Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Long Quest for Justice

San Francisco attorney Inder Comar didn’t initially strike me as a human rights crusader working to bring accountability to arguably the most powerful political office in the world. Maybe it was the setting.

Comar works out of a small, glass-walled office in the Impact Hub, the spot that the tech industry has carved out of the San Francisco Chronicle Building, replacing the newspaper’s hollowed out core of journalists with start-up entrepreneurs seeking “synergy” and other business buzzwords, or just the next great app.

In fact, that’s most of what Comar does in his business law practice, collaborating with management consultants just down the bustling hallway to feed the current tech boom that is having such a huge impact on San Francisco, for good or ill. But the case that has propelled him onto the international stage, his pro-bono passion project, is Saleh vs. Bush, et al.

Inder Comar

The Bush is former President George W. Bush, and the et al is Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of that neocon cabal that told calculated lies to lead the U.S. military into its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Saleh is Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi artist and mother who was displaced by the war, along with her four children and an estimated 3 million other Iraqis. Saleh is the lead plaintiff in a putative class action, and represents other Iraqis injured and displaced by the invasion.

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