Iraq War Crimes

"Toward a Brighter Future"

Jonathan Schwarz — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:14:06 -0500

Judge Patricia Wald, former chief judge for the D.C. Court of Appeals and jurist on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, writing in the new report "Guantánamo and Its Aftermath" (pdf):

There are bound to be casualties when any nation veers from its domestic and international obligations to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on the minds and bodies of many of the 62 former detainees interviewed for this report, many of whom suffered infinite variations on physical and mental abuse, including intimidation, stress positions, enforced nudity, sexual humiliation, and interference with religious practices. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully supported by the United States. The officials and guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving with the tribunal—for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide.

From an AP story, June 30, 2001:

The dramatic decision to deliver Milosevic to the tribunal in defiance of an order by the Yugoslav Constitututional Court staying any extradition threatened to plunge the Balkan country into a political crisis.
Milosevic's successor, Vojislav Kostunica, denounced the handover as ''illegal and unconstitutional.'' Others accused Serb Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who spearheaded the decision, of ''treason'' and knuckling under U.S. pressure....
President Bush praised Yugoslavia for handing over Milosevic, saying the move showed the Balkan nation wants to turn away from ''its tragic past and toward a brighter future.''
U.S. officials said the administration planned to make a pledge in the range of about $100 million for a Yugoslav assistance package, to be discussed Friday in Brussels at a conference of international aid donors.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the handover as ''a thoroughly good thing.''

The full statement by Bush, available on the White House website:

I applaud today’s transfer of indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. This very important step by the leaders in Belgrade ensures that Milosevic can finally be tried for his war crimes and crimes against humanity. During various visits by Yugoslav authorities to Washington, they pledged that Yugoslavia was committed to cooperating with the Tribunal. Milosevic’s transfer is a strong sign of that commitment. We are confident that the government of Yugoslavia will continue down the path of cooperation with the Tribunal.
The transfer of Milosevic to the Hague is an unequivocal message to those persons who brought such tragedy and brutality to the Balkans that they will be held accountable for their crimes. Milosevic’s transfer further signals the commitment of the new leadership in Belgrade to turn Yugoslavia away from its tragic past and toward a brighter future as a full member of the community of European democracies.
The United States stands ready to assist the people of Yugoslavia as they continue to take the difficult steps to advance its democratic and economic reform.

(Suggested by Glenn Greenwald's reference here: "[T]here were early statement from the Bush White House in 2001 about how critical it was to prosecute these Yugoslav leaders for war crimes...")

Oh yeah...Remembering the War and Other National and Global Crises

dlindorff — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:25:56 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack
Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be
sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press
for progressive change.

We saw how the Republican attempt to derail Obama by labeling him a
“socialist” actually backfired—especially when people were reminded
that a fundamental premise of socialism is “income redistribution,” in
which some of the wealth of the rich is taken away through taxation,
and transferred through federal programs to those who are less wealthy.
Joe the Plumber was outraged, but when most Americans who were having
trouble paying for gas or making their next mortgage payment, or who
were worried that their jobs might be about to vanish, thought about
that for longer than a sound-bite, it turns out that, not surprisingly,
they decided socialism and redistribution didn’t sound like a bad or
scary idea at all.

The same can be said of labor unions. In good times, many Americans
have bought the argument that unions are just out to grab dues payments
from their paychecks. But as job security vanishes and wages languish,
people are waking up to the idea that they are simply expendable
“inputs” to employers, and that a union can help them stand up to
abusive, uncaring management. Republican propaganda about the sanctity
of “secret ballot” union elections—ironic given the GOP’s simultaneous
assault all over the country on the right to vote—fell on deaf ears.

Government itself, long a dirty word thanks to years of
conservative propaganda, aped and spread through the corporate media,
is coming back into favor, now that people see that they cannot count
on either themselves or their employers to pull them through hard
times. The idea that government can step in with things like extended
unemployment insurance benefits, food stamps, and even renegotiated
mortgages, makes people who once mocked “big government” view things a
little differently.

But this unprecedented economic crisis also poses dangers.

Because we are so obsessed with the ongoing collapse of the economy
and the gathering storm of debt, unemployment and loss of retirement
savings that it entails, it’s easy for all of us to lose sight of other
crises that demand our urgent attention and action.

Chief among these are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing threat of climate change.

The wars are not going away on their own. The Iraq puppet
government of Nouri al Maliki is close to approving a deadline for the
removal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. That is more than
three years from now—nearly as long as the US was involved in World War
II! It’s longer, even, than the absurd 16 months that Obama said it
would take for him to end the US war and occupation of Iraq during his
campaign, which was bad enough. (In the case of Afghanistan, it
represents a decade of war—as long as the Vietnam War!) The danger is
that Obama will allow that status of troops agreement with Iraq to
become his timetable for withdrawal. We have to say “No!” The Iraq War
must be ended immediately.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, is in a meltdown, and every day that US
forces operate there, the opposition to US occupation grows, simply
strengthening the Taliban. Similarly, the more the US tries to attack
Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in neighboring Pakistan, the more
opposition grows to the US in Pakistan. If we opponents of the war
allow Obama to go ahead with his plans for a larger US military force
in Afghanistan, we will end up with an even bigger and wider war in the
Middle East and Asia, with more terrorist recruits, and with whatever
remains of US funds for important domestic initiatives swallowed up by
the Pentagon and the secret intelligence budget.

Let me put this simply: Nothing progressive that has been proposed
by the Obama campaign can be achieved while the US is engaged in these
two criminal wars. No health care reform, no increase in education
loans, no early childhood education, no public works jobs programs,
Nothing.

