Thursday, March 31, 2011
Conference of Presidents Meets with President Obama
Leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and its member organizations met today with President Barack Obama at the White House to discuss U.S.-Israel relations, ongoing changes in the Middle East and other issues.
The 50-person delegation, led by Conference of Presidents Chairman Alan Solow and Executive Vice Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein, also met with David S. Cohen, the Department of Treasury’s Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence regarding sanctions against Iran; Dennis Ross, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region and Daniel B. Shapiro, Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council, who addressed issues relating to Middle East peace; and with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders including House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.
During the almost one-hour session, President Obama addressed issues including the recent veto of the anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations Security Council, the ongoing changes taking place in the Middle East and prospects of peace between Israel and its neighbors. He then fielded questions from the leaders.
Following the meeting with the President, Mr. Solow and Mr. Hoenlein said, “We appreciate the extraordinary session we had with President Obama today during which we were able to engage in an open dialogue relating to issues of concern to the Jewish community. The President reaffirmed his deep commitment to Israel's security and set out his view as to how the United States can promote the values it shares with Israel as the region undergoes change. The open lines of communication with President Obama and his Administration are highly valued and provide us with the opportunity to articulate the views of American Jewry on issues that face our country.”
They added, “The strong bipartisan support for strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship in all its aspects was evident from the meetings with the congressional leaders. They also spoke of concerns regarding the U.N. continuing to single out Israel in one-sided resolutions, the status of foreign aid to Israel and other countries, and other issues on the congressional agenda. We believe that the discussions are of great importance to inform the leadership of our member organizations, and have the leaders of our country hear their perspectives and concerns.”
Click on link below to see all zionist members
http://www.conferenceofpresidents.org/content.asp?id=55
Are you Brainwashed?
Black people are the survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of "No way!" At this pivotal point in history, the idea of black inferiority should have had a "Going-Out-of-Business Sale." After all, Barack Obama has reached America's Promise Land.
Yet, as Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority testifies, too many in black America are still wandering in the wilderness. In this powerful examination of "the greatest propaganda campaign of all time"--masterful marketing of black inferiority--Burrell poses ten disturbing questions that will make black people look in the mirror and ask why, nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, so many blacks still think and act like slaves.
Brainwashed is no a reprimand--its a call to action. It demands that we questions our self-defeating attitudes and behaviors. Racism is not the issue; how we respond to media distortions and programmed self-hatred is the issue. It's time to reverse the BI campaign with a globally based initiative that harnesses the power of new media and the wisdom of intergenerational coalitions. Provocative and powerful, Brainwashed dares to expose the wounds so that we, at last, can heal.
Yet, as Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority testifies, too many in black America are still wandering in the wilderness. In this powerful examination of "the greatest propaganda campaign of all time"--masterful marketing of black inferiority--Burrell poses ten disturbing questions that will make black people look in the mirror and ask why, nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, so many blacks still think and act like slaves.
Brainwashed is no a reprimand--its a call to action. It demands that we questions our self-defeating attitudes and behaviors. Racism is not the issue; how we respond to media distortions and programmed self-hatred is the issue. It's time to reverse the BI campaign with a globally based initiative that harnesses the power of new media and the wisdom of intergenerational coalitions. Provocative and powerful, Brainwashed dares to expose the wounds so that we, at last, can heal.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Farrakhan to hold press conference addressing events in the Middle East and the Libya policy of the Obama administration
For Immediate Release
March 29, 2011
Contact: Richard Muhammad, The Final Call
Email: editor@finalcallnews.com
Cell: 773-512-9931
Farrakhan to hold press conference addressing events in the Middle East and the Libya policy of the Obama administration
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan will hold a press conference on Thursday, March 31, 2011 at Mosque Maryam, the international headquarters of the Nation of Islam located at 7351 S. Stony Island Avenue in Chicago, Illinois at 1:00 p.m. Central Time. (6:00 GMT)
Minister Farrakhan feels compelled to deliver a word of guidance and warning during this time of upheaval and trouble.
Minister Farrakhan watched with great interest and concern along with millions across the globe, President Barack Obama’s March 28 address from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. He has also followed the recent comments of the Obama administration officials and advisors.
The press conference will be shown live via internet webcast at http://www.noi.org
All media are invited to attend and directly ask questions of Minister Farrakhan. Doors open for Media setup at 11:45 a.m.
For those media organizations interested in coverage, please go to www.finalcall.com/press
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Diet Soda Makes You Fat
Written by Kimberley Stakal
The Wall Street Journal just reported that Diet Coke beats out Pepsi for consumers in the US—only Coke beats them both in total sales. Consumers reach for a can of that cold, bubbly, sweet beverage to get their jolted caffeine fix and a sugary high, but without the calories of normal soda. Sad thing is, if you’re drinking diet soda, it’s still going to make you fat. Find out why.
Researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center recently presented strong data proving that diet soda makes us fat. They found that the more diet sodas a person drank, the more weight they gained. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
But it does get more serious than that. Overall, all soda drinkers (both sugar-sweetened and diet) gained weight compared to a control group that did not drink soda. But those drinking only diet soda gained more weight than those drinking regular soda. Hm. So much, in fact, that researchers concluded there is “a 41% increase in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day.”
Why does diet soda make us fat? It’s not unlike low-fat foods, which also make us fat. Here are some popular theories:
•People allow themselves to binge on other foods thinking they can “balance it out” by drinking diet soda later. Wrong, silly. You’re not balancing anything out. You’re just binging. Try drinking water and eating less instead.
•Putting any food or drink into our stomachs (that isn’t water) triggers our gastric juices to get flowing for digestion, which makes us feel hungry. It’s like revving the engine for digestion. When we tell our bodies to get ready to absorb nutrients from a diet soda that’s actually delivering nothing (but a whole lot of chemicals), our brains get the message that we need to eat something to fill this now revved up engine.
•The tongue recognizes “sweet” flavors as sugars or carbohydrates, and it signals the body to start producing insulin to help regulate blood sugar levels. Well, when we drink diet soda, there is sweet flavor but no actual sugar going into the system, so our bodies now crave sugar as our blood sugar levels have become unstable. This brings on food cravings and sugar cravings in particular. For this reason, diet soda also causes diabetes and pre-diabetic conditions. Awesome.
The real way to fight fatigue and hunger is to drink more water. We often mistake thirst for hunger, and by downing a full glass of water, you can stave off random cravings. It’s also pretty amazing what downing a full glass of water will do for a foggy head—clears it right up with a bit of freshness. Down a full can of diet soda, and you may feel high for about 15 minutes, but chances are you’ll feel downer, hungrier and even a bit fatter soon enough.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
NH Supreme Court: homeschooled girl must go to public school against mom’s wishes
CONCORD, NH, The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld a lower court order Wednesday that sided with the father of a homeschooled student and forced her into a government-run school against her Christian mother’s wishes.
The court made clear that it was not addressing larger religious liberty and homeschooling concerns and was basing its ruling only on the narrow and specific facts of the case.
“While [the case] involves home schooling, it is not about the merits of home verses public schooling,” stated the justices in their opinion.
“We affirm the decision on the narrow basis that it represents a sustainable exercise of the trial court’s discretion to determine the educational placement that is in daughter’s best interests.”
The court heard oral argument in the case on Jan. 6.
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney John Anthony Simmons, who represented the mother, who is divorced from the father, argued that the burden of proof was on the father to prove harm in order to change the schooling arrangement. Because no harm was demonstrated and the girl was acknowledged to be academically superior and socially interactive, even by the court, Simmons argued that the homeschooling arrangement should not have been changed.
However, in the original order issued in July 2009, Judge Lucinda V. Sadler reasoned that the girl’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view.”
“Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children,” responded Simmons. “Courts can settle disputes, but they cannot legitimately order a child into a government-run school on the basis that her religious views need to be mixed with other views. That’s precisely what the lower court admitted it was doing.”
“The lower court held the Christian faith of this mother and daughter against them,” Simmons said. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court bypassed this issue and wrote this off as a ‘parent versus parent’ issue without recognizing the very real underlying threat to religious liberty.”
Nevertheless, ADF Senior Counsel Joseph Infranco said that the law firm appreciates the Supreme Court’s choice to limit “its decision to the facts of this case,” which should ensure that the decision “cannot be used as a battering-ram against religious liberty or homeschooling.”
The “ADF will be vigilant to make sure that it’s not,” he concluded.
“We are disappointed that this young girl is being forced to attend a public school over her mother’s, and reportedly her own, wishes,” said Michael Donnelly, the attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). HSLDA had submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case.
“However, the NH Supreme Court confined its ruling to this case and these facts avoiding any collateral impact on the rights of other parents in New Hampshire who homeschool their children,” he continued. “While the lower court’s decision could have been read to create a presumption in favor of public education over homeschooling, the court emphatically rejected this notion.”
Defiant Gaddafi speaks out as US fighter jet crashes
Libyan TV has broadcast what it says is a brief live address by ruler Muammar Gaddafi before supporters at his encampment near Tripoli, the Libyan capital.
Gaddafi was shown standing on a balcony before a crowd of supporters. It is his first public appearance in a week.
http://media.smh.com.au/gaddafi-i-am-not-afraid-of-the-planes-2247153.html
Denouncing the coalition bombing attacks on his forces, he told them: "In the short term, we'll beat them, in the long term, we'll beat them."
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Public appearance ... Muammar Gaddafi addresses his supporters.
Public appearance ... Muammar Gaddafi addresses his supporters. Photo: AP
State TV said Gaddafi was speaking from his Bab Al-Aziziya residential compound, the same one hit by a cruise missile on Sunday night.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told ABC News that Gaddafi's associates had been reaching out to their contacts worldwide to see how they can "get out of this".
"We've heard about ... people close to him reaching out to people that they know around the world - Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America, beyond - saying what do we do? How do we get out of this? What happens next?" Mrs Clinton said.
Malfunction ... Libyans inspect the wreckage of the US fighter jet.
Malfunction ... Libyans inspect the wreckage of the US fighter jet. Photo: AP
"I'm not aware that he [Gaddafi] personally has reached out, but I do know that people allegedly on his behalf have been reaching out," Mrs Clinton said.
"Some of it is theatre. Some of it is, you know, kind of, shall we say game playing, to try to do one message to one group, another message to somebody else," she said.
"A lot of it is just the way he behaves. It's somewhat unpredictable. But some of it, we think, is exploring. You know, what are my options, where could I go, what could I do. And we would encourage that," she said.
US fighter jet crashes
Mrs Clinton's interview followed an incident during which US troops reportedly opened fire on villagers in an operation to rescue two jet fighter crew members after their plane crashed in eastern Libya. This was flatly denied by the US.
Britain's Channel 4 News reported that at least six villagers were injured when US Marines came in with "all guns blazing" to extract the crew members.
London's Telegraph website also reported six "were believed to have been shot by a US helicopter during his rescue".
The Telegraph said one of the downed crew members was rescued by troops on an Osprey "transformer" aircraft, which can turn from a plane into a helicopter.
United States Africa Command confirmed the US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet crashed and that two crew members were rescued.
But a US spokesman "100 per cent" denied any civilians were injured by US weapons fire in the rescue operation.
Reporter Lindsey Hilsum, at the crash, said the US helicopter came in and opened fire on Monday night, local time, as villagers were handing over one of the downed pilots to local rebel forces.
A man described as a military policeman, Omar Sayd, told the reporter: "We are disturbed about the shooting because if they had given us a chance we would have handed over both pilots."
In Benghazi, Hilsum interviewed one of the injured villagers, who was in a hospital bed. Local people had reportedly been giving a "party" for the crew when they were fired on.
The Telegraph reporter who discovered the plane, Rob Crilly, wrote that the helicopter "strafed the ground to keep the locals at bay" during the rescue.
Locals said they queued up to thank the airman, who had parachuted into a field of sheep, for his role in enforcing the no-fly zone and gave him juice to drink, Crilly reported.
Their F-15E Strike Eagle jet was on a mission on Monday night when it crashed outside Benghazi due to mechanical failure, not hostile fire, US spokesman Vince Crawley said.
Channel 4 News said a pilot and a weapons officer were on the jet. Both ejected safely, but suffered minor injuries.
The pilot was rescued by the US helicopter soon after crash landing and opposition rebels recovered the weapons officer, taking "took good care of him" before coalition forces picked him up some time later.
Details of the incident remain sketchy. The crash is the first known setback for the international coalition during three days of strikes authorised by the United Nations Security Council.
Battles flare as doubts persist
Fighting raged between forces loyal to Gaddafi and insurgents in several towns on Tuesday despite a UN-mandated no-fly zone aimed at stopping the violence.
Meanwhile, as a senior US officer said Gaddafi forces were still attacking civilians, doubts persisted over the best way to continue the campaign to stop Gaddafi, and where it was leading.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said future actions of the coalition, which began air strikes on Saturday on Gaddafi military installations, depend in part of the embattled Libyan leader.
"The military operations could stop at any moment. All it would take is for the Tripoli regime to adhere precisely and completely with UN Security Council resolutions, and to accept a genuine ceasefire," he said.
He called on Gaddafi to withdraw troops engaged in military advances and send them "back to their barracks".
Libyan anti-aircraft fire opened up over the capital after nightfall on Tuesday, amid the sound of far-off explosions, AFP journalists reported.
Residents of Yafran, 130 kilometres south-west of Tripoli, said at least nine people had been killed in clashes between the two sides.
Rebels also said they were under intense attack in their enclave of Misrata, east of Tripoli, which has been besieged by Kadhafi's forces for weeks, with four children killed Tuesday.
But rebels said they had managed to fight off loyalists and retake the outskirts of the western town of Zintan.
After a third night of strikes on Gaddafi's strongholds and defence structure, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said "significant military fighting that has been going on should recede in the next few days".
Destroying radar and missiles under Gaddafi's control would pave the way for a no-fly zone that could be patrolled by combat aircraft, with the United States assuming a supporting role, Gates said in Moscow.
In Misrata, a rebel spokesman reached by telephone said insurgents remained in control despite an onslaught by Gaddafi loyalists who had opened fire with tanks and set snipers on roofs to gun down people in the streets.
A stand-off persisted in eastern Libya, where Gaddafi forces in and around Ajdabiya, south of the insurgents' capital of Benghazi, easily repulsed attempts by the disorganised and ill-armed rebels to advance.
Coalition forces, led by the United States, France and Britain and including some other European states and Arab country Qatar, are acting under UN Security Council resolution 1973 authorising "all necessary means" to protect civilians.
There is co-ordination but no unified command, and moves to hand over control of the operation to NATO are dividing the alliance.
US President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that NATO should play a key role in the command structure of the Libyan mission, the White House said.
"They reviewed the substantial progress that's been made in terms of halting the advance of Gaddafi's forces on Benghazi as well as the establishment of a no-fly zone," spokesman Ben Rhodes said.
NATO ambassadors resumed talks on Tuesday after "very difficult" discussions on Monday that failed to overcome their divisions.
But a diplomat said they had agreed to use the organisation's naval power to enforce an arms embargo on Libya ordered under UN Resolution 1973.
Juppe called for the creation of a special committee of foreign ministers from coalition countries to oversee operations, which he said should meet in the coming days "to show clearly that political oversight is there".
