We’re going to have to jam here. So much new information, so little time.
G. Dubya Bush assuring residents of The Big Easy that
nothing bad actually happened in Katrina, and even
if it did, everything would be hunky dory. The square
was lit by emergency generators : virtually the only
electricity IN New Orleans that night…
I wrote this to the Eugene Register-Guard in 2003:
Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.
Letters in the Editor’s Mailbag
June 19, 2003
After 80 days, it’s time Americans confronted a grave question: If no weapons of mass destruction are found, then members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes.
The U.S.-sponsored United Nations Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2, states: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.” And “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”
Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.
In the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, there were four counts, and one, if not two, are applicable here. Count one: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and count two: waging aggressive war, or “crimes against peace.” When it was argued that the court had no jurisdiction, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor, rejoined, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Remember that in the near year of spin leading up to this war the term “regime change” was never used until 48 hours before the war began: because such a war would have been unlawful.
If war crimes have been committed (thousands are dead), those who screamed about the “rule of law” in 1999 better step up to the plate, else there is no such “rule.”
HART WILLIAMS
Well, at least one court now backs me up. Interestingly, not much comment in the American press. One short page on Google yesterday and one long page and another short overflow story on the next (and that’s when you turn off the redundancy filter):
Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia
by Yvonne Ridley
The Foreign Policy Journal
May 12, 2012Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.
The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison….
Interestingly enough, the Nuremberg Trials at the end of WWII (“watch the great movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster for a bit of the flavor) were cited by the court. Thus far, it’s Yvonne Ridley’s story, her having done the best job of early reporting, having seemingly read a good portion of the transcripts.
It is a sad day, my friends, when old Lenin Era Pravda now online in the XXIth century with a new direction and mission does a MUCH more credible reporting job than the US press and most of the blogosphere. Here are links to four parts of the transcript — such as it is — of the findings of the court with a suggestion that the story has been hacked at least once in the notes to one of the interior parts:
Part 1:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/09-05-2012/121063-accusations_war_crimes-0/
Part II:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/10-05-2012/121082-united_states_torture-0/
Part III
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/12-05-2012/121089-us_torture-0/
Part IV
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/13-05-2012/121099-usa_dock_four-0/
Here is the citation of our own hypocrisy in staining the national character before the whole world (who were watching):
The charge against the accused here is very similar to the charge for which the Nazi war criminals were convicted at the Nuremberg trials: “the charge of conscious participation in a nation-wide governmentally organized system of cruelty and injustice, in violation of the laws of war and humanity, and perpetrated in the name of law by … authority”: Alstotter case.
This is because after 9/11, all the pronouncements from the top made a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining such treatment. A combination of factors account for this: fear, ideology and almost visceral disdain for international rules and norms. There are others who have also committed war crimes but those that have been charged are the key players. Against them there is overwhelming evidence and they bear direct responsibility for war crimes.
That is how it ends. You owe it to yourself to go and read the English translation put up in full by good ol’ Pravda. Time was, citing Pravda was a guarantee that you was at least a pinko, if not an outright commie. Boy times sure change.
George W. Bush, Agent of Al Q.A.E.D.A. is a post you should read
But what I said then was true. It remains true and as this story gains traction, every force in serpentine media and slithery supplication will attempt to convince you that our good nation did NOT commit War Crimes. These are the same bastards who maintained that no US soldier had ever or would ever do anything bad in our invasion and toppling of the regime of that guy who was responsible for Nine-Lebben.
Oh wait.
You see: we Americans are REALLY GOOD at ignoring important problems we find inconvenient. Slavery. Segregation. Child labor. Sweat shops. Women’s rights — promised them during the Civil War by politicians as part of expanding suffrage. Women’s actual rights, and not just the right to vote. Hispanic rights. Minority rights. Disabled access. The right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace. Gays and gay rights and no rights for “illegal aliens” who force sweatshop owners to fire all their American workers and employ the dirt-poor illegals to work for much lower wages, with zero rights.
Kind of like that slave labor in China that builds our computers and our i-Phones® and all the rest of the Wal-Marted, Four Bank and Four Oil Company America.
We are REAL good at it.
The (graven) Image Makers at work
We Americans have never met a problem so big that we couldn’t all agree that it wasn’t actually there, and, therefore, nothing needs be done, nor talkin’ about that bothersome … thing. WHAT thing?
My point.
But the Bushies have PROVEN that you can be lied to with a straight face and will buy ANY crap they want to shove a feeding tube down your throat and ladle into your poor stomach.
Only next time, the country they topple and install their “approved” government after writing its “pillage and loot” constitution won’t be in the Middle East.
It’ll be in the Middle West.
Remember when I said “Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values”? Well, here’s a piece of news for yas: “American values” are now whatever we SAY they are. So …
What is the blogosphere rambling on about?
Romney v. Obama blah blah blah, and it’s only the Fourteenth of Freaking May. Democracy in America is ill-served by this obfuscatory persiflage masquerading as journalism. It is not journalism: it is sycophantism and infantilism and paroxysm. But it is NOT journalism, which, in its finest flower doesn’t merely report the news (with hefty chunks of gossip and hot air speculation thrown in to pad out the segment), but finds the IMPORTANT news and goes after it like a terrier after a rat.
Sure: One of these days we’re going to have to face up to the crimes of the past thirty years. That is guaranteed.
But not today.
That is guaranteed, as well.
Genuine; not PhotoShopped.
Courage.
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Kudos to Thom Hartmann for having the cojones to write about this on TruthOut and mention it on his program today(?).
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A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.