And then there is climate change. The Obama campaign promised to
finally end eight years of a new Dark Ages, when government simply
denied science or actively attacked science, and to start taking
serious action to reduce America’s role in spewing out carbon into the
atmosphere. But you don’t hear much about that anymore. That’s because
reducing America’s carbon footprint costs serious money—money for
research into non-carbon energy sources, money for a power transmission
system to serve wind generation farms, money to develop a new
generation of non-polluting vehicles and to rebuild light rail and
inter-city rail systems. And once again, with the economy in a crisis,
and with the two wars sucking up all available tax revenues that aren’t
being given away to banks and Wall Street financial firms and insurance
companies, none of that is going to happen either, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, while the progressive folks who put their all into the
Obama campaign are reveling in his and their Election Night success,
and are now taking a breather, the forces of darkness that control the
Democratic Party (think Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Rahm
Emanuel and the whole Democratic Leadership Council), are grabbing
control of the new administration, filling the incoming Obama cabinet
with carryover hacks from the Clinton administration, even including
the Clintons themselves, and, in some cases, the outgoing Bush
administration).

This is, in other words, no time to sit back and relax, reveling in
the admittedly hard-to-believe prospect of an African-American moving
into the White House. It is a time for action and then more action.

When Barack Obama makes that dramatic walk from his Inauguration
Day speech at the Capitol building to the White House, the streets need
to be lined with protestors holding up signs calling for an immediate
end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the new Congress tries to vote for a $50 –billion or
$150-billion bail-out of the US auto industry, we need to be packing
the halls shouting it down. That money should be going only into
development of zero-emission automobiles, and it should be in the form
of voting-share equity in those companies.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my top 10 demands for action by the new Democratic government iin Washington:

1. US forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Immediately! Shift the
funds saved to reconstruction aid for those two countries and to
veterans benefits, with any extra savings going to help fund education
in poor school districts in the US.

2. Slash military spending by closing most or all overseas military
bases, by dramatically reducing nuclear forces to near zero, by
reducing the number of men and women in uniform, and by closing bases
in the US. Savings should go to shoring up the Social Security and
Medicare Trust Fund.

3. Open up the secret intelligence budget, currently running at over
$40 billion a year, and cut it, for starters, by half. Savings should
also go to the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund. (Along the way,
ban all spying on Americans, and revive the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act in full as originally written.)

4. Break up the banking and automobile industry, as well as any
other industry in which any player is so large it is able to extort
money out of the government by threatening that its failure would cause
a national economic crisis. “Too big to fail” needs to mean “too big to
be permitted to exist.”

5. Join the Kyoto Treaty, and pledge to immediately begin a campaign
to reduce US carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 or better, 2030.
Establish a crash national research program to develop carbon-free
energy sources, and provide funding for households to convert to
passive geo-thermal heating and cooling systems. Funds can come from
the unused $350-billion portion of the Paulson/Bernacke Wall Street
bailout fund. (Talk about a job-creation program, not to mention a big
whack at imported oil!)

6. Pass the Employer Free Choice Act, requiring employers to
recognize a labor union wherever a majority of the workers have signed
cards saying they want a union, and requiring those employers to
negotiate and reach an initial contract agreement within 90 days, or
under mandatory mediation.

7. Reassert the Constitutionally mandated authority of Congress by
rescinding all Bush/Cheney-era signing statements and executive orders
and declaring them, by Presidental declaration and by Joint Resolution
of the Congress, to have been invalid and unconstitutional.

8. Order the US Justice Department to investigate the actions of the
prior administration and, where crimes are discovered, to prosecute
offenders, up to and including the former president, to the full extent
of the law. This would include obstruction of justice, abuse of power,
commission of war crimes, conspiracy, fraud, bribery, war profiteering
and criminal negligence.

9. Appoint Ralph Nader as new chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, with a powerful mandate take the necessary steps to restore
competition and fairness to the nation’s media. (My pet proposal:
Establish a government loan fund to allow workers at failing newspapers
to buy their publications from the owners and to operate them as
employee-owned enterprises, on a tax-free basis.)

10. Enact a national health care program that provides health
insurance for every person in America. My choice here would be a
single-payer system—essentially an expansion of Medicare to cover
everyone, funded by progressive taxation. Failing that, a system in
which the government has an insurance program operating in competition
with the private sector, should eventually lead to a single-payer plan.
One idea: dispatch a public-citizen commission to Canada to study the
Canadian health system and report back to Congress and the White House
in 90 days.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

McCain and Obama's Animated Election Spectacular

Chip — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:30:50 -0400

This War Report Has Been Approved by Your Government

dlindorff — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:24:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any
independent American corporate news media these past few days as the
coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John
Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.

In the first case, we had the completely pointless if prurient
airing of Edwards’ sordid extra-marital affair. Pointless because
Edwards at this time is a has-been politician. If there were any point
to the coverage it should have been, as Alex Cockburn pointed out in
his journal Counterpunch,
the abject failure of those same reporters and “news” organizations to
cover the story back last fall, when it might have mattered. Back then,
when the only paper covering the story was the National Enquirer,
Edwards was still a viable candidate for the presidency, or a possible
contender for vice president again. It’s not that his personal sex-life
has any news value in and of itself. The point is that had he won the
nomination, or been picked as a vice presidential running mate, its
inevitable exposure later during the general election would have
destroyed any Democratic presidential chances. And the corporate media
knew back then all about this story. They just weren’t pursuing it (and
the current blitz of stories proves that they weren’t holding back out
of principle!).

Then there’s the Georgia war. I was stunned by the graphic
depictions of Russian brutality in Gori and other cities that were
massively bombed and shelled, with apartment buildings collapsed into
rubble, children killed, and civilians targeted. The New York Times, in
particular, had photographic images of dead Georgian soldiers, of
charred bodies, of hysterical mothers. On NBC News, Russian planes were
shown dropping their loads of bombs on apartments.

