Hi All,
This
latest report from Pilger. Does this portend the Big One - a criminal
trial of Western war leaders that would outshine Nuremberg?
Bob.
Date: Saturday, 29 October 2005 7:20 pm
THE EPIC CRIME THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME:
John Pilger
A Royal Air Force officer is about to be tried before a
military court for refusing to
return to Iraq because the war is
illegal. Malcolm Kendall-Smith is the first British
officer to face
criminal charges for challenging the legality of the invasion and
occupation. He is not a conscientious objector; he has completed two
tours in Iraq.
When he came home the last time, he studied the reasons
given for attacking Iraq
and concluded he was breaking the law. His
position is supported by international
lawyers all over the world, not
least by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who
said in September
last year: "The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that
contravened the UN Charter."
The question of legality deeply concerns the British
military brass, who sought Tony
Blair's assurance on the eve of the
invasion, got it and, as they now know, were lied
to. They are right to
worry; Britain is a signatory to the treaty that set up the
International Criminal Court, which draws its codes from the Geneva
Conventions
and the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. The latter is clear: "To
initiate a war of
aggression... is not only an international crime, it
is the supreme international crime,
differing only from other war crimes
in that it contains within itself the accumulated
evil of the
whole."
At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, counts one
and two, "Conspiracy to
wage aggressive war and waging aggressive war",
refer to "the common plan or
conspiracy". These are defined in the
indictment as "the planning, preparation,
initiation and waging of wars
of aggression, which were also wars in violation of
international
treaties, agreements and assurances". A wealth of evidence is now
available that George Bush, Blair and their advisers did just that. The
leaked
minutes from the infamous Downing Street meeting in July 2002
alone reveal that
Blair and his war cabinet knew that it was illegal.
The attack that followed, mounted
against a defenceless country offering
no threat to the US or Britain, has a
precedent in Hitler's invasion of
Sudetenland; the lies told to justify both are eerily
similar.
The similarity is also striking in the illegal bombing
campaign that preceded both.
Unknown to most people in Britain and
America, British and US planes conducted a
ferocious bombing campaign
against Iraq in the ten months prior to the invasion,
hoping this would
provoke Saddam Hussein into supplying an excuse for an
invasion. It
failed and killed an unknown number of civilians.
At Nuremberg, counts three and four referred to "War
crimes and crimes against
humanity". Here again, there is overwhelming
evidence that Blair and Bush
committed "violations of the laws or
customs of war" including "murder... of civilian
populations of or in
occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of
war".
Two recent examples: the US onslaught near Ramadi this
month in which 39 men,
women and children - all civilians - were killed,
and a report by the United Nations
special rapporteur in Iraq who
described the Anglo-American practice of denying
food and water to Iraqi
civilians in order to force them to leave their towns and
villages as a
"flagrant violation" of the Geneva Conventions.
In September, Human Rights Watch released an epic study
that documents the
systematic nature of torture by the Americans, and
how casual it is, even enjoyable.
This is a sergeant from the US Army's
82nd Airborne Division: "On their day off
people would show up all the
time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work
out your frustration
you show up at the PUC [prisoners'] tent. In a way it was sport...
One
day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend
over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a
metal
[baseball] bat. He was the fucking cook!"
The report describes how the people of Fallujah, the scene
of numerous American
atrocities, regard the 82nd Airborne as "the
Murdering Maniacs". Reading it, you
realise that the occupying force in
Iraq is, as the head of Reuters said recently, out
of control. It is
destroying lives in industrial quantities when compared with the
violence of the resistance.
Who will be punished for this? According to Sir Michael
Jay, the permanent under-
secretary of state who gave evidence before the
Parliamentary Foreign Affairs
Committee on 24 June 2003, "Iraq was on
the agenda of each cabinet meeting in
the nine months or so until the
conflict broke out in April". How is it possible that in
20 or more
cabinet meetings, ministers did not learn about Blair's conspiracy with
Bush? Or, if they did, how is it possible they were so comprehensively
deceived?
Charles Clarke's position is important because, as the
current British Home
Secretary (interior minister), he has proposed a
series of totalitarian measures that
emasculate habeas corpus, which is
the barrier between a democracy and a police
state. Clarke's proposals
pointedly ignore state terrorism and state crime and, by
clear
implication, say they require no accountability. Great crimes, such as
invasion
and its horrors, can proceed with impunity. This is lawlessness
on a vast scale. Are
the people of Britain going to allow this, and
those responsible to escape justice?
Flight Lieutenant Kendall-Smith
speaks for the rule of law and humanity and
deserves our
support.
