Norman Solomon (Common Dreams): When War Crimes Are Impossible

[Jack Rabbit]

From CommonDreams.org
Dated Tuesday April 4

When War Crimes Are Impossible
by Norman Solomon

Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media . . . .

The standard way for media to refer to Bush and war crimes in the same breath is along the lines of this lead-in to a news report on CNN's "American Morning" in late March: "The Supreme Court's about to consider a landmark case and one that could have far-reaching implications. At issue is President Bush's powers to create war crimes tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners."

In medialand, when the subject is war crimes, the president of the United States points the finger at others. Any suggestion that Bush should face such a charge is assumed to be oxymoronic.

Read more.

The fact is that a war crimes case for waging an unjustified war of aggression in Iraq against Bush and many of his top aides, including Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, and charges of crimes against humanity for violating the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzales, among others, would be open and shut.

It is beyond doubt that the Bush regime is the most vile gang of war criminals to take control of the reigns of government in decades. As uncomfortable as it is, it needs to be addressed.

[jbfam4]

1. Thanks, Jack

Great article.....

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Addendum 1: Robert Parry: Time to Talk War Crimes

From ConsortiumNews.com
Dated Tuesday March 28

Time to Talk War Crimes
By Robert Parry

In a world where might did not make right, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their key enablers would be in shackles before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague, rather than sitting in the White House, 10 Downing Street or some other comfortable environs in Washington and London.

The latest evidence of their war crimes was revealed in secret British minutes of an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 31, 2003, when Bush, Blair and their top aides chillingly discussed their determination to invade Iraq, though still hoping to provoke the Iraqis into some violent act that would serve as political cover.

Bush, who has publicly told Americans that it was Saddam Hussein who “chose war” by refusing to disarm, was, in reality, set on invading Iraq regardless of Hussein’s cooperation with United Nations weapons inspectors, according to the five-page memo described in detail by the New York Times (March 27, 2006) . . . .

The memo also reveals Bush as conniving to deceive the American people and the world community. At the meeting, Bush floated ideas for how to rally U.N. support for the invasion by engineering a provocation that would portray Hussein as the aggressor.

Read more.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. Addendum 2: Robert Parry: Condi, War Crimes & the Press

Form ConsortiumNews.com
Dated Monday April 3

Condi, War Crimes & the Press
By Robert Parry

During the three years of carnage in Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has shifted away from her now-discredited warning about a “mushroom cloud” to assert a strategic rationale for the invasion that puts her squarely in violation of the Nuremberg principle against aggressive war.

On March 31 in remarks to a group of British foreign policy experts, Rice justified the U.S.-led invasion by saying that otherwise Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “wasn’t going anywhere” and “you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it.” (Washington Post, April 1, 2006)

Rice’s comments in Blackburn, England, followed similar remarks during a March 26 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which she defended the invasion of Iraq as necessary for the eradication of the “old Middle East” where a supposed culture of hatred indirectly contributed to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 . . . .

(T)his doctrine – that the Bush administration has the right to invade other nations for reasons as vague as social engineering – represents a repudiation of the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter’s ban on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders six decades ago.

Read more.

[Jack Rabbit]

4. Related discussion in General Discussion

The War Crimes Confession of Condi Rice opened by chrisfloyd Tuesday 8:19 am PDT.

[enid602]

5. self protection

You'd want to make sure the regime's already toppled before you suggest the boss be tried for war crimes.

[Jack Rabbit]

7. Bush, Cheney and others should be charged with war crimes

There are many reasons to impeach Bush and Cheney, but War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity top the list. After being impeached and removed from office, they should stand trial for war crimes. It would be preferable if this trial were to take place in federal court, but if the US is unable or unwilling to make a good-faith effort to prosecute, then an international tribunal for war crimes in Iraq and crimes against humanity arising out of the war on terror should be established for this purpose.