We read that President Bush condemned the Russian invasion of another nation and called for an immediate ceasefire. Yet there was not one word of astonishment or challenge from reporters or commentators or editorial writers at this stunningly cynical statement coming from a leader who himself is responsible for the blatantly illegal and much more destructive invasion of another nation. And remember, while Georgia is on Russia’s border, and was at least possibly guilty of oppressing and attacking and perhaps even killing members of the Russian minority in two of its provinces (Georgia bombed the biggest town in the secessionist province of Ossetia, killing perhaps 1000 civilians, before Russia invaded), Iraq is half a world away from America and was minding its own business, not threatening Americans in any way. Russia, thus far, has at most killed a few thousand Georgians. America has, by most accounts killed hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Iraqis, very few of them combatants.

We watch and read voluminous reports on this relatively small Russian war against its neighbor and former domestic province (Georgia was one of the SSRs in the old USSR), and meanwhile there is almost nothing being reported about the continuing five-year-old war launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. And certainly, over the course of five years we have gotten no visual depiction of that war even approaching the scenes that were on display from the front in Georgia.

Apparently, in the view of our corporate news editors and managers, it is important for Americans to fully witness the bloody horrors of war when that war is being fought by Russia, but we are to be carefully protected from seeing such things when they are being perpetrated by our own centurions. We aren’t even allowed to see the grievous injuries and death being suffered by our own troops.

And, of course, don't feel to good about the quality of the coverage of the Russian/Georgia conflict either. This too is biased. Indeed one reason we are shown all the carnage is that the US government has been backing Georgia, and there is evidence that the US even encouraged the Georgian attacks on ethnic Russians which provoked the invasion. The US also has obligingly airlifted Georgian troops back from Iraq to Georgia.

This is not news. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

American corporate news media broadcasts and articles should include
a disclaimer: “This report was approved by the media managers of the
Bush/Cheney administration.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Shoot Your Friends First: The Cheney Doctrine

dlindorff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:28:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

Besides, Cheney is in good company in this kind of thinking. We know
from reports of the meeting filed by British intelligence that
President Bush engaged in the same kind of thing when he was having
trouble getting the country and the rest of the civilized world behind
his and Cheney’s plan to attack Iraq. It was disclosed years later that
in early 2003, Bush suggested to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US
could paint a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and fly it over sensitive
parts of Iraqi airspace, so that Saddam Hussein would order it show
down. That, he argued, would anger enough UN member states to win a
security resolution to support a war on Iraq, and failing that, would
give the US an excuse to go in on its own. Blair was reportedly
horrified at this kind of kamikaze thinking—but not horrified enough to
expose the president as a nutcase.

So that’s where we are today folks. A president and a vice president
who both think that it’s a great idea to either send some of your own
troops under false flags into harm’s way to get shot at so you can
start a war, or, even worse, to dress up some of your soldiers as the
enemy you want to go after, and have them open fire on your own guys so
that you can claim you were attacked, and then go to war.

Who gets tricked by all these mad schemes?

Not the Iranians, or in the earlier instance, the Iraqis. They know
they aren’t attacking American forces. No. It’s us, the American
people, who are being tricked. Cheney knows that most Americans think
the idea of attacking Iran—especially when we’re five years into an
interminable war in Iraq and seven years into another war in
Afghanistan, neither of which has an end in sight—is really, really
stupid. So they’re trying to think up a way to trick us into supporting
doing such a stupid thing. And the only thing they can come up with to
overcome our reticence is making us think that our guys are being
attacked.

Now let me say that I’ve been a skeptic about people who claim the
9-11 attacks were an “inside job”—that the US government actually
organized those attacks. I know all the arguments and evidence, but it
always seemed to me that it was over the top to think that our leaders
would try to deliberately kill Americans in order to achieve some
policy goal. And yet, here we have Dick Cheney, the real brains (such
as they are) behind the Bush administration, discussing a plan, using
American forces, to fake an attack on other American forces.

It makes me wonder whether maybe Cheney deliberately shot his friend
Harry Whittington, either to flush those damned elusive quail he was
after, or so that he could generate public sympathy for the embattled
President Bush. And it even makes me wonder whether crazy Dick actually
did have a hand in bringing down those Twin Towers. He may be too
stupid to pull something like that off, but he has made it clear that
it isn’t moral scruples that would prevent him from doing such a
monstrous thing.

As ludicrous, pathetic and outrageous as this administration is, we
need to take this latest Hersh report seriously. It seems clear that
Cheney has a predilection for using fratricide to achieve his nefarious
ends.

It’s one thing when he does it with his own rifle, though. It’s
another when he does it with the world’s most mighty military machine.
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Dear Chief Prosecutor

davidswanson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:50:54 -0400

An Open Letter to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court

Information and Evidence Unit
Office of the Prosecutor
Post Office Box 19519
2500 CM The Hague
The Netherlands
Fax: +31 70 515 8555
Email: otp.informationdesk@icc-cpi.int

July 15, 2008

Dear Chief Prosecutor,

Congratulations on your request for an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan. When the rule of law cannot be justly enforced within a nation, it must be enforced internationally. In that regard, I would like to recommend that you seek an arrest warrant for the president of my nation, the United States of America. I have read your letter of February 9, 2006, in which you decline to seek prosecution of George W. Bush, and I believe new evidence compels another review.

With all due respect for the difficulty of your work, the case you have brought against the president of Sudan has followed quite different standards than those applied in your refusal to prosecute the president of the United States. In fact, you have refused to consider prosecution of George W. Bush because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court. But Sudan is also not a member of the International Criminal Court. Were you to consider the evidence of international crimes in Iraq as it exists today, and to consider the crimes committed on behalf of the president of the United States by members of the United States military and mercenaries employed by the United States, I believe you would find a case for prosecution that met the standards you applied, and applied well and admirably, to the president of Sudan.

