Middle East

Nuremberg 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 to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war, of 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 inhuman 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.

Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principles VI is a crime under international law.

IRAQ

Rights group finds secret prison in Basra - By Mohammed Hamdoun, Azzaman, September 11, 2008

Iraqi Parliament’s Human Rights Commission has found up to 200 malnourished and disease-stricken Iraqi detainees locked in a secret prison in the southern city of Basra. The commission’s spokesman, Amer Thamer, said many of the detainees bore signs of torture. “They are crammed in a circular room surrounded with slabs of concrete with no roof,” Thamer said. He said the prison is operated by the Defense Ministry and none of the inmates has ever been tried or given access to legal assistance. “We put the blame for the horrific conditions of the inmates squarely on the Defense Ministry,” he said. Members of the commission came across the prison during a routine tour of Basra. “Searing temperatures and extremely hot sun had almost grilled some inmates,” he said. “We were told of grave instances of abuse which violate basic human rights conditions,” he added. “To leave prisoners in the open under the scorching heat is inhuman and a flagrant violation of human rights,” he said. Thamer said the 200 prisoners only had access to one flooded and dirty latrine. “The prison is an example of the denial of the most basic rights of inmates,” he said. “The Human Rights Commission in the Parliament considers these violations an example of barbaric and inhuman practices … and a serious violation of human rights," He said the commission has demanded the authorities shut down the prison immediately.

AFGHANISTAN


"To the villagers here, there is no doubt what happened in an American airstrike on Aug. 22: more than 90 civilians, the majority of them women and children, were killed. The Afghan government, human rights and intelligence officials, independent witnesses and a United Nations investigation back up their account, pointing to dozens of freshly dug graves, lists of the dead, and cellphone videos and other images showing bodies of women and children laid out in the village mosque. Cellphone images seen by this reporter show at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among some 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the village mosque. Ten days after the airstrikes, villagers dug up the last victim from the rubble, a baby just a few months old. Their shock and grief is still palpable. For two weeks, the United States military has insisted that only 5 to 7 civilians, and 30 to 35 militants, were killed in what it says was a successful operation against the Taliban: a Special Operations ground mission backed up by American air support. But on Sunday, Gen. David D. McKiernan, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, requested that a general be sent from Central Command to review the American military investigation in light of “emerging evidence.”"" Posted by As'ad at 6:58 AM


16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq
Mon, 08 Sep 2008

The War Will Go On

By C. G. ESTABROOK

01.09/08 "Counterpunch" -- - In the late summer of 2008, as the American political parties convene to produce a new president, it seems clear that Americans will continue to kill and die -- and suffer and inflict terrible injuries -- in the U.S. war in the Middle East, regardless of who is elected president, well into the next administration and beyond.

The war is not limited to Iraq. The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, in March of 2003, was preceded by their invasion of Afghanistan, in October of 2001. In the spring and summer of 2008, more Americans have been killed each month in Afghanistan than in the on-going war in Iraq.

Furthermore, there are undoubtedly members of the current administration -- centered in the office of the vice president -- who wish to attack Iran, and the military and the CIA are already conducting "special operations" there. But the foreign policy establishment in Washington -- which cuts across party lines -- believes, in the words of Democratic party deep thinker Richard Holbrooke, that "AfPak" [Afghanistan and Pakistan] is "even more important to our national security than Iraq."

What he means is that that is where the most serious resistance to the U.S. attempt to dominate the region militarily is coming from. And therefore the Pentagon will send 12,000 to 15,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, as soon as the end of this year, with planning underway for a further force buildup in 2009.

Democracy Now! reported this week that "senior Pentagon officials are debating whether the US military should expand the Afghan war by carrying out military attacks against Islamic militants operating in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas. The move would be in defiance of Pakistan’s civilian government, which recently refused to accept a U.S. military training mission for the Pakistani army ... The prominent military analyst Anthony Cordesman said the US should treat Pakistani territory as a combat zone if Pakistan does not act. Cordesman’s comment came in a new report in which he declared the US is now losing the war against the Taliban. Cordesman writes, "Pakistan may officially be an ally, but much of its conduct has effectively made it a major threat to U.S. strategic interests.'"

Both potential presidents approve. McCain and Obama try to outdo one another on how war-like they will be in AfPak: after Obama said he would send two more brigades to Afghanistan, McCain said he would send three; in his major speech in Berlin, Obama's only specific exhortation to the Germans was, "The Afghan people need our troops and your troops ... We have too much at stake to turn back now."

What in fact do we have at stake? Recently an Afghan government newspaper loosed the proverbial cat when it asserted that the U.S. wants to keep Afghanistan unstable in order to justify the presence of the American military, given Afghanistan's geographical location bordering Iran and central Asia's rich oil- and gas-producing nations.

That's not far wrong. It has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War that the U.S. must control the energy resources of the Middle East. Not because we need them here at home -- the U.S. obtains the bulk of the oil used domestically from the Western hemisphere -- but because control of energy gives the U.S. a strangle-hold on our corporations' major economic competitors, the European Union and northeast Asia (Japan, China and South Korea).

Whether we call them al-Qaida, Taliban, insurgents, terrorists or militants, the people whom we're trying to kill in the Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of their resources. In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in this cause, the Bush administration has vastly misrepresented the situation, from trumpeting the non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" to, apparently, forging incriminating letters.

But even though a majority of Americans are now against the war in Iraq, many still think that the Bush administration was justified in invading Afghanistan, because it "harbored" Osama bin Laden. They forget that the government of Afghanistan tried to discuss the surrender of Osama bin Laden for trial, but the U.S. government refused to negotiate. It preferred a war that supported general U.S. policy in the region.

On the basis of the principles on which the U.S. and its allied governments hanged German leaders after the Second World War, the Bush administration has committed what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime [i.e., worse than terrorism] differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" -- and they've done it twice, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

More than a generation ago, the U.S. war against South Vietnam came to an end -- after horrible suffering and millions dead -- because of the conjunction of three factors: (1) the resistance of the Vietnamese people against foreign occupation; (2) the effective revolt of the American military in Vietnam, largely a conscript army; and (3) the opposition of the American people, seventy per cent of whom came to believe by the late 1960s that the U.S. war was "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not a mistake.

As a character in Shakespeare's Tempest says, "...what's past is prologue, what to come / In yours and my discharge."

C. G. Estabrook is a retired visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the host of "News from Neptune, the TV Edition," on Urbana Public Television and on the website newsfromneptune.com; he can be contacted at carl@newsfromneptune.com