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.”

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.”

Where is justice?

Obama was asked if he will appoint a special prosecutor to independently investigate the crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

President-elect Barack Obama: “We’re still evaluating how we are going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices. And I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards… My orientation is going to be moving forward.”