While there is good reason to expect multiple prosecutions of George W. Bush and of his Vice President and top advisors by individual nations, the rule of law would benefit were the International Criminal Court to take the lead. Should it fail to do so, the entire idea of international law will suffer seriously. In the time since your 2006 letter, Judge Baltasar Garzón of Spain, on March 20, 2008, has written these words in El Pais:

"Breaking every international law, and under the pretext of the war against terror, there has taken place since 2003 a devastating attack on the rule of law and against the very essence of the international community. In its path, institutions such as the United Nations were left in tatters, from which it has not yet recovered....We should look more deeply into the possible criminal responsibility of the people who are, or were, responsible for this war and see whether there is sufficient evidence to make them answer for it....There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation and inquiry to start without more delay."

You wrote in your 2006 letter that you cannot prosecute the crime of aggressive war but only the commission of war crimes that take place during a war, and that in 2009 it may become possible for you to prosecute the crime of aggression. While we must all strive to make that prosecution possible in 2009, it is not needed in order to prosecute George W. Bush, and his prosecution should not wait. As the Nuremberg Tribunal stated so well, "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." This has proven to be true in Iraq, and in Bush's global "war on terrorism", and there is no reason to delay prosecution for each separate element of the accumulated evil.

In order to prosecute crimes against humanity, you write that you need to identify "widespread or systemic attack directed against any civilian population." The civilian population of Iraq has suffered as a result of the US-led invasion and occupation in numbers and proportion that can only be called widespread and systemic. Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion and occupation, measured above the high death rate under international sanctions preceding the attack, are estimated at 1.2 million by two independent sources (Just Foreign Policy's updated figure based on the Johns Hopkins / Lancet report, and the British polling company Opinion Research Business's estimate as of August 2007). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of Iraqis who have fled their homes has reached 4.7 million. If these estimates are accurate, a total of nearly 6 million human beings have been displaced from their homes or killed. Many times that many have certainly been injured, traumatized, impoverished, and deprived of clean water and other basic needs.

In examining attacks on civilian populations, some specific incidents can be highlighted, not all of them occurring between March and May 2003, the period of time you referred to in your 2006 letter, and not all of them involving soldiers of the United Kingdom. It is necessary to examine the entire length of the US-led occupation, and to examine the crimes of US troops and mercenaries. Since May of 2005 I have collected evidence of these crimes on a website at http://afterdowningstreet.org A thoroughly documented October 2006 report posted there and prepared by Consumers for Peace (www.consumersforpeace.org) with the advice of Karen Parker, President of the Association of Humanitarian Lawyers (www.humanlaw.org) and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), will provide you with much useful evidence of crimes during the sieges of Fallujah, Samara, Tal Afar, and other cities, as well as systemic violations of the basic duties of an occupying power, and widespread illegal use of a variety of weapons. See: http://afterdowningstreet.org/warcrimesreport

*****

The above report, as many others, also makes the case that the killing of civilians in thousands of isolated incidents has been standard operating procedure for occupying forces in Iraq:

"One reason for the huge numbers of civilian casualties under the U.S. occupation is that U.S. soldiers have often behaved as if they have been told to shoot anything that moves. As noted in the Christian Science Monitor: 'The rules of engagement instruct U.S. soldiers to bring withering force to bear on positions they're attacked from, even when an insurgent ducks into a private house for cover'. However, many NGOs have attested that private homes and persons who are clearly civilians are attacked without any possible excuse that a particular attack was directed at insurgents....

"'One sergeant in northern Iraq puts it this way: "If someone runs into a house, we're going to light it up. If civilians get killed in there, that's a tragedy, but we're going to keep doing it and people are going to get the message that they should do whatever they can to keep these people out of their neighborhoods."'-- Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor....

"An attack on the small town of Baiji illustrates situations that have been repeated numerous times and on both larger and smaller scales. The following excerpts are taken from an article by Michael Schwartz, using reports from the New York Times and the Washington Post:

'In early January 2006, …a relatively small incident (not even worthy of front page coverage)…illustrated perfectly the capacity of the American military to kill uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.'

"Schwartz cited the Times account of what happened at Baiji, 150 miles north of Baghdad, on January 3. The account relied on U.S. officials who had stated:

"'A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft detected three men planting a roadside bomb about 9 p.m. The men "dug a hole following the common pattern of roadside bomb emplacement," the military said in a statement. "The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was relayed to close air support pilots."

"'The men were tracked from the road site to a building nearby, which was then bombed with "precision guided munitions," the military said. The statement did not say whether a roadside bomb was later found at the site. An additional military statement said Navy F-14's had "strafed the target with 100 cannon rounds" and dropped one bomb."

"'Schwartz continues his narrative: The target was a "building nearby," identified by a drone aircraft as an enemy hiding place. According to eyewitness reports given to the Washington Post, the attack effectively demolished the building, and damaged six surrounding buildings. While in a perfect world, the surrounding buildings would have been unharmed, the reported amount of human damage in them (two people injured) suggests that, in this case at least, the claims of "precision" were at least fairly accurate.

"'The problem arises with what happened inside the targeted building, a house inhabited by a large Iraqi family. Piecing together the testimony of local residents, the Times reporter concluded that fourteen members of the family were in the house at the time of the attack and nine were killed.

"'Because in this case -- unlike in so many others in which American air power utilizes "precisely guided munitions" -- there was on-the-spot reporting for an American newspaper, the U.S. military command was required to explain these casualties. Without conceding that the deaths actually occurred, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, commented: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."