France also has doubts about the impact on Arab countries of NATO taking control - though the Arab League has backed the no-fly zone - while Germany refused to vote for Resolution 1973.
Belgian and Spanish warplanes began patrolling Libyan skies on Monday, British Typhoon fighters and Canadian jets launched their first missions from Italian bases, and a Greek source said France's aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle should join in from waters off Crete, probably by Wednesday.
Italian pilots said they had helped suppress air defences, despite Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose country has close ties with former colony Libya, saying Italian planes "are not firing and will not fire".
Russia and the United States clashed over Western bombing raids, with the US defence chief saying Moscow had accepted Gaddafi's "lies" about civilian casualties.
In talks with Mr Gates, Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev voiced dismay over what he called the "indiscriminate use of force".
Mr Gates rejected Moscow's criticism, even as he predicted that the bombing would be scaled back within days.
Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci said the Western-led air strikes were disproportionate, amid US and British efforts to bring more Arab states on board.
A spokesman for the British Prime Minister said London was talking to Arab nations in a bid to "develop" the coalition.
And the White House said Mr Obama and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to seek a "broad-based international effort, including Arab states".
Oil prices rose after dipping on profit-taking earlier in the day.
Brent North Sea crude for delivery in May rose 49 cents to $115.45 a barrel in late London trade, while New York's main contract, light sweet crude for April jumped $1.42 to $103.75.
And the US imposed sanctions on 14 firms controlled by Libya's National Oil Corp, tightening a financial noose on a key source of funds for the Gaddafi regime.
Meanwhile, it emerged that three Western journalists who went missing in eastern Libya last week, including two from Agence France-Presse, were arrested by Gaddafi's forces on Saturday.
AFP chairman Emmanuel Hoog wrote to Gaddafi on Tuesday, asking that he free AFP's Dave Clark and Roberto Schmidt, and Joe Raedle from the Getty agency.
"I have the honour to ask you to restore their liberty, in the name of that same freedom of expression and information that you refer to so often," Hoog wrote.
Reporter Clark and photographer Schmidt, and Raedle, had not been heard from since Friday evening.
Their driver Mohammed Hamed said they ran into a Libyan convoy near Ajdabiya. They turned around, but were caught after a chase by soldiers who shot out their tyres.
Four soldiers ordered the journalists out of their vehicle at gunpoint before putting them into a military vehicle and driving them away.
A Sister Lynched? Was this a Cover UP?
Our Friend Died In Africa: Cops Say Suicide Some Say Murder
"POSSIBLE LYNCHING" GWETV special report: Family and Friends suspect foul play in the death of activist Zandile (Zandi) Mthembu. Police say suicide however family and friends (as this video may prove) say that Zandi was looking forward to a life of victory. This video and testimony by Tony B. Consious her new friend as of December 2010 who met her in West Africa (Dekar, Senegal) shows the side of Zandi that everyone who came in contact with her knew. She lived her life as a power of love in the flesh.
We ask on behalf of the family that everyone forward this video to as many public officials as possible and also news media handlers/reporters. What actual happened to Zandile must be uncovered.
In this video you will see Zandile as she represented her views on African youth in Hip Hop and the potential of fusing the two cultures together (African and Hip Hop). Also in this video Tony B. Conscious is interviewed by Philip Muhammad of GWETV (Audio). Tony met Zandile (Zandi) during the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture. Tony alleges that Zandi's husband emailed him several times and was not pleased with Zandi for being with him in West Africa. Tony also alleges that Zandi's husband did not find Zandi's speech to his liking where she spoke on behalf of the youth of Africa as she encouraged them to embrace African Culture on National Satellite Television from the Hotel Meridian in Dekar, Africa at the Black World Festival of Arts & Culture. Tony alleges that Zandi's husband (Nicholas Rolland Director of G7 Energies) as having involvement in the untimely murder of Zandile and tells all in this interview.
If you have any information regarding this case or would like to be interviewed please write to:
God's Water Entertainment
Po Box 2085 New York NY 10025
or email or call Zandile's family at 083 274 99 56 - mfundeni@ymail.com
"POSSIBLE LYNCHING" GWETV special report: Family and Friends suspect foul play in the death of activist Zandile (Zandi) Mthembu. Police say suicide however family and friends (as this video may prove) say that Zandi was looking forward to a life of victory. This video and testimony by Tony B. Consious her new friend as of December 2010 who met her in West Africa (Dekar, Senegal) shows the side of Zandi that everyone who came in contact with her knew. She lived her life as a power of love in the flesh.
We ask on behalf of the family that everyone forward this video to as many public officials as possible and also news media handlers/reporters. What actual happened to Zandile must be uncovered.
In this video you will see Zandile as she represented her views on African youth in Hip Hop and the potential of fusing the two cultures together (African and Hip Hop). Also in this video Tony B. Conscious is interviewed by Philip Muhammad of GWETV (Audio). Tony met Zandile (Zandi) during the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture. Tony alleges that Zandi's husband emailed him several times and was not pleased with Zandi for being with him in West Africa. Tony also alleges that Zandi's husband did not find Zandi's speech to his liking where she spoke on behalf of the youth of Africa as she encouraged them to embrace African Culture on National Satellite Television from the Hotel Meridian in Dekar, Africa at the Black World Festival of Arts & Culture. Tony alleges that Zandi's husband (Nicholas Rolland Director of G7 Energies) as having involvement in the untimely murder of Zandile and tells all in this interview.
If you have any information regarding this case or would like to be interviewed please write to:
God's Water Entertainment
Po Box 2085 New York NY 10025
or email or call Zandile's family at 083 274 99 56 - mfundeni@ymail.com
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The "Demonization" of Muslims and the Battle for Oil
Throughout history, "wars of religion" have served to obscure the economic and strategic interests behind the conquest and invasion of foreign lands. "Wars of religion" were invariably fought with a view to securing control over trading routes and natural resources.
The Crusades extending from the 11th to the 14th Century are often presented by historians as "a continuous series of military-religious expeditions made by European Christians in the hope of wresting the Holy Land from the infidel Turks." The objective of the Crusades, however, had little to do with religion. The Crusades largely consisted, through military action, in challenging the dominion of the Muslim merchant societies, which controlled the Eastern trade routes.
The "Just War" supported the Crusades. War was waged with the support of the Catholic Church, acting as an instrument of religious propaganda and indoctrination, which was used in the enlistment throughout Europe of thousands of peasants, serfs and urban vagabonds.
America's Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East
In the eyes of public opinion, possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central. A war is said to be Just if it is waged on moral, religious or ethical grounds.
America's Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East is no exception. The "war on terrorism" purports to defend the American Homeland and protect the "civilized world". It is upheld as a "war of religion", a "clash of civilizations", when in fact the main objective of this war is to secure control and corporate ownership over the region's extensive oil wealth, while also imposing under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank (now under the leadership of Paul Wolfowitz), the privatization of State enterprises and the transfer of the countries' economic assets into the hands of foreign capital. .
The Just War theory upholds war as a "humanitarian operation". It serves to camouflage the real objectives of the military operation, while providing a moral and principled image to the invaders. In its contemporary version, it calls for military intervention on ethical and moral grounds against "rogue states" and "Islamic terrorists", which are threatening the Homeland.
Possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central to the Bush administration's justification for invading and occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Taught in US military academies, a modern-day version of the "Just War" theory has been embodied into US military doctrine. The "war on terrorism" and the notion of "preemption" are predicated on the right to "self defense." They define "when it is permissible to wage war": jus ad bellum.
Jus ad bellum serves to build a consensus within the Armed Forces command structures. It also serves to convince the troops that the enemy is "evil" and that they are fighting for a "just cause". More generally, the Just War theory in its modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda.
