-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded message follows ------- To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: New Jersey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date sent: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 16:21:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: !b_a_Act: [P] Breach of Geneva Conventions and Crimes Against Humanity Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(No war in Iraq - http://pnews.org/) ========================================================================= Subscribe or Unsubscribe to PNEWS ("progressive" news and views) forums (on internet since 1982): --- http://pnews.org/signup.shtml Oldest "progressive" mailing list on the interNUT.... ========================================================================= Breach of Geneva Conventions and Crimes Against Humanity "The Geneva Convention indicates that it's not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war." [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] "The American media have dutifully taken their cue and waxed indignant over Iraq's alleged breach of the Geneva Conventions. After remaining silent on the US trashing of the Conventions in its treatment of Taliban soldiers captured in Afghanistan, the press and TV news channels have taken to pronouncing on the sanctity of the provisions on POWs. Academic "experts" have popped up on TV screens to denounce the Iraqis, without making any reference to Washington's far more grievous violations of international law concerning the treatment of POWs." [Henry Michaels, "Washington's use and abuse of the Geneva Conventions" - World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) - March 29, 2003] As I have also written here before, the US ignores the International Court of Justice at the Hague. It ignored the court when it decided it was illegal for the United States to mine the Nicaraguan harbor and it ignored the court's order for reparations. "The Bush administration has gone further by rejecting the new International Criminal Court, which opened this month.....The US has demanded treaties with other countries not to prosecute American representatives for crimes against humanity..." [WSWS] I have written (see http://pnews.org/ for links and articles) how the U.S. only pays attention to the United Nations when it suits it. The new International Criminal Court has not been endorsed by the U.S. for fear that Americans from previous administrations (and this one) would be prosecuted for genocide and other crimes against humanity. "Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded that Belgium change its war crimes legislation in order to halt a case against Powell, George Bush senior, Vice President Dick Cheney and former US army commander Norman Schwarzkopf for committing war crimes during the 1991 Gulf War. Washington fears a similar lawsuit is about to be made against George W. Bush for human rights violations and civilian deaths in the current war." [WSWS] WAR OF AGGRESSION "Lawyers Against the War, an international legal group, has accused the current Bush administration of "committing the supreme international crime, as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal," by launching an unprovoked assault on Iraq in defiance of the UN Security Council. According to one of the group's founders, Professor Michael Mandel of Canada's Osgoode Hall Law School, the Nuremberg International War Tribunal, which prosecuted Nazis leaders after World War II, said that "to initiate a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."" [WSWS] The treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners of war (who they refuse to recognize as POWS) is the most egregious of George Bush's flagrant and demonstrable violations of the Geneva Conventions. ".....It is illegally holding hundreds of Taliban soldiers captured in Afghanistan at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. When the first of the detainees arrived in Guantanamo in January 2002, the Pentagon released photographs and footage of them in orange jumpsuits, kneeling before US soldiers, shackled, handcuffed and wearing blacked-out goggles over their eyes and masks covering the mouth and nose. The images shocked world opinion, but Bush, Rumsfeld and Powell refused to recognize the detainees as POWs." [WSWS] The very same day that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld accused Iraq of violating the Geneva Convention by video filming and photographing American POWs the U.S. flew 30 Taliban prisoners from Afghanistan to Cuba (tied together, unable to use a toilet, not fed and hooded). 660 prisoners have been incarcerated in Cuba. They have not been able to talk to anyone. No legal represenation has been permitted. These prisoners are treated as non-persons. They come from 40 different countries and they are being held without charges. This is a violation of all the law of human decency. Many have been held now for over a year. "From the outset, the US government refused to have the status of the Taliban captives determined by a "competent tribunal," as required under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention. It has unilaterally declared them to be "terrorists" and "unlawful combatants"--terms not used in the Conventions--even though they were fighting with the armed forces of the Taliban government, then the UN-recognized administration of Afghanistan, which was a signatory to the Conventions." [WSWS] Do you get the feeling that we're no better than Nazis? This is the conduct of a criminal regime. These are the kinds of accusations we hear leveled against so-called "cruel" regimes and people like Saddam Hussein. "In its definition of POWs, Article 4 of the Conventions specifically includes "members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of "a country's armed forces," as well as "organized resistance movements" and inhabitants who "spontaneously take up arms to resist invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units." [WSWS] These Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners meet the requirments of the Convention to be defined as POWs yet the Bush administration refuses to recognize them as prisoners. To the Bush administration they are non-persons. They are not entitled to rights and therefore can be tortured to death and they have been. Someday history will provide the evidence and those seeking justice will demand that George Bush and all those who participated in this travesty of justice are perpetrators of these crimes and will be tried and punished for crimes against humanity. 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