"'Notice that Lt. Col. Johnson (while not admitting that civilians had actually died) did assert U.S. policy: If suspected guerrillas use any building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to "shield themselves." These are, in other words, essential U.S. rules of engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid demolishing surrounding structures.'"

*****

A thoroughly documented Article of Impeachment introduced in the United States House of Representatives in June 2008 charges, in part:

"In the course of invading and occupying Iraq, the President, as Commander in Chief, has taken responsibility for the targeting of civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, use of antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, the use of white phosphorous as a weapon, depleted uranium weapons, and the use of a new version of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs. Under the direction of President George Bush the United States has engaged in collective punishment of Iraqi civilian populations, including but not limited to blocking roads, cutting electricity and water, destroying fuel stations, planting bombs in farm fields, demolishing houses, and plowing over orchards.

"Under the principle of 'command responsibility', i.e., that a de jure command can be civilian as well as military, and can apply to the policy command of heads of state, said command brings President George Bush within the reach of international criminal law under the Additional Protocol I of June 8, 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, Article 86 (2). The United States is a state signatory to Additional Protocol I, on December 12, 1977.

"Furthermore, Article 85 (3) of said Protocol I defines as a grave breach making a civilian population or individual civilians the object of attacks. This offense, together with the principle of command responsibility, places President George Bush's conduct under the reach of the same law and principles described as the basis for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, under Article 6 of the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunals: including crimes against peace, violations of the laws and customs of war and crimes against humanity, similarly codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Articles 5 through 8."

See: http://afterdowningstreet.org/busharticleVIII

*****

Your 2006 letter explained that in your investigation of willful killing and inhumane treatment in Iraq you were able to find fewer than 20 victims. It would appear you were limiting your investigation to victims of British troops, if not limiting it in other ways as well. More than 20 victims of U.S. murder, torture, and inhumane treatment can be found in photographic evidence from Abu Ghraib prison alone.

According to the just released book "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer, a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documents and describes what it concludes is unequivocally torture in widespread use by the United States in Iraq and elsewhere. Mayer reports that this Red Cross report has long been known to President Bush. Bush, of course, signed an order in February 2002 brushing aside the Geneva Conventions and authorizing the use of torture. The evidence of torture by US mercenaries and troops is extensive and includes the testimony of numerous victims and witnesses, photographs, and video.

Here are a few sources of information made public since your 2006 letter:

ACLU Announces Publication of Administration of Torture, a Groundbreaking Account of Prisoner Abuse in U.S. Custody Abroad
http://aclu.org/about/staff/administrationoftorture.html

FBI Details Possible Detainee Abuse
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/16890

Cheney's Leading Role in Torture
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney

Uninvestigated Crimes: CIA Torture Flights Out of North Carolina
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/17997

Abu Ghraib: "Man In the Hood" provides testimony at War Crimes Conference
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/18337

New Light Shed on CIA's "Black Site" Prisons
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/19084

Aspects of Padilla's Treatment Confirmed
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/19085

What Happened to the Padilla Interrogation Videos?
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/19632

'We Were Torturing People For No Reason' -- A Soldier's Tale
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20720

'Outsourced Guantanamo' - FBI & CIA Interrogating Detainees in Secret Ethiopian Jails, U.S. Citizen Among Those Held
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20977

CIA Tortured Me in Iraq, Claims Freed Iranian Diplomat
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/20992

Photos of 'Tortured' Iraqi's Corpse Released
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/21391

Former Guantanamo Inmate Describes Interrogations
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/23719

Rumsfeld, Perjury, and Shoving Things Up Rectums
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/23721

Guantánamo Man’s Family Release 'Torture' Dossier
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/25717

CIA Detention Program Remains Active: U.S. Official
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/27486

Torture Victim Tells His Story to Congress
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/27876

Guantanamo Military Lawyer Breaks Ranks to Condemn "Unconscionable" Detention
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28147

Dozens of 'Ghost Prisoners' Not Publicly Accounted For
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28211

Torture Orders Came from Bush
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28347

Flight Logs Reveal Secret Rendition
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28955

Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/29065

Former Chief Prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions Resigned his Post
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/29300

Kiriakou: White House Approved Abuzabaydah's WaterBoarding
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/29335

*****

In fact, the evidence of crimes against humanity authorized and ordered by my president is overwhelming. Please allow me to recommend for your review just a few sources of information that have become public since your 2006 letter was written:

2007 May 4 United States Army Surgeon General's Report on Declining Morale and War Crimes
http://armymedicine.army.mil/news/mhat/mhat.html

US Attack on Iraqi Peace Parliamentarian
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/16887

US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/17011

'Shocking' video: Shi'a Iraqi soldiers beat Sunnis as US trainers watch
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/17779

Death Squads, American Style
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/17862

Fifth Marine Pleads Guilty in Murder of Innocent Man
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/18557

Jailed Two Years, Iraqi Tells of Abuse by Americans
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/18690

Coerced Labor Building Baghdad Embassy?
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/23182

Marine Told to Destroy Haditha Photos
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/23473

The Other War: Iraq Veterans Speak Out on Shocking Accounts of Attacks on Iraqi Civilians
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24605

Marine Says Beatings Urged in Iraq
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24762

Video: Marine on Hamdania Shooting
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/25661

U.S. Soldier Convicted of Beating Iraqi Detainee With Baseball Bat
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/25824

Marine Tells of Order to Execute Haditha Women and Children
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/26350

Documents Show Troops Disregarding Rules
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/26439

U.S. Aims To Lure Insurgents With ‘Bait’
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/27114

Soldier: Sergeant From N.C. Ordered Me to Shoot Unarmed Iraqi Man
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/27233

