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president's orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.
"The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations," said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. "If we don't protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances."

Which brings us to America's first war crimes trial against terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay. This week, prosecutors opened their case against Osama Bin Laden;s driver Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whose 2006 Supreme Court case overturned the Bush administration's previous regime of military tribunals. But in what be the first challenge to President Bush's regime of torture and so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," the presiding judge Monday barred evidence obtained from Hamdan under "highly coercive" conditions during his detention in Afghanistan.
No doubt, the indictment of Sudan's al-Bashir and the apprehension of Karadzic are victories against the forces of what Jane Mayer deemed The Dark Side. It is one of the tragic legacies of President George W. Bush, one few Americans could have imagined, that the United States government would join them there.