The evidence is overwhelming that they knew that the case against Saddam was weak and would not justify an attack. In addition to the direct evidence of the Downing Street Memos, including the most recent memo revealed. there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Cheney and Libby made frequent trips to Langleyl it seems this was in order to strong-arm analysts into saying what they wanted the American people to believe. Doug Feith headed a department in the Pentagon, the OSP, whose mission was to cherry pick intelligence that would support the case for war, suppress that which did not and edit ambiguity out of reports to make the case for war appear more certain than facts warranted. While in fact there were no weapons at all, Mr. Rumsfeld told us he "knew" Saddam's arsenal was in the neighborhood of Tikrit and Baghdad and General (Ret.) Powell told the UN Security Council how much of what chemical agents Saddam had on hand. Ambassador Wilson reported that there was no attempt by Saddam to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger, yet Mr. Bush uttered his infamous sixteen words to the contrary in the 2003 SOTU, Mr. Cheney continually talked of Saddam's "reconstituted" nuclear program and Dr. Rice spoke of smoking guns and mushroom clouds.

Major (Ret.) Scott Ritter, the former chief UN weapons inspector, was willing to testify that most of Saddam's biochemical arsenal had been destroyed by the end of 1998 when weapons inspectors left Iraq and that the shelf life of anything remaining would have expired long before the Bush regime began beating the drums of war. Mr. Ritter was ignored by the regime, by Congress and by the corporate-own US mainstream media. UN documents relied upon by the regime showed that Iraq had a biochemical arsenal at one time (as if we didn't know that), but the same documents also presented evidence that the arsenal was ordered destroyed shortly after the 1991 war. General Powell referred to the evidence of the existence of the weapons in his speech to the Security Council, but neglected to even mention evidence of its destruction.

Evidence of Saddam's ties to al Qaida, such as reports of a meeting between Iraqi intelligence agents and September 11 hijacker Mohammad Atta, were debunked long before the start of the invasion.

There was never any conclusive, convincing proof of any part of the regime's stated case for war. They were lying and they knew it. Each one of those lies was uttered for the purpose of garnering public support for and Congressional approval of an otherwise unjustified war of aggression. Each one of those lies is a war crime.

Moreover, they have behaved like liars all along. We have already cited the very existence of the OSP in the Pentagon and the strong-arming of intelligence analysts to alter their reports (i.e., to fix "facts" around the pre-determined policy). If these people had any real confidence in the intelligence to make the case for war, they would have felt no need for Mr. Feith's emendations. They would have presented it, all of it. Also, when Ambassador Wilson went public with his story of his trip to Niger and what he found there, no attempt was made to refute his facts. Instead, his wife was exposed by White House aides as a covert agent in the CIA, effectively ending her career as a covert agent and possibly endangering her life. If Mr. Wilson was incorrect in his facts, honest men would have set the record straight and left his wife out of it.

Ambassador Wilson's expose of how Mr. Bush's 2003 SOTU was contradicted by his own findings in Niger would not have caused so much excitement if that had been the only thing wrong the regime's case for war. If American and British troops had run up the Tigris and Euphrates River and found Iraq awash in weapons-grades biological and chemical agents and whole archives documenting Saddam's links to al Qaida, no one would have cared if sixteen little words found their way into the 2003 SOTU that did not belong there. The problem is that not only was that not the only thing the regime in their pre-war case against Saddam, but that they got everything wrong. They got nothing right. That is even more remarkable than if they had got everything right. One might conclude that they weren't concerned about facts, but with selling points.

They sold the American people a war. It turned out to be a grotesque bill of goods. Those responsible must be held accountable.

[400Years]

6. marking for later

[yurbud]

8. Seizing Iraq's oil & giving cronies the contracts is prima facie war crime

LINK:

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2005/12/facts-that-are-missing-from-iraq.html

• Background on oil company machinations regarding Iraq:
  
  http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html
  
  http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm
  
  
• Restructuring Iraq's oil during a military occupation to favor our oil companies is probably a war crime.
  
  http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
  
  The Hague Convention of 1907 (IV) see articles 47, 53, 55
  http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/195?OpenDocument
  
  The Geneva Convention of 1949 (IV) we've broken almost every section of article 147, and Bush has personally broken article 148.
  http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/380?OpenDocument
  
  We cannot break such fundamental, long-standing treaties such as these and then complain when other countries violate the treaties we like.
  
  
• Because of pressure from the oil companies, failure of the media to cover the issue adequately, and public inertia, we have failed to prepare for declining oil supplies by switchng to other energy sources, or even add them to the mix in a significant way.
  
  

Recent developments:

http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=483&row=0

[Jack Rabbit]

9. Absolutely

Those counts should be added to the indictment.

