Burden of Proof

Here's a question... when beginning a preemptive war, who has the burden of proof- the country who is the aggressor or the country being invaded?

According to Cheney, Iraq had the burden of proof to prove somehow that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction...

"Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof. Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police," Cheney said.

For those of you who have never had to prove a negative, this can be very hard to do - particularly when the leader of the aggressor country doesn't want to hear the true answer.

In this case, what the US did was essentially pick out someone and kill them, then turn around and say that the person that we killed had the burden of proof to prove that he wasn't a threat to us. Sound fair? It's not, which is why the world doesn't trust us anymore. The defense that Iraq had the burden of proof wouldn't fly in a courtroom, and the Bush Adminstration, if they could be tried by a war crimes tribunal, would be easily convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

-John Locke