The Battle for Oil. Demonization of the Enemy
War builds a humanitarian agenda. Throughout history, vilification of the enemy has been applied time and again. The Crusades consisted in demonizing the Turks as infidels and heretics, with a view to justifying military action.
Demonization serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against "Islamic terrorism" (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth. The term "Islamo-fascism," serves to degrade the policies, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while also upholding the tenets of "Western democracy" and the "free market" as the only alternative for these countries.
The US led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region. (See table and maps below).
Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves, depending on the source and methodology of the estimate. (See table below).
In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves. Western countries including its major oil producers ( Canada, the US, Norway, the UK, Denmark and Australia) control approximately 4 percent of total oil reserves. (In the alternative estimate of the Oil and Gas Journal which includes Canada's oil sands, this percentage would be of the the order of 16.5%. See table below).
The largest share of the World's oil reserves lies in a region extending (North) from the tip of Yemen to the Caspian sea basin and (East) from the Eastern Mediterranean coastline to the Persian Gulf. This broader Middle East- Central Asian region, which is the theater of the US-led "war on terrorism" encompasses according to the estimates of World Oil, more than sixty percent of the World's oil reserves. (See table below).
Iraq has five times more oil than the United States.
Muslim countries possess at least 16 times more oil than the Western countries.
The major non-Muslim oil reserve countries are Venezuela, Russia, Mexico, China and Brazil. (See table)
Demonization is applied to an enemy, which possesses three quarters of the world's oil reserves. "Axis of evil", "rogue States", "failed nations", "Islamic terrorists": demonization and vilification are the ideological pillars of America's "war on terror". They serve as a casus belli for waging the battle for oil.
The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The Middle East Central Asian region is heavily militarized. (See map). The oil fields are encircled: NATO war ships stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean (as part of a UN "peace keeping" operation), US Carrier Strike Groups and Destroyer Squadrons in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian deployed as part of the "war on terrorism".
All-nuclear formation: Enterprise, Long Beach (CGN-9), and Bainbridge (CGN-25).
USS Enterprise Strike Group
The ultimate objective, combining military action, covert intelligence operations and war propaganda, is to break down the national fabric and transform sovereign countries into open economic territories, where natural resources can be plundered and confiscated under "free market" supervision. This control also extends to strategic oil and gas pipeline corridors (e.g. Afghanistan).
Demonization is a PSYOP, used to sway public opinion and build a consensus in favor of war. Psychological warfare is directly sponsored by the Pentagon and the US intelligence apparatus. It is not limited to assassinating or executing the rulers of Muslim countries, it extends to entire populations. It also targets Muslims in Western Europe and North America. It purports to break national consciousness and the ability to resist the invader. It denigrates Islam. It creates social divisions. It is intended to divide national societies and ultimately trigger "civil war". While it creates an environment which facilitates the outright appropriation of the countries' resources, at the same time, it potentially backlashes, creates a new national consciousness, develops inter-ethnic solidarity, brings people together in confronting the invaders.
It is worth noting that the triggering of sectarian divisions and "civil wars" is contemplated in the process of redrawing of the map of the Middle East, where countries are slated to be broken up and transformed into territories. The map of the New Middle East, although not official, has been used by the US National War Academy. It was recently published in the Armed Forces Journal (June 2006). In this map, nation states are broken up, international borders are redefined along sectarian-ethnic lines, broadly in accordance with the interests of the Anglo-American oil giants (See Map below). The map has also been used in a training program at NATO's Defense College for senior military officers.
Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).
The oil lies in Muslim lands. Vilification of the enemy is part and parcel of Eurasia energy geopolitics. It is a direct function of the geographic distribution of the World's oil and gas reserves. If the oil were in countries occupied predominantly by Buddhists or Hindus, one would expect that US foreign policy would be directed against Buddhists and Hindus, who would also be the object of vilification..
In the Middle East war theater, Iran and Syria, which are part of the "axis of evil", are the next targets according to official US statements.
US sponsored "civil wars" have also been conducted in several other strategic oil and gas regions including Nigeria, the Sudan, Colombia, Somalia, Yemen, Angola, not to mention Chechnya and several republics of the former Soviet Union. Ongoing US sponsored "civil wars", which often include the channelling of covert support to paramilitary groups, have been triggered in the Darfur region of Sudan as well as in Somalia, Darfur possesses extensive oil reserves. In Somalia, lucrative concessions have already been granted to four Anglo-American oil giants.
"According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco [now part of BP], Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there." (America's Interests in Somalia, Global Research, 2002)
Globalization and the Conquest of the World's Energy Resources
The collective demonization of Muslims, including the vilification of Islam, applied Worldwide, constitutes at the ideological level, an instrument of conquest of the World's energy resources. It is part of the broader economic, political mechanisms underlying the New World Order.
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, at www.globalresearch.ca . He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
ANNEX
For details on th Campaign against the pipeline see
http://www.bakuceyhan.org.uk/more_info/bp_pipeline.htm
Route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
NOTES PERTAINING TO THE TABLE ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF OIL RESERVES
Indicated are the world's main oil reserve countries. Countries with less than 0.1 % of total reserves are not indicated.
The Oil and Gas Journal figures indicated above are based on proven oil reserves including the bituminous oil fields (oil sands or tar sands). The World Oil figures indicate oil reserves without the tar sands. The difference between the two sets of figures largely pertains to the position of Canada and Venezuela. The tar-sands are considered by some experts as not recoverable with present technology and prices, although this issue is the object of heated debate.
Muslim countries are indicated in bold. Percentages are rounded up to first decimal.
*Canada appears according to this estimate as the Second Country in terms of the size of proven reserves, due to the size of its bituminous oil fields. The Oil & Gas Journal's oil reserve estimate above for Canada includes 4.7 billion barrels of conventional crude oil and condensate reserves and 174.1 billion barrels of oil sands reserves.
In other recognized estimates, where the oil sands are not accounted for, Canada's reserves are much lower (in billions of barrels):
BP Statistical Review 16.802
Oil & Gas Journal 178.792
World Oil 4.700
BP notes that "the figure for Canadian oil reserves includes an official estimate of Canadian oil sands "under active development"." BP says of its data sources for oil reserves that "the estimates in this table have been compiled using a combination of primary official sources, third-party data from the OPEC Secretariat, World Oil, Oil & Gas Journal and an independent estimate of Russian reserves based on information in the public domain.
World Oil's Canadian oil reserve estimate "does not include 174 billion bbl [barrels] of oil sands reserves."
War is Illegal
It's a simple point, but an important one, and one that gets overlooked. Whether or not you think a particular war is moral and good, the fact remains that war is illegal. Actual defense by a country when attacked is legal, but that only occurs once another country has actually attacked, and it must not be used as a loophole to excuse wider war that is not employed in actual defense.
Needless to say, a strong moral argument can be made for preferring the rule of law to the law of rulers. If those in power can do anything they like, most of us will not like what they do. Some laws are so unjust that when they are imposed on ordinary people, they should be violated. But allowing those in charge of a government to engage in massive violence and killing in defiance of the law is to sanction all lesser abuses as well, since no greater abuse is imaginable. It's understandable that proponents of war would rather ignore or "re-interpret" the law than properly change the law through the legislative process, but it is not morally defensible.
For much of U.S. history, it was reasonable for citizens to believe, and often they did believe, that the U.S. Constitution banned aggressive war. Congress declared the 1846-1848 War on Mexico to have been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the president of the United States." Congress had issued a declaration of war, but the House believed the president had lied to them. (President Woodrow Wilson would later send troops to war with Mexico without a declaration.) It does not seem to be the lying that Congress viewed as unconstitutional in the 1840s, but rather the launching of an unnecessary or aggressive war.
As Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in March 2003, "Aggression is a crime under customary international law which automatically forms part of domestic law," and therefore, "international aggression is a crime recognized by the common law which can be prosecuted in the U.K. courts." U.S. law evolved from English common law, and the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes precedents and traditions based on it. U.S. law in the 1840s was closer to its roots in English common law than is U.S. law today, and statutory law was less developed in general, so it was natural for Congress to take the position that launching an unnecessary war was unconstitutional without needing to be more specific.
In fact, just prior to giving Congress the exclusive power to declare war, the Constitution gives Congress the power to "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations." At least by implication, this would seem to suggest that the United States was itself expected to abide by the "Law of Nations." In the 1840s, no member of Congress would have dared to suggest that the United States was not itself bound by the "Law of Nations." At that point in history, this meant customary international law, under which the launching of an aggressive war had long been considered the most serious offense.
Fortunately, now that we have binding multilateral treaties that explicitly prohibit aggressive war, we no longer have to guess at what the U.S. Constitution says about war. Article VI of the Constitution explicitly says this:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." [emphasis added]
So, if the United States were to make a treaty that banned war, war would be illegal under the supreme law of the land.
The United States has in fact done this, at least twice, in treaties that remain today part of our highest law: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the United Nations Charter.
WE BANNED ALL WAR IN 1928
In 1928, the United States Senate, that same institution that on a good day can now get three percent of its members to vote against funding war escalations or continuations, voted 85 to 1 to bind the United States to a treaty by which it is still bound and in which we "condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in [our] relations with" other nations. This is the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It condemns and renounces all war. The U.S. Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, rejected a French proposal to limit the ban to wars of aggression. He wrote to the French ambassador that if the pact, ". . . were accompanied by definitions of the word 'aggressor' and by expressions and qualifications stipulating when nations would be justified in going to war, its effect would be very greatly weakened and its positive value as a guaranty of peace virtually destroyed." The treaty was signed with its ban on all war included, and was agreed to by dozens of nations. Kellogg was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929, an award already rendered questionable by its previous bestowal upon both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
However, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty it added two reservations. First, the United States would not be obliged to enforce the treaty by taking action against those who violated it. Excellent. So far so good. If war is banned, it hardly seems a nation could be required to go to war to enforce the ban. But old ways of thinking die hard, and redundancy is much less painful than bloodshed.
The second reservation, however, was that the treaty must not infringe upon America's right of self-defense. So, there, war maintained a foot in the door. The traditional right to defend yourself when attacked was preserved, and a loophole was created that could be and would be unreasonably expanded.
When any nation is attacked, it will defend itself, violently or otherwise. The harm in placing that prerogative in law is, as Kellogg foresaw, a weakening of the idea that war is illegal. An argument could be made for U.S. participation in World War II under this reservation, for example, based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, no matter how provoked and desired that attack was. War with Germany could be justified by the Japanese attack as well, through predictable stretching of the loophole. Even so, wars of aggression have been illegal (albeit unpunished) in the United States since 1928.
In addition, in 1945, the United States became a party to the United Nations Charter, which also remains in force today as part of the "supreme law of the land." The United States had been the driving force behind the U.N. Charter's creation. It includes these lines:
"All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
"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."
This would appear to be a new Kellogg-Briand Pact with at least an initial attempt at the creation of an enforcement body. And so it is. But the U.N. Charter contains two exceptions to its ban on warfare. The first is self- defense. Here is part of Article 51:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence (sic) 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."
So, the U.N. Charter contains the same traditional right and small loophole that the U.S. Senate attached to the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It also adds another. The Charter makes clear that the U.N. Security Council can choose to authorize the use of force. This further weakens the understanding that war is illegal, by making some wars legal. Other wars are then, predictably, justified by claims of legality. The architects of the 2003 attack on Iraq claimed it was authorized by the United Nations, even though the United Nations disagreed.
The U.N. Security Council did authorize the War on Korea, but only because the U.S.S.R. was boycotting the Security Council at the time and China was still represented by the Kuomintang government in Taiwan. The Western powers were preventing the ambassador of the new revolutionary government of China from taking China's seat as a permanent member of the Security Council, and the Russians were boycotting the Council in protest. If the Soviet and Chinese delegates had been present, there is no way that the United Nations would have taken sides in the war that eventually destroyed most of Korea.
It seems reasonable, of course, to make exceptions for wars of self-defense. You can't tell people they're forbidden to fight back when attacked. And what if they were attacked years or decades earlier and have been occupied by a foreign or colonial force against their will, albeit without recent violence? Many consider wars of national liberation to be a legal extension of the right to defense. The people of Iraq or Afghanistan don't lose their right to fight back when enough years go by, do they? But a nation at peace cannot legally dredge up centuries- or millennia-old ethnic grievances as grounds for war. The dozens of nations in which U.S. troops are now based cannot legally bomb Washington. Apartheid and Jim Crow were not grounds for war. Nonviolence is not just more effective in remedying many injustices; it is also the only legal choice. People cannot "defend" themselves with war any time they wish.
What people can do is fight back when attacked or occupied. Given that possibility, why wouldn't you also make an exception — as in the U.N. Charter — for the defense of other, smaller countries that are unable to defend themselves? After all, the United States liberated itself from England a long time ago, and the only way it can use this rationale as an excuse for war is if it "liberates" other countries by overthrowing their rulers and occupying them. The idea of defending others seems very sensible, but — exactly as Kellogg predicted — loopholes lead to confusion and confusion allows larger and larger exceptions to the rule until a point is reached at which the very idea that the rule exists at all seems ludicrous.
And yet it does exist. The rule is that war is a crime. There are two narrow exceptions in the U.N. Charter, and it is easy enough to show that any particular war does not meet either of the exceptions.
Libya has not attacked the United States.
The United Nations has not authorized bombing Libya.
On August 31, 2010, when President Barack Obama was scheduled to give a speech about the War on Iraq, blogger Juan Cole composed a speech he thought the president might like to, but of course did not, give:
"Fellow Americans, and Iraqis who are watching this speech, I have come here this evening not to declare a victory or to mourn a defeat on the battlefield, but to apologize from the bottom of my heart for a series of illegal actions and grossly incompetent policies pursued by the government of the United States of America, in defiance of domestic US law, international treaty obligations, and both American and Iraqi public opinion.
"The United Nations was established in 1945 in the wake of a series of aggressive wars of conquest and the response to them, in which over 60 million people perished. Its purpose was to forbid such unjustified attacks, and its charter specified that in future wars could only be launched on two grounds. One is clear self-defense, when a country has been attacked. The other is with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council."
"It was because the French, British, and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 contravened these provisions of the United Nations Charter that President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned that war and forced the belligerents to withdraw. When Israel looked as though it might try to hang on to its ill-gotten spoils, the Sinai Peninsula, President Eisenhower went on television on February 21, 1957, and addressed the nation. These words have largely been suppressed and forgotten in the United States of today, but they should ring through the decades and centuries:
"'If the United Nations once admits that international dispute can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization, and our best hope of establishing a real world order. That would be a disaster for us all…. [Referring to Israeli demands that certain conditions be met before it relinquished the Sinai, the president said that he] "would be untrue to the standards of the high office to which you have chosen me if I were to lend the influence of the United States to the proposition that a nation which invades another should be permitted to exact conditions for withdrawal….'
"'If it [the United Nations Security Council] does nothing, if it accepts the ignoring of its repeated resolutions calling for the withdrawal of the invading forces, then it will have admitted failure. That failure would be a blow to the authority and influence of the United Nations in the world and to the hopes which humanity has placed in the United Nations as the means of achieving peace with justice.'"
