Category: News
News and Views
‘Aiding and Abetting’ Crimes is Unlawful, Sometimes
The International Criminal Court has sentenced Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia “to 50 years in prison over his role in atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s,” reports the New York Times.
As is common for heads of state, Taylor did not physically carry out these crimes himself. Rather he did by proxy, which is why the court convicted him on charges of “aiding and abetting, as well as planning, some of the most heinous and brutal crimes.” Prosecutors introduced evidence, for example, of communications Taylor had with rebel forces while he was in Liberia and they were in Sierra Leone. Other testimony “focused on arms and munitions shipments to those rebels.”
The court’s mandate “covered only those crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002, wherein up to 50,000 people were killed.” Those were some interesting years. It just so happens that America was “aiding and abetting, as well as planning” what would become incredibly heinous and brutal crimes which would in many ways surpass what happened in Sierra Leone. But the leadership in Washington didn’t aid and abet these crimes against humanity sitting in a poor nation in Africa, so their crimes aren’t within the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.
Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration provided the Turkish government with the bulk of its arms. As this was happening, the atrocities committed by Turkey against the Kurdish population in the southeast was at its peak. “In the single year 1997 alone,” writes Noam Chomsky, “U.S. arms flow to Turkey exceeded the combined total for the entire Cold War period up to the onset of the state terror campaign.” Under the pretext of suppressing Kurdish separatist rebels, Turkey unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the southeast, forcibly displacing more than 400,000 impoverished Kurdish villagers. Torture and extra-judicial killings and disappearances were rampant, and the bombing and attacks by security forces led to the deaths of up to 40,000 people. Such a vast and coordinated campaign would have been very difficult without critical U.S. support.
Indonesia had been committing crimes against the people of East Timor from 1975-1999. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave the terrible President Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, an event which led to tens of thousands of deaths and major army atrocities right off the bat. The U.S.-backed state terror – “the United States was then supplying Indonesia’s military with 90 percent of its arms,” writes Reed Brody of the Nation – lasted through to the Clinton administration and by 1999 the dead totaled somewhere around 200,000-250,000 people. “This shows every sign of being planned and coordinated beforehand,” said Sidney Jones of Human Rights Watch in 1999. “The Indonesian army may be trying to teach a lesson not only to the East Timorese but to the people of Aceh and Irian Jaya. The lesson is: if you seek separation from Indonesia, even if support for separation is overwhelming, we will destroy you, and no outside power will come to your aid.”
In 2002, the last year in the ICC’s mandate for conviction of Taylor’s role in aiding and abetting the murder and torture of over 50,000 people, the Bush administration had already begun the sales campaign that would become the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Prior to this, throughout the 1990s, the U.S.-led sanctions regime directly contributed to a dramatic increase in child mortality rates and notoriously resulted in the death of over 500,000 children (that’s ten times more than Taylor has been convicted of helping kill). But very soon after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the Bush administration began to construct fallacious and distorted justifications for an aggressive, unprovoked war on Iraq. Every initial justification for the invasion has since been conclusively falsified, and the invasion and occupation of the country led to the deaths of well over 600,000 Iraqis. As this was being needlessly carried out, the Bush administration also had set up a worldwide system of torture and indefinite detention without charge or trial, also serious international crimes.
Nobody is saying Taylor isn’t a criminal that deserves to go to jail. But why is America’s leadership sitting comfortably in early retirement after “aiding and abetting” and “planning” crimes that far surpass anything Taylor did? Washington considers itself above the law, which is probably the reason for its refusal to ratify the statute authorizing the ICC, and why it would almost certainly veto any UN Security Council referral to the ICC. When the World Court held in 1984 that the Reagan administration had committed international terrorism – or rather, aided and abetted international terrorism – in Nicaragua through its terrorist proxies in the Contra rebel militias (who committed atrocities from torture to mass murder of tens of thousands of people), Reagan merely dismissed the case and refused to have anything to do with the court. And that’s how to commit massive crimes with impunity (i.e. have the power to ignore the victims). Easy as pie.
The Worst Horror Imaginable
…is to be called an ‘Arab.’ At least that is my take away from the latest Obama ad to appease bigots. In today’s Electronic Intifada, editor Ali Abunimah notes how easily and breezily this slips by the sensible Eastern Establishment censors:
But The Hill fails to note the blatant anti-Arab racism in the ad. It features a clip of an 11 October 2008 exchange at a Minnesota town-hall style campaign event between McCain and a woman in the audience. The exchange can be seen starting 15 seconds into the ad:
WOMAN: “I have heard about him [Obama]. He’s an Arab.”
MCCAIN: “No ma’am, no ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, whom I just happen to have disagreements with.”
If the bigotry contained in the exchange is not obvious, try replacing the word “Arab” with “Jew” and then imagine what the response would have been to how McCain handled it then, and to Obama using it now.
