from the Bangor Daily News, via CommonDreams:
Published on Wednesday, October 31, 2007 by the Bangor Daily News (Maine)
Bringing Rumsfeld to Justiceby Pat LaMarche
“Men are being brought to this black business hoodwinked. They are to be drawn in by degrees, until they cannot retreat … we are breaking through all those sacred maxims of our forefathers, and giving alarm to every wise man … that all his rights depend on the will of men whose corruptions are so notorious, who regard him as an enemy, and who have no interest in his prosperity.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ve been thinking of this quotation since I learned Friday that in the “Court of First Instance” (Tribunal de Grande Instance) Donald Rumsfeld was charged with war crimes. Why Friday? Because Rumsfeld was in France and French law requires that the accused be in the country when charged. Hey, what’s Rumsfeld doing in France? I thought he didn’t like “Old Europe.”
This isn’t the first time either. He’s also been charged in five other countries including Germany. Since World War II, Germany’s had a zero tolerance policy on war crimes - so they get a jump on things, they don’t require that the accused be present. But the French charges could get real interesting. Some of the former prisoners of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib now live in France and they can testify.
The little soliloquy above is from a guy worried about his country irrationally going to war. Basically, he thought that the war wasn’t about justice; it was about plundering natural resources for personal gain. To compound his reservations, he feared that his countrymen had underestimated the will of the locals to defend themselves and that spelled disaster. He believed that his country stood on much nobler ideals and would lose its reputation, its integrity and eventually its place on the world stage.
The quotation comes from 1775. A guy named George Johnstone said it. The one-time British governor of West Florida thought that King George III underestimated the difficulty of forcing people so far away to comply with his demands.
But the majority in Parliament believed that their superior firepower would quickly stun the rabble into compliance. A little “shock and awe” would do the trick - a couple of pre-emptive blasts from the royal canons and everyone would fall into line.
Gee, if Rumsfeld had read a few history books over those years between serving in the corrupt Nixon administration and 2001, he might have avoided the German charges of waging an illegal, pre-emptive war - not to mention learning the folly of burning people’s homes. After widely publicizing their plans to attack what would become Portland, Maine the British bombarded the city, completely destroying it. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/31/4927/
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