The epic crime that dares not speak its name

[Also the criminal neocon government in The Netherlands openly supports this ilegal war - http://tinyurl.com/93c97]

THE US-LED INVASION OF IRAQ IS AN ILLEGAL ACT THAT CONTRAVENED THE UN CHARTER

by JOHN PILGER

LONDON - 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."

[FPF: 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC: video & text-interview of the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.:http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v]

THE QUESTION OF LEGALITY

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.

BLAIR AND BUSH COMMITTED "VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS OR CUSTOMS OF WAR

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 MURDERING MANIACS

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.

JOHN PILGER

[enditem] - Web site at - Url.: http://pilger.carlton.com/print

First published in the New Statesman - Url.: http://www.newstatesman.co.uk>

FWD. IN FULL AGREEMENT WITH PILGER BY:

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor : Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/66dmo
The Netherlands
FPF@Chello.nl

MAIN$TREAM MEDIA MAKE MORONS!

* *The Dutch author this far has worked abroad for international media for more than 4 decades, as a fully independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism.

* Our future: Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World - The most chilling story on why all this happens and who does it - url.: http://tinyurl.com/ax5zt

* The Nuremberg principles: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/byurp

* The leaked 'Downing Street Memos' expose the criminal lies by war criminals like Bush, Blair, Berlusconi(It.) Balkenende(NL) - their collaborating media and other malignant ilk - Url.: http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

* MSNBC - Poll: Ninety-four (94) percent believes that George Bush and the neocon media mislead the nation to go to war with Iraq - Url.: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8248969/

* ''The Lancet'' and the ''Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health'' report: ''Over 100.000 killed in the illegal Iraq war''-Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5gys7

* Bush interview. ABC: No WMD's but many killed: "It was worth it" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6bal9

* Former Secr. of State Madeleine Albright in her comment on half a million dead children in Iraq: "We think it's worth it" On CBS 60' Minutes - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8

* The must-see three-part BBC Documentary, "The Power of Nightmares," puts it bluntly: "Al-Qaeda is a (neocon) myth." - See Url.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html

* Criminals in Indonesia steal millions, faking and 'fighting' their own "War on Terror" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cq36f

* Wayne Madsen: ''What has Israel to do with 9/11?'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bj754 - 'American neocons' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b5vsb - The US Federal Reserve and the private banks owning it - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/d3ntq

* Who are the Lords of the Lies? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/c59ad - Are their Corporate News Media Incompetent, Criminally Negligent or Complicit? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cqpfe

* Brainwashed? - Take the free 'Gullibility Factor' test to find out if you're really a mind slave, or not - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cbgnc

* Colin Powell: 'It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/22p6c

* American car magnate Henry Ford investigated 85 years ago the global problem - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2xz35

* Help all the troops of whatever nationality to come back from abroad! We need them badly at home in many countries - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE PAID FOR BY TAXES - to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

* The World Can't Wait! - Drive out the neocons and their 'Bush Regime' - Mobilize for November 2, 2005! - Url.: http://www.worldcantwait.org/

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

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Fitzgerald & Amin the "ape," people-eating blacks: Richard Nixon's Africa

FPF: IF THERE IS ANYBODY OUTSIDE OF THE US WHO THINKS THAT THE PEOPLE MANAGING THE POWER RIGHT NOW VIA THE US THINK OTHERWISE ABOUT YOU: FORGET IT! - YOU ARE EITHER PROFITABLE, OR DON'T EXIST.*

Especially - and I have worked enough years in Africa to know it - since Idi Amin was a CIA-product which became - like bin Laden as usual - a 'blowback'. - [http://tinyurl.com/3bytm]

The TV-film of the 'Western' white and short trousered 'businessmen' in the 'Business Club' in Uganda's capital Kampala, is never shown again, since the people - owning the media where it could be shown - were all involved. It was a disgrace for humanity to see all those greedy trade slaves drunkenly carrying 'Amin the Cannibal' around in a chair.

And they were all there: US, UK, Israeli, German, French, Dutch, Asian and all other crooks: the top fifty on the list of profiteers. All Africa 'old hands' know it, and most editors too. They all know that now Uganda is stillin the firm hands of the US companies thanks to Ugandan president Musaveni's collaboration. All mainstream media shut up about it, and are logically guilty by association. Like anybody else right now: all the cowards which shut up about Iraq and the legallity of it.

The US/UN invasion of Sudan's oil fields - with media fakes and the cover up by the UN so called 'peace troops' - got under way, when the man who wanted indepence and a fair share for the people in Sudan where the oil was, political leader John Garang, suddenly fell out of the sky. Garang and his close collaborators thought they were flying home above the thousand lakes and lushly green hilltops, after saying farewell to Musaveni and his 'spooks' in Kampala. [http://tinyurl.com/7a7px] - Garang, as ordered, never made it home; he did not fit the neocon picture.

I remember Musaveni telling me in Stockholm, Sweden, when I interviewed him there 20 years ago, that he wanted 'the Swedish model', meaning some form of democratic statehood. Not the 'Swedish Model', with two neocon families - Wallenberg and Bonnier - running the image/matrix of the country. The same media system by the way as we are subjected to in most of our 'western' countries. Who for instance knows what the US and allies did in Rwanda? And what for? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cdmt5

THE NAKED APES

Have a look how we, as Desmond Morris called us correctly ''the naked apes'' [http://tinyurl.com/3rfmb] are doing, and never forget: we in the so called 'developed countries' blame the people we have have maltreated for centuries for not being able to do what we have denied them to learn.

World news Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, at the globally broadcasted White House press conference about Libby, a court case that actually is about the genocidal behavior of the US neocons - without understanding what impact this has in so called Third World coutries, the victims of the IMF, World Bank etc. Fitzgerald said : "The guy who shined my shoes today told me...

