Time to Talk War Crimes
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...
[22003]
|
Uruknet on Alexa
>
:: Segnala Uruknet agli amici. Clicka qui.
:: Invite your friends to Uruknet. Click here.
:: Segnalaci un articolo :: Tell us of an article
|
Time to Talk War Crimes
Robert Parry
|
March 28, 2006
n
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]
At the same Oval Office meeting, Bush cavalierly
dismissed concerns that the U.S. conquest might not go as smoothly as he
expected.
The President predicted that it was "unlikely
there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and
ethnic groups," according to the British minutes written by David
Manning, then Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser.
But Bush’s judgment would prove tragically wrong,
as more than 2,300 U.S. troops have died along with tens of thousands of
Iraqis – possibly more than 100,000 – in three years of invasion,
occupation and now sectarian violence.
Conniving Bush
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.
Bush suggested painting a U.S. plane up in U.N.
colors and flying it over Iraq with the goal of drawing Iraqi fire, the
minutes said.
"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance
aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the
memo said about Bush’s scheme. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in
breach."
Regardless of whether any casus belli could
be provoked, Bush already had "penciled in" March 10, 2003, as the start
of the U.S. bombing of Iraq, according to the memo. "Our diplomatic
strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning
wrote.
At the Oval Office meeting, Bush also discussed
possibly assassinating Hussein, according to the memo. (Bush, it should
be noted, assured the American people that he would restore "honor and
decency" to the Oval Office where Bill Clinton had sexual dalliances
with Monica Lewinsky.)
According to the British memo, Bush and Blair
acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq,
nor were they likely to be found in the coming weeks, but that wouldn’t
get in the way of the U.S.-led invasion.
Blair, however, stressed the need for a second
resolution from the U.N. Security Council that would authorize the use
of force. Bush agreed to try but felt he had the authority to attack
Iraq whether the U.N. approved or not.
"The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts
to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," the
memo said about Bush’s plans. "But he had to say that if we ultimately
failed, military action would follow anyway."
Averted Eyes
Parts of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting memo were
disclosed earlier this year by British attorney Philippe Sands, author
of the book, Lawless World. But Sands’s disclosure received scant
attention in the United States, where the major news media also has
downplayed other revelations of Bush’s duplicity about the Iraq War.
In 2005, the U.S. press mostly averted its eyes
when a British newspaper disclosed the so-called "Downing Street Memo,"
which recounted the chief of British intelligence telling Blair in July
2002 that Bush was set on invading Iraq and that "intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy."
The major U.S. media also has failed to challenge
Bush when he has claimed falsely that Hussein brought the war on himself
by barring U.N. inspectors from his country.
"We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in,
and he wouldn’t let them in," Bush said when he began revising the
pre-war history in July 2003, four months after invading Iraq. "And,
therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from
power."
Bush has repeated that lie in varying forms dozens
of times since, including at a televised news conference on March 21,
2006. [See Consortiumnews.com’s "Those Lies, Again."]
Nuremberg Precedent
Beyond more proof that Bush has lied consistently
about Iraq, the Jan. 31, 2003, memo represents striking evidence that
Bush, Blair and their top assistants violated the Nuremberg Principles
and the U.N. Charter by launching an aggressive war against Iraq.
While many Americans think of the Nuremberg trials
after World War II as just holding Nazi leaders accountable for
genocide, a major charge against Adolf Hitler’s henchmen was the crime
of aggressive war. Later, that principle was embodied in the United
Nations Charter, forbidding armed aggression by one state against
another.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who
represented the United States at the Nuremberg Tribunal, made clear that
the intent was to establish a precedent against aggressive war.
"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation
may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive
warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for
altering those conditions," Jackson said, adding that the same rules
would apply to the victors in World War II.
"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.
"We are able to
do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in
power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men
answerable to the law. This trial
represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law
to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the
foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggression against the
rights of their neighbors."
The British memos, combined with public statements
by Bush and his senior aides, represent a prima-facie case that
Bush, Blair and others violated the Nuremberg Principles and the U.N.
Charter, to which the United States was a founding signatory.
While Bush has insisted that his invasion of Iraq
was "preemptive" – defined as an act of self-defense to thwart an
impending attack – his argument is not only laughable in the case of
Iraq, but has been contradicted by his own advisers, including Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice.
Rice's Cultural Engineering
In a March 26 interview on NBC’s "Meet the Press,"
Rice offered a different rationale for invading Iraq. She agreed that
Hussein was not implicated in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks nor did
she assert that he was conspiring with al-Qaeda on another assault.
Instead, Rice justified invading Iraq and ousting
Hussein because he was part of the "old Middle East," which she said had
engendered hatreds that led indirectly to 9/11.
"If you really believe that the only thing that
happened on 9/11 was people flew airplanes into buildings, I think you
have a very narrow view of what we faced on 9/11," Rice said. "We faced
the outcome of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had
to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle East. The
new Iraq will be a part of the new Middle East, and we will all be
safer."
Rice’s argument – that Bush has the right to
invade any country that he feels is part of a culture that might show
hostility toward the United States – represents the most expansive
justification to date for launching the Iraq War.
It goes well beyond waging "preemptive" or even
"predictive" war. Rice is asserting a U.S. right to inflict death and
destruction on Muslim countries as part of a social-engineering
experiment to eradicate their perceived cultural and political
tendencies toward hatred.
Despite the extraordinary implications of Rice’s
declaration, her comment passed almost unnoticed by the U.S. news media,
which gave much more attention to her demurring on the possibility of
becoming the next National Football League commissioner.
Yet Rice’s new war rationale, combined with the
British memo on Bush’s determination to invade Iraq regardless of the
facts, should be more than enough evidence to put Bush, Rice, Blair and
other U.S. and British officials before a war crimes tribunal.
But that would only happen if Justice Jackson were
right about the universal application of the principle against
aggressive wars – and if all nations and leaders actually lived by
the same rules.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine,
the Press & 'Project Truth.'
|
|
:: Article nr. 22003 sent on 28-mar-2006 09:06 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=22003
Link: www.consortiumnews.com/2006/032706.html
:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.
The section for the comments of our readers has been closed, because of many out-of-topics.
Now you can post your own comments into our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/uruknet
[ Printable version
] | [ Send it to a friend ]
[ Contatto/Contact ] | [ Home Page ] | [Tutte le notizie/All news ]
|
|
Uruknet on Twitter
::
RSS updated to 2.0
:: English
:: Italiano
::
Uruknet for your mobile phone:
www.uruknet.mobi
Uruknet on Facebook
The newsletter archive
:: All events
|