US Violating Chemical Weapons Convention in Iraq
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28563

*****

I would, in particular, recommend for your review the first-person testimony of U.S. soldiers and Marines returned from Iraq:
http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier

*****

In your 2006 letter you suggest that the crimes, if they are to be prosecuted, must have been "committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes." I believe this can be well established for the war crimes authorized and ordered by the president of the United States in Iraq and elsewhere. Not only has it been U.S. policy to attack and to punish civilians, to arbitrarily detain, and to torture, but President George W. Bush has gone to great lengths to ensure that those obeying his illegal orders not be subject to prosecution. The question of whether U.S. mercenaries or soldiers will be subject to Iraqi law is a major sticking point in ongoing negotiations between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

According to a thoroughly documented Article of Impeachment introduced against President Bush in the United States House of Representatives in June 2008, Bush has

"established policies granting United States government contractors and their employees in Iraq immunity from Iraqi law, U.S. law, and international law.

"Lewis Paul Bremer III, then-Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for post-war Iraq, on June 27, 2004, issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 17, which granted members of the U.S. military, U.S. mercenaries, and other U.S. contractor employees immunity from Iraqi law.

"The Bush Administration has chosen not to apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice or United States law to mercenaries and other contractors employed by the United States government in Iraq.

"Operating free of Iraqi or U.S. law, mercenaries have killed many Iraqi civilians in a manner that observers have described as aggression and not as self-defense. Many U.S. contractors have also alleged that they have been the victims of aggression (in several cases of rape) by their fellow contract employees in Iraq. These charges have not been brought to trial, and in several cases the contracting companies and the U.S. State Department have worked together in attempting to cover them up.

"Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which the United States is party, and which under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution is therefore the supreme law of the United States, it is the responsibility of an occupying force to ensure the protection and human rights of the civilian population. The efforts of President Bush and his subordinates to attempt to establish a lawless zone in Iraq are in violation of the law."

See: http://afterdowningstreet.org/busharticleXV

*****

For documentation of crimes by U.S. mercenaries, please review these reports:

2007 Oct 11 UN Report on Blackwater and Other Mercenaries Killing Indiscriminately
http://uniraq.org/FileLib/misc/HR%20Report%20Apr%20Jun%202007%20EN.pdf

Blackwater Security Shot Iraqi Man
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/18363

CIA Mercenary Gets 8 Years for Beating a Prisoner to Death
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/18556

Blackwater Guards Killed 16 as U.S. Touted Progress
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/27244

FBI Admits Blackwater Mercenaries Murdered at Least 14 People
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28704

*****

The crimes of George W. Bush are not limited to Iraq. For an excellent summary and extensive documentation of charges that he has authorized illegal detention, torture, and rendition to nations that torture, please see these three Articles of Impeachment:

http://afterdowningstreet.org/busharticleXVII

http://afterdowningstreet.org/busharticleXVIII

http://afterdowningstreet.org/busharticleXIX

*****

Thank you for your careful and impartial consideration and courage.

Sincerely,
David Swanson

Torture for the Torturers

dlindorff — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:04:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t believe in torture, but right now, I’d like to see a few
people subjected to some of the torture techniques that they approved
for use against US captives in the so-called War on Terror.

I’d be satisfied if they just stuck to the ones used against
15-year-old Omar Khadr—techniques that a US federal judge established
constituted torture under the Geneva Conventions.

I have a 15-year old son, so I’m particularly aware of what an
atrocity it has been the way the US has treated Khadr, and some 2500
other young boys and teenagers that it admits to having captured and
labeled as “enemy combatants” in its so-called “war on terror.”

Khadr, recall, was sent at the age of 14 to Pakistan by his
allegedly terrorist-linked Canadian father to attend a madrassa—one of
those fundamentalist Muslim schools. Like a number of students of those
schools, he was indoctrinated in jihad and ended up fighting with the
Taliban in Afghanistan against the warlords that opposed them. When the
US attacked Afghanistan, in 2001, Khadr got caught up in a war against
America. According to the charge against him, he was arrested in 2002
after US Special Forces found him and some adult fighters hiding out in
a remote compound in the mountains. The Americans called in an air
strike, and then moved into the rubble to find out who was left—quite
probably, according to some testimony in the case—to finish them off.
Someone, still alive after the attack, tossed a grenade which killed
one of the Americans and blinded another. The others sprayed the
wounded fighters, gravely injuring Khadr and killing one of his older
companions.

Khadr was accused of being the grenade tosser, and was reportedly
tortured in Afghanistan, before being shipped off to Guantanamo, where
he remains six years later, facing a military tribunal. He was
interrogated there, not just by Americans, but by Canadians too.

A citizen of Canada, and clearly someone who was captured and held
in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which hold that children are
“protected persons,” not to be held as POWs if captured in wartime, but
rather to be treated as victims of war, Khadr has thus far been
abandoned to his fate by his own government. The Conservative prime
minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, anxious to have Canada serve as a
willing servant of US military power and foreign policy, has not lifted
a finger to help him.

Now a court in Canada has ordered the Canadian government to
release videotapes it was keeping secret of Khadr’s interrogations, and
they make for ugly viewing. Khadr is shown weeping, holding up his
wounded arms, pleading to be given treatment, pleading to be returned
to Canada. It’s a disgusting scene, especially when we learn that he
had already been “softened up” for his Canadian interrogators by
American torture specialists at Guantanamo who subjected this boy to
three weeks of sleep deprivation and god knows what other creative
techniques which we recently learned were copied from the methods
developed by the North Koreans and applied to American captives in the
Korean War.

It all makes you disgusted to be an American—especially with so
many Americans still justifying this kind of grotesque behavior.

