Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is calling for the indictment of President Bush and Israeli leaders on charges of war crimes. Addressing the Arab League summit in Doha, Chavez criticized the International Criminal Court indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in light of US-Israeli actions.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: “This genocide that was governed by the United States for eight years after Bush ordered the bombing of Iraq, where thousands and thousands of children were killed and entire families, innocent men and women. Why don’t they go after Bush—he truly committed genocide—or the Israeli government, which also commits genocide?”

Bashir is currently in Saudi Arabia in defiance of an international warrant for his arrest. In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the former Jordanian Queen, Queen Noor, criticized Sudan’s actions in Darfur but said the US is guilty of double standards in supporting Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.

Queen Noor: “Were there not so many cases where Western pressure has been brought to bear on Arabs, but Israel’s, for example, disproportionate killing of civilians in Gaza during the recent and also in Lebanon in 2006, during the crisis there, if those cases had not taken place with relatively little Western outcry, you would find a very different attitude, I think, towards what’s taken place in Sudan.”

A Spanish court has launched a criminal investigation into whether six Bush administration lawyers including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the Bush administration’s use of torture at Guantanamo. Spain’s law allows it to claim jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents who were prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were tortured there. The case was sent to the Spanish prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998. The other former Bush administration officials facing investigation are former Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee; Pentagon official Douglas Feith; Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington and and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes. Michael Ratnerof the Center for Constitutional Rights praised the Spanish court’s decision and said arrest warrants might have already been issued.

Michael Ratner, author of The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: “If you are any of those six at this point, you don’t want to go to 25 countries that make up the European Union because you may be subject to immediate arrest. What will happen next is this investigation will most likely continue in a very vigorous form. It will look at those six, and it will also have the possibility of going up the chain of command, not just to Rumsfeld, but all the way up to Cheney and Bush. So it’s a serious investigation, it’s one the Obama administration has to take seriously. So it means for them that the pressure is increasing in this country for them to open its own criminal investigation.”

On Wednesday, President Obama announced a plan to overhaul contracting policies in all government departments. Singling out military contracts in Iraq, Obama said the new rule changes would save taxpayers $40 billion a year.

President Obama: “And this wasteful spending has many sources. It comes from investments in unproven technologies. It comes from a lack of oversight. It comes from influence-peddling and indefensible no-bid contracts that have cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.”

President Obama: “We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war.”

Administration officials say Obama is preparing to order U.S. combat troops to withdraw from Iraq by August 2010. The nineteen-month deadline would be three months longer than what Obama proposed on the campaign trail. As many as fifty-thousand U.S. troops would still remain in Iraq under Obama’s plan. A “senior military officer” told the Los Angeles Times: “When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, ‘get out’, and everyone’s gone. But that is not going to happen.”