Fw: [A-List] Crime Against Humanity by John Pilger April 10, 2003

["Christopher Black" <bar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>
To: "Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 7:34 PM
Subject: [A-List] Crime Against Humanity by John Pilger April 10, 2003


> <"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the Nuremberg trial
> of the Nazi leadership, "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." In stating this
> guiding principle of international law, the judges specifically rejected
> German arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other
> countries.>
>
> Crime Against Humanity
> by John Pilger
> April 10, 2003
> ZNet
>
> A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American
> fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly fire", spoke to his
> mother on a satellite phone. Holding the phone over his head so that she
> could hear the sound of the American planes overhead, he said: "Listen,
> that's the sound of freedom."
>
> Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being
ferociously
> ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed the Observer's
> page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel
> headline: "The moment young Omar discovered the price of war". These
> cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American marine reaching out
> to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just participated in the mass murder
of
> his father, mother, two sisters and brother during the unprovoked invasion
> of their homeland, in breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples.
>
> No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper; no honest
> headline, such as: "This American marine murdered this boy's family". No
> photograph of Omar's father, mother, sisters and brother dismembered and
> blood-soaked by automatic fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda
> picture have been appearing in the Anglo-American press since the invasion
> began: tender cameos of American troops reaching out, kneeling,
ministering
> to their "liberated" victims.
>
> And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80 men, women
> and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the Mirror, where were the
> pictures, and footage, of small children holding up their hands in terror
> while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel in the street? Imagine
> that in a British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a
> right to see it.
>
> "To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the Nuremberg trial
of
> the Nazi leadership, "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." In stating this guiding
> principle of international law, the judges specifically rejected German
> arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other
> countries.
>
> Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and their media court
do
> now will change the truth of their great crime in Iraq. It is a matter of
> record, understood by the majority of humanity, if not by those who claim
to
> speak for "us". As Denis Halliday said of the Anglo-American embargo
against
> Iraq, it will "slaughter them in the history books". It was Halliday who,
as
> assistant secretary general of the United Nations, set up the "oil for
food"
> programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly realised that the UN had become an
> instrument of "a genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned in
> protest, as did his successor, Hans von Sponeck, who described "the wanton
> and shaming punishment of a nation".
>
> I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly because their
> names and their witness have been airbrushed from most of the media. I
well
> remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight shortly after
his
> resignation: "So are you an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set
> the tone for the travesty of journalism that now daily, almost gleefully,
> treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger Mosey, the head of
> BBC Television News, described the BBC's war coverage as "extraordinary -
it
> almost feels like World Cup football when you go from Um Qasr to another
> theatre of war somewhere else and you're switching between battles".
>
> He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and no one will
> say so, even when they are murdering journalists. They bring to this
> one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless people the same racist,
> homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole programme
of
> murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all their foreign wars,
> as it does through their own divided society. Take your pick of the
current
> onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their tanks swept heroically into
> Baghdad and out again. They murdered people along the way.
>
> They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of children. Hear their
> voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape: "We shot the shit out of
> it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues and hospitals - hospitals already
> denuded of drugs and painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of
> $5.4bn in humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and paid
for
> by Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with minimal
> anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of freedom".
>
> Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British helicopter pilot
who
> came to blows with an American who had almost shot him down. "Don't you
know
> the Iraqis don't have a fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot
> reflect on the truth he had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise
against
> a stricken third world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt it.
> The British have been the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any
> standard, the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American machine was
> heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small arms and desperate ambushes,
> they panicked the Americans and reduced the British military class to one
of
> its specialities - mendacious condescension.
>
> The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of Ba'ath
Party
> loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real people:
> cultured and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary of
dishonour
> has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from the
broadcasting
> box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked the Today programme's presenter of
a
> former general embedded in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging, isn't
it?"
> he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their plummy voices, are their
> bond.
>
> On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle
> East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this "hugely encouraging"
> truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of British soldiers smashing their
way
> into a family home in Basra, pointing their guns at a woman and
manhandling,
> hooding and manacling young men, one of whom was shown quivering with
> terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners and,
if
> so, based on what sort of intelligence, given Britain's long unfamiliarity
> with this territory and its inhabitants . . . The least this ugly display
> will do is remind Arabs and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double
> standards - we can show your prisoners in . . . degrading positions, but
> don't you dare show ours.".
>
> Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup football".
> There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate refugees are streaming in
and
> the hospitals are overflowing. All this misery is due entirely to the
> "coalition" invasion and the British siege, which forced the United
Nations
> to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic relief agency,
> which has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian quota for
> water in emergency situations is 20 litres per person per day.
>
> Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people drinking from
> contaminated wells. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.5
million
> people across southern Iraq are without water, and epidemics are
inevitable.
> And what are "our boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from staging
> childish, theatrical occupations of presidential palaces, having fired
> shoulder-held missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster bombs?
>
> A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is difficult to
> deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone". The logic of
> his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the British and
> the Americans were not defying international law, there would be no
> difficulty in delivering aid.
>
> There is something especially disgusting about the lurid propaganda coming
> from these PR-trained British officers, who have not a clue about Iraq and
> its people. They describe the liberation they are bringing from "the
world's
> worst tyranny", as if anything, including death by cluster bomb or
> dysentery, is better than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient truth is
> that, according to Unicef, the Ba'athists built the most modern health
> service in the Middle East.
>
> No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but Saddam
> Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular
society
> and a large and prosperous middle class. Iraq was the only Arab country
with
> a 90 per cent clean water supply and with free education. All this was
> smashed by the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed in
1990,
> the Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution system that the UN's
> Food and Agriculture Organisation described as "a model of efficiency . .
.
> undoubtedly saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was smashed when the
> invasion was launched.
>
> Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on
> protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by American
> "friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are using solid uranium
> coated on missiles and tank shells. When I was in southern Iraq, doctors
> estimated a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas where depleted uranium
> was used by the Americans and British in the 1991 war. Under the
subsequent
> embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied equipment with which to
clean
> up its contaminated battlefields. The hospitals in Basra have wards
> overflowing with children with cancers of a variety not seen before 1991.
> They have no painkillers; they are fortunate if they have aspirin.
>
> With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera), little of this has
> been reported. Instead, the media have performed their preordained role as
> imperial America's "soft power": rarely identifying "our" crime, or
> misrepresenting it as a struggle between good intentions and evil
incarnate.
> This abject professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen dangers
of
> such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition in Iran, Korea,
Syria,
> Cuba, China.
>
> George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just following
> orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no doubt the right
of
> ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in an illegal war of
> aggression. Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek status as
> conscientious objectors. They face court martial and imprisonment; yet
> virtually no questions have been asked about them in the media. George
> Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he
and
> Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being threatened with
> withdrawal of the Labour whip.
>
> Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime Minister is
a
> war criminal who should be sent to The Hague. This is not gratuitous; on
the
> prima facie evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and all those who have
been,
> in one form or another, accessories should be reported to the
International
> Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts few now
take
> seriously, they brought terrorism and death to Iraq.
>
> A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that the new court
> has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University wrote, to investigate
"not
> only the regime, but also the UN bombing and sanctions which violated the
> human rights of Iraqis on a vast scale". Add the present piratical war,
> whose spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The
> whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the magnitude
of
> their crime.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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