Eisenhower was referring to an incident that began when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal; Israel invaded Egypt in response. Britain and France pretended to step in as outside parties concerned that the Egyptian-Israeli dispute might jeopardize free passage through the canal. In reality, Israel, France, and Britain had planned the invasion of Egypt together, all agreeing that Israel would attack first, with the other two nations joining in later pretending they were trying to stop the fighting. This illustrates the need for a truly impartial international body (something the United Nations has never become but someday could) and the need for a complete ban on war. In the Suez crisis, the rule of law was enforced because the biggest kid on the block was inclined to enforce it. When it came to overthrowing governments in Iran and Guatemala, shifting away from big wars to secret operations much as Obama would do, President Eisenhower held a different view of the value of law enforcement. When it came to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Obama was not about to concede that the crime of aggression should be punished. The National Security Strategy published by the White House in May 2010 declared:
"Military force, at times, may be necessary to defend our country and allies or to preserve broader peace and security, including by protecting civilians facing a grave humanitarian crisis…. The United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests, yet we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force."
Try telling your local police that you may soon go on a violent crime spree, but that you will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force.
WE TRIED WAR CRIMINALS IN 1945
Two other important documents, one from 1945 and the other from 1946, treated wars of aggression as crimes. The first was the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the institution that tried Nazi war leaders for their crimes. Among the crimes listed in the charter were "crimes against peace," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity." Crimes "against peace" were defined as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing." The next year, the Charter of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the trial of Japanese war criminals) used the same definition. These two sets of trials deserve a great deal of criticism, but a great deal of praise as well.
On the one hand, they enforced victors' justice. They left out of the lists of prosecuted crimes certain crimes, such as the bombing of civilians, in which the allies had also engaged. And they failed to prosecute the allies for other crimes that the Germans and Japanese were prosecuted and hanged for. U.S. General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the firebombing of Tokyo, said "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."
The tribunals claimed to start the prosecutions at the very top, but they gave the Emperor of Japan immunity. The United States gave immunity to over 1,000 Nazi scientists, including some who were guilty of the most horrendous crimes, and brought them to the United States to continue their research. General Douglas MacArthur gave Japanese microbiologist and lieutenant general Shiro Ishii and all the members of his bacteriological research units immunity in exchange for germ warfare data derived from human experimentation. The British learned from the German crimes they prosecuted how to later set up concentration camps in Kenya. The French recruited thousands of SS and other German troops into their Foreign Legion, so that about half of the legionnaires fighting France's brutal colonial war in Indochina were none other than the most hardened remnants of the German Army from World War II, and the torture techniques of the German Gestapo were widely used on French detainees in the Algerian War of Independence. The United States, also working with former Nazis, spread the same techniques throughout Latin America. Having executed a Nazi for opening dikes to flood Dutch farmland, the United States proceeded to bomb dams in Korea and Vietnam for the same purpose.
War veteran and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Edgar L. Jones returned from World War II, and was shocked to discover that civilians back home thought highly of the war. "Cynical as most of us overseas were," Jones wrote, "I doubt if many of us seriously believed that people at home would start planning for the next war before we could get home and talk without censorship about this one." Jones objected to the sort of hypocrisy that drove the war crimes trials:
"Not every American soldier, or even one per cent of our troops, deliberately committed unwarranted atrocities, and the same might be said for the Germans and Japanese. The exigencies of war necessitated many so-called crimes, and the bulk of the rest could be blamed on the mental distortion which war produced. But we publicized every inhuman act of our opponents and censored any recognition of our own moral frailty in moments of desperation.
"I have asked fighting men, for instance, why they — or actually, why we — regulated flame-throwers in such a way that enemy soldiers were set afire, to die slowly and painfully, rather than killed outright with a full blast of burning oil. Was it because they hated the enemy so thoroughly? The answer was invariably, 'No, we don't hate those poor bastards particularly; we just hate the whole goddam mess and have to take it out on somebody.' Possibly for the same reason, we mutilated the bodies of enemy dead, cutting off their ears and kicking out their gold teeth for souvenirs, and buried them with their testicles in their mouths, but such flagrant violations of all moral codes reach into still-unexplored realms of battle psychology."
On the other hand, there is a great deal to praise in the trials of the Nazi and Japanese war criminals. Hypocrisy not withstanding, surely it is preferable that some war crimes be punished than none. Many people intended that the trials establish a norm that would later be enforced equally for all crimes against the peace and crimes of war. The Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, said in his opening statement:
"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. The Charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, 'under ... the law.' And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment."
The tribunal concluded that aggressive war was "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." The tribunal prosecuted the supreme crime of aggression and many of the lesser crimes that followed from it.
The ideal of international justice for war crimes has not yet been achieved, of course. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee included a charge of aggression against President Richard Nixon for ordering the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia in its draft articles of impeachment. Rather than including those charges in the final version, however, the Committee decided to focus more narrowly on Watergate, wire-tapping, and contempt of Congress.
In the 1980s Nicaragua appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). That court ruled that the United States had organized the militant rebel group, the Contras, and mined Nicaragua's harbors. It found those actions to constitute international aggression. The United States blocked enforcement of the judgment by the United Nations and thereby prevented Nicaragua from obtaining any compensation. The United States then withdrew from the binding jurisdiction of the ICJ, hoping to ensure that never again would U.S. actions be subject to the adjudication of an impartial body that could objectively rule on their legality or criminality.
More recently, the United Nations set up tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as special courts in Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Cambodia, and East Timor. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has prosecuted war crimes by the leaders of small countries. But the crime of aggression has loomed as the supreme offense for decades without being punished. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States evicted Iraq and punished it severely, but when the United States invaded Iraq, there was no stronger force to step in and undo or punish the crime.
In 2010, despite U.S. opposition, the ICC established its jurisdiction over future crimes of aggression. In what types of cases it will do so, and in particular whether it will ever go after powerful nations that have not joined the ICC, nations that hold veto power at the United Nations, remains to be seen. Numerous war crimes, apart from the overarching crime of aggression, have in recent years been committed by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, but those crimes have not yet been prosecuted by the ICC.
In 2009, an Italian court convicted 23 Americans in absentia, most of them employees of the CIA, for their roles in kidnapping a man in Italy and shipping him to Egypt to be tortured. Under the principle of universal jurisdiction for the most terrible crimes, which is accepted in a growing number of countries around the world, a Spanish court indicted Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and 9-11 suspect Osama bin Laden. The same Spanish court then sought to prosecute members of the George W. Bush administration for war crimes, but Spain is being pressured by the Obama administration to drop the case. In 2010, a judge involved, Baltasar Garzón, was removed from his position for allegedly abusing his power by investigating the executions or disappearances of more than 100,000 civilians at the hands of supporters of Gen. Francisco Franco during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and the early years of the Franco dictatorship.
In 2003, a lawyer in Belgium filed a complaint against Gen. Tommy R. Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, alleging war crimes in Iraq. The United States quickly threatened to move NATO headquarters out of Belgium if that nation did not rescind its law permitting trials of foreign crimes. Charges filed against U.S. officials in other European nations have thus far failed to go to trial as well. Civil suits brought in the United States by victims of torture and other war crimes have run up against claims from the Justice Department (under the direction of Presidents Bush and Obama) that any such trials would constitute a threat to national security. In September 2010, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, agreeing with that claim, threw out a case that had been brought against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, for its role in "renditioning" prisoners to countries where they were tortured.
In 2005 and 2006 while Republicans held a majority in Congress, Democratic Congress members led by John Conyers (Mich.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), and Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) pushed hard for an investigation into the lies that had launched the aggression against Iraq. But from the time the Democrats took the majority in January 2007 up to the present moment, there has been no further mention of the matter, apart from a Senate committee's release of its long-delayed report.