But back to my desire to see some torture inflicted. My profound
wish is that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Department
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Canadian Prime Minister Harper all be subjected to no less than a month
of torture, to include water boarding, at least 2-3 weeks of sleep
deprivation, a variety of 24-stints of being forced into stress
positions (Rumsfeld’s should be standing), some violent slapping
around, and a bit of creative sexual humiliation. Since we don’t know
at this point that anal sodomizing was officially sanctioned, or just
was something that the torturers on the ground came up with that was
then ignored by superiors, I’m willing to let that one be left up to
those performing the torture, but I sure won’t object if it happens.

At this point, I can’t think of anything less than such a
punishment that would be fitting for these monsters who are currently
still running our, and Canada’s, governments.

When I think of what kind of twisted minds these people must have
in order to actually have met in the White House and approved such
methods for use against human beings—human beings who under our
Constitution are to be afforded the presumption of innocence, and who
are promised to be protected against “cruel and unusual” punishments
(or in Harper’s case to have known about it and then not protested,
even to protect a child born in his own country)—it makes me sick to my
stomach.

If there is a hell, I am sure there is in it some special circle
reserved for such monsters, but I think, having seen what was done at
their direction and with their approval to young Khadr (who after all,
if he really ever did toss that grenade, was only doing what any US
soldier would hope to have the courage to do in wartime if his unit
were attacked), that hell is too good for these leaders. They all need
and deserve the special punishment of having done to them what they
ordered or allowed to be done to others.

Sadly, my wish to see them suffer such a fate is unlikely to be
granted. One can at least hope, though, that they will have their names
etched somewhere for posterity on some memorial to the victims of war
crimes and to the eternal condemnation of the perpetrators of such
bestiality.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in Philadelphia.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Keeping Count (When Ours Goes Down, Theirs Goes Up)

dlindorff — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:18:25 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Celeste Zappala, the Gold Star mother of an early casualty in
America's invasion of Iraq who lost her son when he was doing guard
duty during a fraudulent "search" for alleged WMDs in Iraq, was
speaking from the heart when she told a group of antiwar demonstrators
at Philadelphia's Independence Mall Saturday that she was grateful no
American troops had been killed during the past week in Iraq.

Her concern for the troops' well-being is understandable.

But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are
coming at the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even
more true in Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.

The reason for this ugly calculus is that in order to keep
politically damaging US casualties as low as possible, the US military
and the Bush/Cheney administration that gives the generals their
marching orders, are resorting increasingly to the use of air
power--bombs and rockets and remote controlled, missile-equipped
Predator drone aircraft--to attack suspected militant targets.

Case in point--the 22 people the BBC reports
were killed in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province yesterday in a
US missile strike on what turns out to have been a wedding procession.
According to reports from local Afghan police and other officials
quoted in the BBC story, 19 of the victims of this horrific attack were
women and children.

This slaughter--which US military authorities, following their
standard MO, are denying, claiming that those killed were "militants"--
follows an earlier one Friday in Afghanistan, in which a missile fired
from a US helicopter killed 15 people, all civilians.

It has reached a point that in Afghanistan, the US and its NATO
allies (though primarily the US, since most NATO forces are not in
front-line combat roles, and are not conducting most of the air
strikes) are killing far more Afghan civilians than are the Taliban and
their allies in the country.

The same thing is true in Iraq, where the on-the-ground combat role
of US forces is being scaled back, while the use of air power is being
ramped up.

The very idea of conducting an "occupation" via airpower is
fundamentally criminal in nature, since there is simply no way that
people operating at command centers and computer terminals--sometimes
in the case of Predator drones, terminals that are actually situated in
the US!--can make accurate determinations about who the target is, and,
equally importantly, how many innocent civilians may be in the
immediate vicinity of a strike.

We cannot celebrate the reduction in US casualties if they are
coming at the expense of innocent civilians (and I know that this was
not Ms. Zappala's intent, either).

The same strategy of killing from the air was adopted in the later
years of the Vietnam War. It wasn't as successful at reducing US
casualties, because in Vietnam, US forces were confronting a large,
well organized military force, and had to confront them on the ground,
but it was successful at killing innocent Vietnamese, as well as people
in Cambodia and Laos, who were dying at a more prodigious rate towards
the end of that conflict than in its earlier years, thanks to
indiscriminate US bombardment.

The same thing is happening now in America's current imperialist wars.

At the Independence Mall demonstration, organized by the venerable
Brandywine Peace Community, there was a somber memorial made to
America’s dead in Iraq: a black cloth on which was painted the number
4000 in large white numerals. Several blood-red long-stemmed roses were
laid upon the cloth. But there should have been a second black cloth
also strewn with roses, on which should have been painted the number
1.2 million—the estimated number of innocent Iraqis killed in America’s
invasion and occupation of their country. (I don’t mean to criticize
either Celeste or Brandywine here, and certainly the Iraqi and Afghani
deaths were mentioned by speakers at the event.)

We in the anti-war movement need to make certain that we do not
allow the issue to be narrowly focussed on protecting American troops.
We need to continually make the point that it is criminal for America's
military forces to be slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghanis.
___________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush/Cheney and special contracts with Big Oil in Iraq - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

seandiego — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:32:23 -0400

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE TODAY (7/2/08). THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST UNITE TO SHOW THE WORLD WE DID NOT SUPPORT OR APPROVE OF THE INJUSTICES OF THIS ADMINISTRATION AND THE CRIMES IT COMMITTED AGAINST IRAQ, THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD. TO REGAIN OUR STATURE IN THE WORLD, WE MUST CHARGE BUSH AND CHENEY WITH WAR CRIMES BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES IT FOR US. CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS TODAY!

