QUESTION: What makes you think the Iraq War is illegal?

Someone posed that question to me in response to one of my youtube videos.

Here's my response:

Thank you for your thoughtful question.

The Nuremberg War Crime Principles, which we used to prosecute the Nazis, and the UN Charter, which we helped draft and whole-heartedly supported after World War II forbid wars of aggression. While Bush went to the UN about the inspectors issue, he did not seek Security Council approval to invade Iraq, which made the war illegal according to Kofi Annan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm

Oddly, we are very selective about when we like the UN. When they are helping us beat up on Saddam, they are good. When they say anything about how Israel treats Palestinians as many resolutions have, we ignore them

Bush knew Saddam was not a threat to us, and went as far as to use the uranium from Niger claim which he knew was false. Even before the war, intelligence professionals in the CIA, Pentagon, and Defense Department were complaining that the White House was pressuring them to make their reports more alarmist than the facts warranted.

In the case of the Pentagon, the administration went as far as to open a separate “Office of Special Plans” that had no intel professionals or separate streams of information, yet produced reports that exaggerated or contradicted military intel. This intel was them presented to Congress and the American people as factual.

A more slippery lie Bush told was creating the impression that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. 70% of Americans believed this but when Bush was asked about it directly, he was forced to admit on at least three different occasions that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, including the 2004 presidential debate.

Those lies had serious consequences: we will end up spend half a trillion dollars on the this war, have lost over 3,000 troops, with tens of thousands more injured, and over 600,000 Iraqis are dead according to the Lancet, the leading medical journal in Britain. Saddam killed about 100,000 people over the ten years before the invasion.

Even if Saddam had the dreaded WMD, or a nuclear weapon in particular, CIA director George Tenet was forced to admit to the Senate that Saddam would have been unlikely to use them on us unless we were literally about to overthrow him. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2312369.stm

He would be even less likely to give them to terrorist since once he did, he would have no control over how they were used. Saddam may have been evil, but he was not stupid. He probably knew how to count, and we have 10,000 nukes, a handful of which would exterminate everyone in Iraq in minutes. Saddam may have been evil, but he was not stupid. He even asked our ambassador to Iraq what our opinion was before we invaded Kuwait.

The actual intelligence was irrelevant to Bush anyway. In the minutes of his planning the war with Tony Blair, it was made clear that the trips to the UN, and demands for inspectors were simply efforts to “wrong-foot” Saddam and provide the appearance of justification rather than real diplomatic efforts. They went as far as to say “the facts were being fixed around the policy.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/18/nwar118.xml


Before the war even started, the Bush administration drew up a plan to privatize and sell off everything in the country, especially the oil. GOP strategist Grover Norquist proudly admits on camera authoring part of it and some oil executives have admitted their role in the war planning.
http://mysite.verizon.net/myk15/iraqmeetingstimeline.html
http://www.gregpalast.com/adventure-capitalism-the-hidden-2001-plan-to-carve-up-iraq

The privatization of natural resources and government services under Paul Bremer violates Article 55 of the Hague Convention, and the Bush administration themselves were concerned that their restructuring of Iraq’s oil industry to our oil companies liking would be prosecutable under this article.
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/195?OpenDocument

Whether the current government of Iraq is truly independent and sovereign is debatable since Bush vetoed their first choice for prime minister, and exerted heavy pressure on the drafting of the Constitution and the current Hydrocarbon Law.

Iraqis who know about the Hydrocarbon Law don’t like it.
http://www.basraoilunion.org
http://www.niqash.org/content.php?contentTypeID=171
http://www.macroworld.net/m/m.w?lp=GetStory&id=245184201

If we restructure their oil industry to benefit our oil companies, is that going to make people in Iraq and the rest of the Arab World like us more or less? If the war in Iraq has something to do with the War on Terror, it seems odd to do something that will make terrorism MORE likely.