In Britain, in contrast, there have been endless "inquiries" beginning the moment the "weapons of mass destruction" weren't found, continuing to the present, and likely extending into the foreseeable future. These investigations have been limited and in most cases can accurately be characterized as whitewashes. They have not involved criminal prosecution. But at least they have actually taken place. And those who have spoken up a little have been lauded and encouraged to speak up a little more. This climate has produced tell-all books, a treasure trove of leaked and declassified documents, and incriminating oral testimony. It has also seen Britain pull its troops out of Iraq. In contrast, by 2010 in Washington, it was common for elected officials to praise the 2007 "surge" and swear they'd known Iraq would turn out to be a "good war" all along. Similarly, Britain and several other countries have been investigating their roles in U.S. kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture programs, but the United States has not — President Obama having publicly instructed the Attorney General not to prosecute those most responsible, and Congress having performed an inspired imitation of a possum.
WHAT IF THE COPS OF THE WORLD BREAK THE LAW?
Political Science professor Michael Haas published a book in 2009 the title of which reveals its contents: "George W. Bush, War Criminal? The Bush Administration's Liability for 269 War Crimes." (A 2010 book by the same author includes Obama in his charges.) Number one on Haas's 2009 list is the crime of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. Haas includes five more crimes related to the illegality of war:
War Crime #2. Aiding Rebels in a Civil War. (Supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan).
War Crime #3. Threatening Aggressive War.
War Crime #4. Planning and Preparing for a War of Aggression.
War Crime #5. Conspiracy to Wage War.
War Crime #6. Propaganda for War.
The launching of a war can also involve numerous violations of domestic law. Many such crimes relating to Iraq are detailed in "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush," which was published in 2008 and includes an introduction that I wrote and 35 articles of impeachment that Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) presented to Congress. Bush and Congress did not comply with the War Powers Act, which requires a specific and timely authorization of war from Congress.
Bush did not even comply with the terms of the vague authorization that Congress did issue. Instead he submitted a report full of lies about weapons and ties to 9-11. Bush and his subordinates lied repeatedly to Congress, which is a felony under two different statutes. Thus, not only is war a crime, but war lies are a crime too.
I don't mean to pick on Bush. As Noam Chomsky remarked in about 1990, "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." Chomsky pointed out that General Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged for having been the top commander of Japanese troops who committed atrocities in the Philippines late in the war when he had no contact with them. By that standard, Chomsky said, you'd have to hang every U.S. president.
But, Chomsky argued, you'd have to do the same even if the standards were lower. Truman dropped atomic bombs on civilians. Truman "proceeded to organize a major counter-insurgency campaign in Greece which killed off about one hundred and sixty thousand people, sixty thousand refugees, another sixty thousand or so people tortured, political system dismantled, right-wing regime. American corporations came in and took it over." Eisenhower overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala and invaded Lebanon. Kennedy invaded Cuba and Vietnam. Johnson slaughtered civilians in Indochina and invaded the Dominican Republic. Nixon invaded Cambodia and Laos. Ford and Carter supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Reagan funded war crimes in Central America and supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. These were the examples Chomsky offered off the top of his head. There are many more.
PRESIDENTS DON'T GET TO DECLARE WAR
Of course, Chomsky blames presidents for wars of aggression because they launched them. Constitutionally, however, the launching of a war is the responsibility of Congress. Applying the standard of Nuremberg, or of the Kellogg-Briand Pact — ratified overwhelmingly by the Senate — to Congress itself would require a lot more rope or, if we outgrow the death penalty, a lot of prison cells.
Until President William McKinley created the first presidential press secretary and courted the press, Congress looked like the center of power in Washington. In 1900 McKinley created something else: the power of presidents to send military forces to fight against foreign governments without congressional approval. McKinley sent 5,000 troops from the Philippines to China to fight against the Boxer Rebellion. And he got away with it, meaning that future presidents could probably do the same.
Since World War II, presidents have acquired tremendous powers to operate in secrecy and outside the oversight of Congress. Truman added to the presidential toolbox the CIA, the National Security Advisor, the Strategic Air Command, and the nuclear arsenal. Kennedy used new structures called the Special Group Counter-Insurgency, the 303 Committee, and the Country Team to consolidate power in the White House, and the Green Berets to allow the president to direct covert military operations. Presidents began asking Congress to declare a state of national emergency as an end run around the requirement of a declaration of war. President Clinton used NATO as a vehicle for going to war despite congressional opposition.
The trend that moved war powers from Congress to the White House reached a new peak when President George W. Bush asked lawyers in his Justice Department to draft secret memos that would be treated as carrying the force of law, memos that re-interpreted actual laws to mean the opposite of what they had always been understood to say. On October 23, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee signed a 48-page memo to the president's counsel Alberto Gonzales titled Authority of the President Under Domestic and International Law to Use Military Force Against Iraq. This secret law (or call it what you will, a memo masquerading as a law) authorized any president to single-handedly commit what Nuremberg called "the supreme international crime."
Bybee's memo declares that a president has the power to launch wars. Period. Any "authorization to use force" passed by Congress is treated as redundant. According to Bybee's copy of the U.S. Constitution, Congress can "issue formal declarations of war." According to mine, Congress has the power "to declare war," as well as every related substantive power. In fact, there are no incidental formal powers anywhere in my copy of the Constitution.
Bybee dismisses the War Powers Act by citing Nixon's veto of it rather than addressing the law itself, which was passed over Nixon's veto. Bybee cites letters written by Bush. He even cites a Bush signing statement, a statement written to alter a new law. Bybee relies on previous memos produced by his office, the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. And he leans most heavily on the argument that President Clinton had already done similar things. For good measure, he cites Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush Sr., plus an Israeli ambassador's opinion of a U.N. declaration condemning an aggressive attack by Israel. These are all interesting precedents, but they aren't laws.
Bybee claims that in an age of nuclear weapons "anticipatory self-defense" can justify launching a war against any nation that might conceivably acquire nukes, even if there is no reason to think that nation would use them to attack yours:
"We observe, therefore, that even if the probability that Iraq itself would attack the United States with WMD, or would transfer such a weapon to terrorists for their use against the United States, were relatively low, the exceptionally high degree of harm that would result, combined with a limited window of opportunity and the likelihood that if we do not use force, the threat will increase, could lead the President to conclude that military action is necessary to defend the United States."
Never mind the high degree of harm the "military action" produces, or its clear illegality. This memo justified a war of aggression and all the crimes and abuses of power abroad and at home that were justified by the war. At the same time that presidents have assumed the power to brush aside the laws of warfare, they have publicly spoken of supporting them. Harold Lasswell pointed out in 1927 that a war could better be marketed to "liberal and middle-class people" if packaged as the vindication of international law. The British stopped arguing for World War I on the basis of national self-interest when they were able to argue against the German invasion of Belgium. The French quickly organized a Committee for the Defense of International Law.
"The Germans were staggered by this outburst of affection for international law in the world, but soon found it possible to file a brief for the defendant.…The Germans…discovered that they were really fighting for the freedom of the seas and the rights of small nations to trade, as they saw fit, without being subject to the bullying tactics of the British fleet."
The allies said they were fighting for the liberation of Belgium, Alsace, and Lorraine. The Germans countered that they were fighting for the liberation of Ireland, Egypt, and India.
Despite invading Iraq in the absence of U.N. authorization in 2003, Bush claimed to be invading in order to enforce a U.N. resolution. Despite fighting a war almost entirely with U.S. troops, Bush was careful to pretend to be working within a broad international coalition. That rulers are willing to promote the idea of international law while violating it, thereby risking endangering themselves, may suggest the importance they place on winning immediate popular approval for each new war, and their confidence that once a war has begun no one will go back to examine too closely how it happened.
