COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: AWOL
The Epic That Dares Not Speak Its Name
John Pilger, ZNet Commentary
October 28, 2005
An RAF
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 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 Home
Secretary, 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. New Statesman (London) |
www.newstatesman.co.uk Monday, October 31, 2005
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