As far as our general treatment of Iraqis, every part of article 147 of the Geneva Convention has been broken except for biological experiments and forcing Iraqis to serve us militarily. While less known than the Abu Ghraib torture, when we were rounding up Saddam’s generals, kidnapped one’s family to flush him out.
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/380?OpenDocument

Veterans like John McCain have said that mistreating Iraqis makes it even more likely that if our soldiers are taken prisoner, they will be mistreated.

The Army has a simple standard for whether the war crime of torture has occurred in their interrogation manual: if the same action was done to US troops, would you consider it illegal?

I’ve attached some of the relevant portions of international law. As Americans, we should be concerned when our government lies to us about the reasons they started a war, particularly when they exploited our feelings of vulnerability after 9/11.

Mike
(end of message)

SOURCES ON INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIME LAWS:

The Geneva Convention of 1949 (IV) we've broken almost every section of article 147, and Bush has personally broken article 148.

Art. 147. Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or
property protected by the present Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/380?OpenDocument


The Hague Convention of 1907 (IV) see articles 47, 53, 55

Art. 55. The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct.
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/195?OpenDocument

The privatization of natural resources and government services under Paul Bremer violates this article of the Hague Convention, and the Bush administration themselves were concerned that their restructuring of Iraq’s oil industry to our oil companies liking would be prosecutable under this article. Whether the current government of Iraq is truly independent and sovereign is debatable since Bush vetoed their first choice for prime minister, and exerted heavy pressure on the drafting of the Constitution and the current Hydrocarbon Law.

Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928

ARTICLE I

The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.
ARTICLE II

The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.


http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/kbpact.htm


Nuremberg Principles

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War Crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles


UN Charter

Article 2, paragraph 4

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Article 51

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

iraq war privatization war crimes oil psa production sharing agreement president george w bush oil companies shell bpExxonMobil ChevronTexaco ConocoPhillips united nations antonia juhasz greg palast GOP privatization corruption occupation war of aggression hydrocarbon law grover norquist torture professor smartass iraq john mccain yellow cake uranium niger war on terror public relations worst president ever failure war criminal smartass comments resistance censored news hugo chavez venezuela

VIDEO & PICS: More of new Abu Ghraib photos & how methods developed

The only place to see all of the new photos is in the real player video of the story, which includes the first video clips from inside the prison I've seen. You definitely need moving pictures to capture a guy banging his head against a door he's chained to.

The good news is that these were leaked by people in the Army who are repulsed by this and the policies that allowed it to happen, and therefore may rebel against other orders that do our country more harm than good.

The official Bush administration position is that this is old news and those who are responsible are being punished.

But consider these things:

Rumsfeld authorized these techniques:

the use hoods, stress positions, isolation, stripping naked, deprivation of light, removal of religious items, forced grooming, and menacing with dogs.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20050425.html

Our current attorney general approved this White House torture memo:

Torture, the memo says, "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html

Both definitions violate the Geneva Convention, American laws, and the Army Field Manual on Interrogations which states that the guiding principle is the Golden Rule--treat your prisoners the way you would want ours treated.

Bush himself has said we don't torture, but when John McCain wrote an amendment simply requiring the military to follow their own interrogation manual and not torture people, Bush first asked for an exception for the CIA and then, rather than make his first veto of a prohibition of torture, accompanied his signature with a signing statement saying he could ignore this law whenever he chooses.

This business of issuing signing statements that contradict the plain sense of laws Congress passes is what Samuel Alito meant when he used the term "unitary executive" in his confirmation to the Supreme Court; he meant the president can do whatever the hell he wants and it's legal. Like term limits and balanced budgets, conservatives will suddenly change their mind about this if there's a Democratic president.

The first link on this is best and you can only see some of the pics there. It requires real player though, so if the player doesn't open automatically,you may need to copy the URL and paste it into real player. The slideshow link has the same clip in flash player.