THE ACCUMULATED EVIL OF THE WHOLE
The Hague and Geneva Conventions and other international treaties to which the United States is a party ban the crimes that are always part of any war, regardless of the legality of the war as a whole. Many of these bans have been placed in the U.S. Code of Law, including the crimes found in the Geneva Conventions, in the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and in the conventions against both chemical and biological weapons. In fact, most of these treaties require signatory countries to pass domestic legislation to make the treaties' provisions part of each country's own legal system. It took until 1996 for the United States to pass the War Crimes Act to give the 1948 Geneva Conventions the force of U.S. Federal Law. But, even where the activities forbidden by treaties have not been made statutory crimes, the treaties themselves remain part of the "Supreme Law of the Land" under the United States Constitution.
Michael Haas identifies and documents 263 war crimes in addition to aggression, that have occurred just in the current War on Iraq, and divides them into the categories of "conduct of the war," "treatment of prisoners," and "the conduct of the postwar occupation." A random sample of the crimes:
War Crime #7. Failure to Observe the Neutrality of a Hospital.
War Crime #12. Bombing of Neutral Countries.
War Crime #16. Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians.
War Crime #21. Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons.
War Crime #31. Extrajudicial Executions.
War Crime #55. Torture.
War Crime #120. Denial of Right to Counsel.
War Crime #183. Incarceration of Children in the Same Quarters as Adults.
War Crime #223. Failure to Protect Journalists.
War Crime #229. Collective Punishment.
War Crime #240. Confiscation of Private Property.
The list of abuses that accompany wars is long, but it's hard to imagine wars without them. The United States seems to be moving in the direction of unmanned wars conducted by remote-controlled drones, and small- scale targeted assassinations conducted by special forces under the secret command of the president. Such wars may avoid a great many war crimes, but are themselves completely illegal. A United Nations report in June 2010 concluded that the U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan were illegal. The drone attacks continued.
A lawsuit filed in 2010 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the practice of targeted killings of Americans. The argument the plaintiffs made focused on the right to due process. The White House had claimed the right to kill Americans outside the United States, but it would of course be doing so without charging those Americans with any crimes, putting them on trial, or providing them with any opportunity to defend themselves against accusations. CCR and the ACLU were retained by Nasser al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government's decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi. But the Secretary of the Treasury declared Anwar al-Aulaqi a "specially designated global terrorist," which made it a crime for lawyers to provide representation for his benefit without first obtaining a special license, which the government at the time of this writing has not granted.
Also in 2010, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) introduced a bill to prohibit the targeted killings of U.S. citizens. Since, to my knowledge, Congress had not up to that point passed a single bill not favored by President Obama since he entered the White House, it was unlikely that this one would break that streak. There was just not enough public pressure to force such changes.
One reason, I suspect, for the lack of pressure was a persistent belief in American exceptionalism. If the president does it, to quote Richard Nixon, "that means that it's not illegal." If our nation does it, it must be legal. Since the enemies in our wars are the bad guys, we must be upholding the law, or at least upholding ad hoc might-makes-right justice of some sort. We can easily see the conundrum created if people on both sides of a war assume that their side can do no wrong. We would be better off recognizing that our nation, like other nations, can do things wrong, can in fact do things very, very wrong — even criminal. We would be better off organizing to compel Congress to cease funding wars. We would be better off deterring would-be war makers by holding past and current war makers accountable.
David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie" from which this is excerpted: http://warisalie.org
Wyclef Jean shot while In Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Hip-hop singer Wyclef Jean says he was grazed by a bullet in the hand when he stepped out of his car in Haiti to make a phone call.
The Haitian-American performer says he had just left the car Saturday night when he heard gunfire. Jean says the next thing he noticed, there was blood on his shirt and sneakers.
He told told us in a telephone interview Sunday that he has no idea who fired or whether the rounds were targeting him.
He says a doctor treated him at a hospital and he is taking antibiotics.
Neither police nor hospital officials could immediately be reached.
Jean says the shooting happened in the capital of Port-au-Prince. He says a driver and the hip-hop singer known as FanFan were with him.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) - Hip-hop star Wyclef Jean was recovering Sunday after receiving a gunshot wound to the hand while campaigning for a fellow performer who is running for president.
The shooting happened in the Delmas section of the capital, Port-au-Prince, after 11 p.m. local time Saturday (11 p.m. EDT; 0300 Sunday GMT) said Joe Mignon, senior program director for Jean's Yele Foundation. Jean was treated at a hospital and later released, Mignon said.
Jean's brother, Samuel, confirmed the musician was shot. Neither he nor Mignon had additional details, and a spokesman for the Haitian National Police could not be reached immediately for comment.
Jean, a native of Haiti who rocketed to fame as a member of the hip-hop trio The Fugees, is in his home country to support fellow musician and friend Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly, one of two presidential candidates in a run-off vote taking place Sunday.
Last week, Jean participated in a Martelly concert in downtown Port-au-Prince that sought to win over voters.
"We are happy that Wyclef is okay but we continue to pray for him and for a peaceful and fair election today in Haiti," the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has worked with Jean on educational issues and bringing aid to Haiti after the devastating January 2010 earthquake, said in a statement.
The statement also quoted Jimmy Rosemond, who it said was accompanying Jean on his current trip to Haiti.
"It is clear that enemies of progressive change in Haiti are behind the shooting of Wyclef - those that don't want to accept that a monumental change is inevitable for the betterment of the Haitian people," Rosemond said. "This incident will not deter those of us that see the election as crucial to the country's future."
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Interview with Muammar Gadhafi on events in Libya
The West is to be forgotten. We will not give them our oil’ - Gaddafi
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Japan earthquake as it happened
Hundreds of people are dead after one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck Japan, triggering a devastating 10-metre-high tsunami along parts of the country's northeastern coastline.
The massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck on Friday afternoon local time, creating gigantic waves which swept away cars, boats, homes and people as the surging water overwhelmed coastal barriers.
Widespread fires burned out of control and Japan's nuclear industry was on alert as reactors shut down automatically as a safety precaution.
Millions of people are reported to be without electricity, airports are closed and public transport in Tokyo and other cities has come to a halt as Japan reels amid the twin devastations.
Police said 200 to 300 bodies have been found in the northeastern coastal city of Sendai where hundreds of buildings have collapsed. Japan's NHK television said the victims appeared to have drowned.
Police said another 88 were confirmed killed and 349 were missing.
Thousands of people living near a nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture were ordered to evacuate after the reactor developing a cooling fault. Officials said the move was a precaution and there was no evidence of leaking radiation.
Meanwhile, countries around the Pacific basin are on tsunami alert amid warnings that a wall of water could completely wash over low-lying islands.
RAW FOOTAGE
Friday, March 11, 2011
Major Earthquake, Tsunami Hit Japan
A massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake has struck off Japan's northeastern coast, triggering a four meter tsunami that washed away cars along parts of the coastline.
Video from national broadcaster NHK showed dozens of cars, large ferries and some buildings being swept out to sea in the port city of Kamaishi in the province of Iwate.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warming for the entire Pacific coast of Japan following the quake that struck about 125 kilometers off the eastern coast, at a depth of 10 kilometers. Residents in the coastal areas have been urged to immediately evacuate to higher ground.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in the U.S. state of Hawaii said a tsunami warning was also in effect for Russia, Marcus Island and the Northern Marianas. It said a tsunami watch was issued for Guam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Hawaii.
Friday's massive quake was felt in Tokyo, where it shook buildings and caused several fires. The Tokyo metro system says all train and subway traffic in the city has been stopped.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has convened an emergency meeting of the Cabinet to assess the situation.
WATCH FOOTAGE
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Exclusive interview with Ballerina Misty Copeland
Misty Copeland is an accomplished ballerina…and a incredible sister. She’s the first Black American female soloist for the prestigious American Ballet Theatre
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