It's no wonder that hardly anyone among African-Americans in a recently published poll trusts the US government with Bush and his advisers: too many of them have to shine shoes to stay alive. Guess how many are trying to survive on less than ONE dollar a day? Only TWO percent said they approved of Bush performance as president, the lowest level ever recorded in that category, NBC television reported. [http://tinyurl.com/7elvl]

So, when reading a story like the one below, you certainly must ask yourself: Why do they give me this information? To what side do they all of us want to look? What - now again - do they want me to believe? Who Profits?

Amin the "ape," people-eating blacks: Richard Nixon's Africa

Agence France Presse - Oct 27th - 2005 - Former president Richard Nixon considered Ugandan dictator Idi Amin an "ape" and mistrusted his own State Department as "always on the side of the blacks," according to documents made public this week.

The once-classified documents show Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger in raw form in dealing with African crises in 1972, including Uganda's mass expulsion of Asians and genocide in Burundi.

But for all of the rough language, the transcripts of phone conversations and other texts highlight the US reluctance to take a stand on atrocities committed by Amin's regime until US citizens were threatened.

And Kissinger made clear Washington's refusal to respond to the plight of tens of thousands of Asians expelled by Amin until after the November 7, 1972 US election that gave Nixon a second term.

In private, both Nixon and Kissinger showed unvarnished contempt for many of the players in Africa, from Amin to US State Department diplomats.

"Isn't it awful though... that this goddamn guy at the head of Uganda, Henry, is an ape," Nixon told Kissinger by telephone from his retreat at Camp David on September 24, 1972.

"He's an ape without education," Kissinger replied.

"He's a prehistoric monster," Nixon later chimed in.

Nixon thought little more of Kwame Nkrumah, the late father of Ghanaian independence and champion of the pan-African movement whom he dismissed as "that asshole."

The Republican leader went apoplectic when he learned his State Department was balking at providing assistance for thousands of Britons stranded and fearing massacre in Uganda.

"Screw State!" Nixon bellowed. "State's always on the side of the blacks. The hell with them!"

But 10 days earlier, in a meeting at the White House, Kissinger had little to say to a senior British delegation looking for help to resettle some of the Indians and Pakistanis brutally chased out of Amin's country.

"I believe we are looking to see if we can take any (action) but I am confident that we cannot take enough to help your problem," he said. "We are eager to avoid this issue before November 7."

A November 1, 1972 memorandum from Kissinger to Nixon stated bluntly that US interests in Uganda were limited to protecting American citizens and barring the Russians from having a free hand.

The pair were also left fulminating and frustrated by the 1972 slaughter of an estimated 150,000-200,000 Hutus in an outbreak of tribal violence in Burundi.

"I'm getting tired of this business of letting these Africans eat a hundred thousand people and do nothing about it," Nixon fumed in the September 24 phone call.

Kissinger, who was to win a Nobel Peace Prize [Yes, but - FPF- Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cyvfm] the next year for negotiating a ceasefire in the Vietnam War, endorsed the show of compassion that confounded "these bleeding hearts in this country who like to say we kill yellow people."

In the end, the United States did not do much more in Burundi than try to whip up international pressure to stop the killing, recall the US ambassador for consultations and provide 150,000 dollars in relief aid.

Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal and died in 1994.

[enditem] - 2005 Agence France Presse - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/76dov


FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor : Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/66dmo
The Netherlands
FPF@Chello.nl

MAIN$TREAM MEDIA MAKE MORONS!

* *The Dutch author this far has worked abroad for international media for more than 4 decades, as a fully independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism.

* Our future: Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World - The most chilling story on why all this happens and who does it - url.: http://tinyurl.com/ax5zt

* The Nuremberg principles: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/byurp

* 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC: video & text-interview of the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.:http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v

* The leaked 'Downing Street Memos' expose the criminal lies by war criminals like Bush, Blair, Berlusconi(It.) Balkenende(NL) - their collaborating media and other malignant ilk - Url.:http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

* MSNBC - Poll: Ninety-four (94) percent believes that George Bush and the neocon media mislead the nation to go to war with Iraq - Url.: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8248969/

* ''The Lancet'' and the ''Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health'' report: ''Over 100.000 killed in the illegal Iraq war''-Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5gys7

* Bush interview. ABC: No WMD's but many killed: "It was worth it" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6bal9

* Former Secr. of State Madeleine Albright in her comment on half a million dead children in Iraq: "We think it's worth it" On CBS 60' Minutes - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8

* The must-see three-part BBC Documentary, "The Power of Nightmares," puts it bluntly: "Al-Qaeda is a (neocon) myth." - See Url.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html

* In Indonesia they steal millions, faking and 'fighting' their own "War on Terror" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cq36f

* Wayne Madsen: ''What has Israel to do with 9/11?'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bj754 - 'American neocons' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b5vsb - The US Federal Reserve and the private banks owning it - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/d3ntq

* Are their Corporate News Media Incompetent, Criminally Negligent or Complicit? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cqpfe

* Brainwashed? - Take the free 'Gullibility Factor' test to find out if you're really a mind slave, or not - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cbgnc

* Colin Powell: 'It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/22p6c

* Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5k7vx

* American car magnate Henry Ford investigated 85 years ago the global problem - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2xz35

* Help all the troops of whatever nationality to come back from abroad! We need them badly at home in many countries - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE PAID FOR BY TAXES - to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

* The World Can't Wait! - Drive out the neocons and their 'Bush Regime' - Mobilize for November 2, 2005! - Url.: http://www.worldcantwait.org/

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

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