My post above (number 7) simply outlines the case that the invasion of Iraq was an unjustified war of aggression, that it was not done for the stated reasons. That, of course, begs two questions: why did the neocons invade Iraq and why did they lie about the reasons? The answers to those questions would support a more devastating case against them.

[yurbud]

10. I can't figure out why Democrats aren't asking that question or

answering it for the Bushies given the evidence Palast, Naomi Klein, and others have found.

[Jack Rabbit]

11. Your case would support an indictment of someone I didn't name in post 7

Namely, Paul Bremer. He was the one responsible for the post-invasion administration of Iraq and for carrying out violations of the conventions which you cite.

In Post 7, I named Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Libby and Feith. I didn't mention other pre-war prevaricators like Wolfowitz and Perle. Scott McClellan and Ari Fleischer may get off the hook, since we can't know whether they knew any more than they were told. We should also ask what did Karl Rove know; he is quite likely to have known the truth of the matter. Powell may actually have a defense, and my bet would be that he has the best chance of an acquittal, at least among those who should definitely be charged. Active field commanders like General Franks may also be liable, since they probably would have known that Saddam had little or nothing but followed orders to attack.

I didn't even go into charges of crimes against humanity, which involve treatment of detainees. Alberto Gonzales and others, including Jay Bybee (now a federal judge) and John Yoo (now a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco), drew up memoranda to justify torture and inhumane treatment with legal reason so (if you will pardon the term) tortured that it is hard to take seriously. They should stand trial. So should General Sanchez, who approved illegal interrogation techniques in Iraq, and General Miller, who did likewise at Guantánamo. Mr. Rumsfeld approved these techniques at the Pentagon and Dr. Stephen Carbone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, also signed on.

That's quite a list, and it's only a partial list.

[slipslidingaway]

12. K&R ...thanks, need two more votes. n/t

[slipslidingaway]

13. Kick for the info, also link to new article by Robert Parry below.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/040406.html

snip>>

"U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who represented the United States at Nuremberg, stated, too, that the principle did not only apply to Adolf Hitler’s henchmen, but to all nations, including World War II’s victorious powers.

“Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment,” Jackson said.

This failure of the U.S. press corps to address legal and moral issues raised by Bush’s Iraq War also reflects a refusal by the news media to hold leading American journalists accountable for their part in the tragedy.

Richard Cohen may feel “humbled,” but that is little comfort to the tens of thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers killed and maimed from an aggressive war that nearly all the high-priced American pundits cheered on."

[Briar]

14. What this shows is that

we are no more civilised than the world was under the Romans, or the Hapsburgs, or the British Empire. The simple fact is that might makes right - the will of the powerful is the law. The UN, the Geneva Conventions and similar initiatives represented an attempt to bring the rule of law to the international arena, but the rule of law operates by the consent of those who choose to accept it. And the US does not choose to accept the rule of any law other than its own national self interest. So long as it can project its power to promote that self interest, it will continue to do so. In the kind of world that US foreign policy invokes, with its claim to pre-emptive strikes and "humanitarian" interventions, the only way the powerful will be made to face justice is if they lose their power. The broken and defeated are brought to court, the powerful can ignore it.

[slipslidingaway]

15. Noam Chomsky Returning to the Scene of the Crime:

War Crimes in Iraq

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0404-30.htm

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. At least it's turning up in British TV drama

Channel 4's follow-up to satirical drama A Very Social Secretary could include a fictional scenario in which the prime minister, Tony Blair, is put on trial for war crimes over the Iraq conflict after he leaves office.

Alistair Beaton, the creator of the David Blunkett drama, is scripting a follow-up imagining Mr Blair's life after No 10. The writer is working on scenes in which the former prime minister is arrested for war crimes, according to sources familiar with the project.
...
More4, Channel 4's spin-off digital service aimed at over-35s, premiered A Very Social Secretary on its launch night in October last year and would also show the first transmission of the drama about Mr Blair's life after Downing Street. If the drama goes ahead, it is likely to be shown on More4 this autumn.

"Alistair Beaton is writing another script. Robert Lindsay is very keen to do Tony Blair again. It would be a romp about what might happen to the prime minister in the future," Mr Dale said.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story/0,,1746052,00.html