Opening Iraq's oil fields to Big Oil

By Bob Herbert
THE NEW YORK TIMES

July 2, 2008

It's getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. It was the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies also got contracts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn't wait. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, U.S. troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target – the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry – not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry – probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its unusual no-bid contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq's vast oil reserves. As the Times reported Monday, “At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world's largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry.”

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the United States, where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans – in July! – are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

And then there's the so-called war on terror.

The latest news is that al-Qaeda, the terror network that actually did attack the United States, has successfully regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan and has reconstituted its ability to institute terror attacks from the region.

For an administration joined at the hip to the oil industry, the lure of Iraq's enormous reserves was stronger even than the impulse to conquer an enemy that murdered more than 2,700 civilians on Sept. 11, a toll greater than the number of Americans killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Referring to al-Qaeda members who regrouped in Pakistan, the Times reported on Monday:

“Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.”

Who knows how long it will be before the United States disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.

How long will it take before that finally sinks in?

America has a Double Standard When It Comes to Kids. Victims if Prostitutes, Terrorists if They Are Caught Fighting the US

dlindorff — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:44:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Double standards when it comes to children are pretty
appalling—especially when it comes to “our” kids vs. “their” kids, but
here in America they aren’t limited to just right-wingers.

Take reaction to the US Supreme Court’s latest ruling that you
cannot execute rapists—even those who rape children—on the theory that
only killing someone justifies execution.

Politicians who make their careers by promoting state sponsored
murder have been quick to condemn this latest “liberal outrage” by
calling for more laws that would make execution the punishment for
raping a child (admittedly a monstrous crime).

"Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged
that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this,"
says Republican Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who said the
court’s 5-4 decision makes America “a less safe place to grow up.”

Even Barack Obama has weighed in, along with John McCain, in
condemning the court’s decision, saying that states should be free to
pass death statutes for child rape.

Texas Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, supporting death for
“repeat child molesters, says, “Our top priority remains protecting our
most precious resource — our children." (Huh? I thought in Texas it was
oil.)

Then there’s the FBI’s latest sweeping busts of child prostitution
rings, which rescued 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings. In announcing
the arrests of some 300 people, FBI Director Robert Mueller said, "Our
top priority in these cases has always been to identify children
victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous
environments.”

"These kids are victims,” said Ernie Allen, president of the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “They lack the
ability to walk away. This is the 21st-century slavery."

The question is, where are Mueller and Allen and these allegedly
concerned politicians when it comes to children who are forced or lured
into fighting against the US, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq? Where are
they when those children are captured by US military forces and
incarcerated with adult captives in hell-holes like Bagram Airbase in
Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or Guantanamo, where there was
a special children’s section called Camp Iguana? I certainly haven’t
heard a word from either Obama or that famous POW McCain in defense of
America’s child war prisoners.

Take Omar Khadr, shot and then captured and tortured by US forces
at the tender age of 15 in 2002 in Afghanistan and held for six years
in Guantanamo. Last week, I reported on his story
and on plans to try him by military tribunal as a terrorist because he
had dared, allegedly, to toss a grenade at US Special Forces troops who
had called in an air strike on him and several adult fighters, killing
one US soldier (at least one witness to the incident, a US soldier,
says it was not Khadr who three the grenade). Nobody’s saying that
Khadr was a victim. Nobody’s saying that he “lacked the ability to walk
away” from the Taliban forces that his father and older brothers had
him join at the age of 14 a year before. Nobody’s saying he should be
“identified” and “removed from these dangerous environments.”

Nobody in government or in child protection organizations is even
investigating to see if Khadr, as a 15-year-old captive, was tortured!
Indeed, the US has been blocking both Khadr’s military defense attorney
and his Canadian lawyer (Khadr is a Canadian citizen) from getting
military records giving the details of his capture and subsequent
treatment.

Canadian journalist Chris Cook reports that the Canadian government
actually argued in Canadian court against releasing the US reports in
its possession claiming doing so might “upset relations” between Canadian and
the United States. (The Canadian Supreme Court in May rejected that
pathetically subservient claim by a 9-0 vote, ordering full disclosure.)

The thing is, Khadr is just one of at least 2500 children who have
been captured and held as “enemy combatants” by the US in the
Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

Like child prostitutes, these captives, if they were even actually
involved in operations against the US (who would know, since they’ve
never been given hearings in court, and since in many cases the
evidence, such as it is, against them is the result of torture, either
of the children themselves, or of others), are at worst child soldiers,
who cannot be held responsible for their actions. Indeed, under the UN
Charter and the Geneva Convention, as amended by a protocol signed by
the US in 2002, any of them who, at the time of their capture, were
under 18, as was Khadr, are to be considered not POWs or “enemy
combatants,” but rather victims, who need care and treatment.

Aside from Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has filed an article of
impeachment against President Bush, charging him with a war crime for
holding these children, and for authorizing rules of engagement that
have encouraged the killing of children as young as 14, who are
“presumed” to be combatants, and for the six other members of the
House who have co-signed his impeachment bill (Rep. Robert Wexler,
D-FL, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-CA, Rep. Tammy
Baldwin, D-WI, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-NY, and Rep. Sam Farr, D-CA), no
members of Congress have called for the protection of children captured
or held by US military forces.

Their, and the American public’s “concern” for the welfare of
children is narrowly limited to those who are lured or forced into
prostitution. That’s it.

Of course, we should not be surprised at this double standard. Most
of these same politicians are also quick to support laws that take
young children from poor (and usually minority) urban backgrounds who
commit violent crimes and have them tried, and punished, as adults.
Again, these children are as much victims as the kids who become child
prostitutes, but there’s no love lost on them by these “child welfare”
charlatans.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net