AUSTRALIAN STORY:

http://203.15.102.143:8080/ramgen/media/6304abughraib.rm

STILLS:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/16/abu_ghraib/portfolio.html


STILLS & SLIDESHOW:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/abu/#salon

Democracy Now did three stories on these new photos. The most compelling was on the history of the development of these methods which started around the same time as the governments research into using drugs, hypnosis, electro-shock and other methods mind control. Ironically, those more exotic ones proved less effective than a couple of simpler ones: sensory deprivation, self-inflicted injury, and culturally based humiliation. One university researching sensory deprivation found they could induce psychosis within 48 hours by cutting off light, sound, and touch.

The researcher also goes into more detail of the mind control program, MKULTRA, and his research into CIA involvement in the drug trade in Southeast Asia, which is gripping stuff. Audio and video is available too.

Even these methods are relatively useless for obtaining information, but since at least 60% of the detainees at Abu Ghraib were innocent, it is far more likely this was done to incite fear in the general public or recruit informers as the guy in the famous Christ pose photo said he was pressured to become.

KEY EXCERPTS:

HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228

Friday, February 17th, 2006

Professor McCoy Exposes the History of CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror

SENSORY DEPRIVATION

From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill -- and the first breakthrough came at McGill. And it's in the book. And here, you can see the -- this is the -- if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows -- that's the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University --

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.

And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.

SELF-INFLICTED PAIN

Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.” And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.

Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique.

CULTURAL ASSAULT STARTED AT GUANTANAMO & EXPORTED TO ABU GHRAIB

Now, one of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, he appointed General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo, alright, because the previous commanders at Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.

And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called “Biscuit” teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Professor McCoy, we’re going to break for a minute, and then we'll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

FULL TEXT:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228


OTHER DEMOCRACY NOW STORIES ON NEW ABU GHRAIB PHOTOS:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522219

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522224



abu ghraib torture photos democracy now memo kubark mkultra video

Israel & Saudi Arabia AGREE: Iraq War creating not just attracting terrorists

Normally, about the only thing you could get Israel & Saudi to agree on is the weather.

But this analysis debunks the Bush argument that at least the Iraq War is attracting terrorists to Iraq instead of the US, as if there is a finite number, and we can kill enough to resolve the problem.

This study was done by examining interrogations of captured foreign fighters in Iraq, and background investigations of suicide bombers in Iraq.

The history of past insurgencies including our own failed war in Vietnam show that this is asinine. Every time to you kill someone, you inspire a brother, or cousin, or neighbor to take up arms. And if the war itself is obviously unjust it can attract sympathizers from outside even to the point of taking up arms, as the Israelis and Saudis are noting.

We had something similar happen with a terrorist here in the US about 150 years ago. John Brown was a well-known anti-slavery activist who raided slave-holding farms to liberate their slaves. When he tried to seize weapons from the Harper's Ferry armory, he was caught and hung. Rather than quell the anti-slavery movement, it galvanized it (the original lyrics of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were about Brown's death). Within a few years, the Civil War followed because Lincoln said he would not allow slavery to spread into anymore new states.

The same thing happened to the French in Algeria. A French director made an extremely realistic movie, The Battle of Algiers, about the insurgency against the French. At the very end, the French capture the leader of the rebels hiding in a hole in a wall, and say "at last, we have broken the back of the rebellion." As the screen fades to black, the words that crawl up the screen say the rebellion continued, and a few years later, the French were forced to leave.

Just because people aren't white (or as white as us), don't speak English, and put up with a dictator for decades, doesn't mean they are stupid or less human than us.

KEY EXCERPTS:

The Boston Globe

Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq
War radicalized most, probes find

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | July 17, 2005


However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."

****

Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that ''the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a responsibility to go."

Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families, according to the two investigations. ''The vast majority of them had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. ''I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world."

FULL TEXT:

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/07/17/study_cites_seeds_of_terror_in_iraq/