Fwd: The Epic Crime That Dares Not Speak Its Name

[Guest guest]

October 27, 2005

The New Statesman (UK)

 

THE EPIC CRIME THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

By John Pilger

 

 

A Royal Air Force officer is about to be tried before a military court for

refusing to return to Iraq because the war is illegal. Malcolm Kendall-Smith

is

the first British officer to face criminal charges for challenging the

legality

of the invasion and occupation. He is not a conscientious objector; he has

completed two tours in Iraq. When he came home the last time, he studied the

reasons given for attacking Iraq and concluded he was breaking the law. His

position is supported by international lawyers all over the world, not least

by

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who said in September last year: " The

US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN Charter. "

 

The question of legality deeply concerns the British military brass, who

sought

Tony Blair's assurance on the eve of the invasion, got it and, as they now

know,

were lied to. They are right to worry; Britain is a signatory to the treaty

that

set up the International Criminal Court, which draws its codes from the

Geneva

Conventions and the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. The latter is clear: " 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. "

 

At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, counts one and two,

" Conspiracy

to wage aggressive war and waging aggressive war " , refer to " the common plan

or

conspiracy " . These are defined in the indictment as " the planning,

preparation,

initiation and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in

violation

of international treaties, agreements and assurances " . A wealth of evidence

is

now available that George Bush, Blair and their advisers did just that. The

leaked minutes from the infamous Downing Street meeting in July 2002 alone

reveal that Blair and his war cabinet knew that it was illegal. The attack

that

followed, mounted against a defenceless country offering no threat to the US

or

Britain, has a precedent in Hitler's invasion of Sudetenland; the lies told

to

justify both are eerily similar.

 

The similarity is also striking in the illegal bombing campaign that

preceded

both. Unknown to most people in Britain and America, British and US planes

conducted a ferocious bombing campaign against Iraq in the ten months prior

to

the invasion, hoping this would provoke Saddam Hussein into supplying an

excuse

for an invasion. It failed and killed an unknown number of civilians.

 

At Nuremberg, counts three and four referred to " War crimes and crimes

against

humanity " . Here again, there is overwhelming evidence that Blair and Bush

committed " violations of the laws or customs of war " including " murder... of

civilian populations of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of

prisoners of war " .

 

Two recent examples: the US onslaught near Ramadi this month in which 39

men,

women and children - all civilians - were killed, and a report by the United

Nations special rapporteur in Iraq who described the Anglo-American practice

of

denying food and water to Iraqi civilians in order to force them to leave

their

towns and villages as a " flagrant violation " of the Geneva Conventions.

 

In September, Human Rights Watch released an epic study that documents the

systematic nature of torture by the Americans, and how casual it is, even

enjoyable. This is a sergeant from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division: " On

their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if

you

wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC [prisoners']

tent. In

a way it was sport... One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a

pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini

Louisville

Slugger that was a metal [baseball] bat. He was the fucking cook! "

 

The report describes how the people of Fallujah, the scene of numerous

American

atrocities, regard the 82nd Airborne as " the Murdering Maniacs " . Reading it,

you

realise that the occupying force in Iraq is, as the head of Reuters said

recently, out of control. It is destroying lives in industrial quantities

when

compared with the violence of the resistance.

 

Who will be punished for this? According to Sir Michael Jay, the permanent

under-secretary of state who gave evidence before the Parliamentary Foreign

Affairs Committee on 24 June 2003, " Iraq was on the agenda of each cabinet

meeting in the nine months or so until the conflict broke out in April " . How

is

it possible that in 20 or more cabinet meetings, ministers did not learn

about

Blair's conspiracy with Bush? Or, if they did, how is it possible they were

so

comprehensively deceived?

 

Charles Clarke's position is important because, as the current British Home

Secretary (interior minister), he has proposed a series of totalitarian

measures

that emasculate habeas corpus, which is the barrier between a democracy and

a

police state. Clarke's proposals pointedly ignore state terrorism and state

crime and, by clear implication, say they require no accountability. Great

crimes, such as invasion and its horrors, can proceed with impunity. This is

lawlessness on a vast scale. Are the people of Britain going to allow this,

and

those responsible to escape justice? Flight Lieutenant Kendall-Smith speaks

for

the rule of law and humanity and deserves our support.