There’s No Such Thing as Civilians in the Drone War
Via Glenn Greenwald, this New York Times report on the Obama administration’s drone wars:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
…The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.
“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”
Even when it is admitted that civilians are killed in drone strikes, it is inevitably described as legitimate “collateral damage.” There is a systematic refusal to call it what it really is, although former general counsel at the CIA John A. Rizzo, now under investigation in Obama’s war on whistleblowers, has referred to these killings as “murder.”
The BBC’s Photo Fib of a Syrian Massacre
A few days have passed since the BBC irresponsibly passed off this 2003 picture of dead Iraqis as depicting dead Syrians in last week’s Houla massacre. The original photographer, who works for Getty Images, said “Someone is using someone else’s picture for propaganda on purpose.” The Telegraph:
Photographer Marco di Lauro said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources.
The picture, which was actually taken on March 27, 2003, shows a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.
It was posted on the BBC news website today under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.
The caption states the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but says it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”.
Max Fisher at the Atlantic thinks “the BBC’s error seems like an innocent one.” He thinks it was a hasty mistake arising after the photo made its rounds anonymously throughout the Internet: “We might never know who first entered this photo into the social media currents, which sent it flying through Arabic- and English-language social networks (including my own Twitter account) until it landed on the BBC website’s front page.”
We can’t know for sure, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume the BBC’s innocent naiveté as opposed to its knowing deception. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy theory, but I think there are two pressures on news organizations when it comes to hard-to-cover situations like the one in Syria. First, there is a pressure to get the most sensational story out before anyone else does. And what’s more sensational than a pile of dead bodies? There is also pressure to pose a call to action, which in other words is a pressure to validate what has been the dominant narrative of the Syria conflict. I think it’s entirely possible that the editors at the BBC did not do their due diligence and some even knowingly let the false photo go up, hoping they wouldn’t get caught.
In any case, this is a reminder that much of the journalism on Syria has to be taken with a grain of salt. We know much of the establishment’s information has been attained through opposition activists or expat groups and we also know of a number of instances where they have fibbed the reality on the ground. We also know the opposition has committed serious atrocities, and so have an interest in glossing over those facts in favor of information emphasizing the atrocities of the Assad regime. This doesn’t mean the Assad regime hasn’t committed its own atrocities and peddled its own propaganda. It has.
Confirming events on the ground has become slightly easier since the UN observers arrived. And despite this photo fib, the Houla massacre does in fact appear to have taken place, probably committed by the regime, according to UN observers and witnesses. But this BBC controversy should make clear that the establishment media is not the vaunted authority they parade themselves to be and are just as much in the dark about things as the rest of us.
Cup of Coffee Should Cover It, Right?
Its Memorial Day and for many Americans this means vacation. Not for Antiwar.com of course, because the war doesn’t take a vacation and neither do we. But this sort of “take a trip up north” or “go to a barbecue” holiday comes with the built-in assumption that we reflect on glorious military campaigns of the past. During peacetime this is extremely easy to do, of course, there’s no reason to question this reflection too much, its just an excuse for an extra day off. In the midst of an unending, hugely unpopular war, things change, and couching the three-day weekend in jingoist terms is going to get people thinking about the war, and nobody in power wants that.
They can’t exactly cancel the holiday either, both because the calenders are already printed and because that’s going to get people thinking even more about the war. Instead, there seems to be a concerted effort to make very cynical displays of state “generosity” over the weekend, apparently thinking that this will salve over any doubts people have about the wartime regime. Since the state’s generosity is entirely a function of massive taxes and its also running a huge deficit fighting the war, so it better be real cynical and real cheap.
Here in Michigan, it takes the form of the Michigan Citizen Corps (MCC), whose rhetoric is couched entirely in “homeland security” and “anti-terrorism,” but whose real duties show up on these three-day weekends.
They go to rest stops along the Interstate highways, and give away government-subsidized cups of coffee to people to “honor” the troops. Fearing that this inherently ridiculous little program wasn’t sufficient any longer, the Federal Government even threw a $6,000+ grant at the group to buy some Snow Cone machines for the kids. Because we don’t want their little hearts and minds thinking too much either, especially since this war is going to last so long that they’ll eventually be voters.
On Saturday night, the US military launched an air strike in Paktia Province, killing a family of eight, including six children. One of the first responses I got about the story was from a self-righteous MCC person, who insisted that my reporting on the killings was not only disrespecting the holiday, but was disrespecting his “service” in handing out that subsidized coffee. He accused me of “missing the big picture” on the government by criticizing the deaths of those kids while ignoring the nice coffee-giving things they do.
Eight people are dead. Six children. How many cups of coffee do you need to look the other way? Inquiring minds want to know.