POLICE VIOLENCE AT GUADALAJARA SUMMIT: 30 WOUNDED, 100 ARRESTED SHOW YOUR SOLIDARITY: CALL MEXICAN CONSULATES TO DEMAND THEIR RELEASE!
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MAY 28, 2004: COPS REFUSE TO IDENTIFY ARRESTEES, DEMAND RANSOM FOR RELEASE Extreme police repression breaks out at the ALCUE trade summit in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Latin American and Caribbean heads of state are negotiating the terms of the sale of their countries' resources and labor to the European Union behind closed doors. Global justice activists demanding public participation and democratic debate over development polices, along with bystanders, were brutally beaten, gassed, and arrested. The majority of those detained were picked up in the street in the hours later as they attempted to retreat to safety. As they have refused to release the names, charges and locations of the arrestees, we consider them to have been "disappeared" by the authorities. In negotiations, police have proposed to ransom all but 9 of the disappeared in exchange for payment for property damage.
As part of the global social movement, which has been taking place since Seattle ‘99, days of Social Action have been organised in Guadalajara, Mexico, with reference to the III ALCUE (Latin American, Caribbean and European Union)summit , taking place at the centre of this city. The days of action have consisted of a series of forums and workshops where people look for alternatives to neoliberal policies, as well as organising cultural activities and street celebrations.
The Independent May 23, 2004
Has the U.S. Government Committed War Crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq?
By Robert Higgs
After World War II, the U.S. government, in cooperation with the governments of
the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France, established an International
Military Tribunal to bring to justice the leaders of the European Axis regimes.
The Tribunal's Charter, published August 8, 1945, declared in Article 6: "The
following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the
Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility":
(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, 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;
(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such
violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or
deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or
in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on
the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton
destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by
military necessity;
(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement,
deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population,
before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious
grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction
of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country
where perpetrated.
The Article concluded by declaring pointedly that "leaders, organizers,
instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation of execution of a
Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible
for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan."
Further, Section 7 states:
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible
officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them
from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
Moreover, Section 8 states:
"The fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a
superior shall not free him from responsibility . . . ."
The Tribunal also prohibited tu quoque (so did you) defenses-no surprise,
inasmuch as this whole proceeding amounted to "victor's justice," and the
prosecuting powers themselves scarcely wished to acknowledge that during the war
they too had taken many actions that would not bear scrutiny.
At a series of trials at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949, more than a hundred
defendants were tried. At the most important trial, which placed before the bar
of justice the top surviving leaders of Hitler's government, twenty-two men were
indicted on one or more of the counts listed above; nineteen were convicted on
one or more counts; and three were found not guilty. Of those found guilty,
twelve were sentenced to death by hanging; three were sentenced to life in
prison; and four were sentenced to prison for terms that varied from ten to
twenty years. No appeals were permitted.
If today the U.S. government were to put itself on trial, on the same basis it
employed to try the Nazis at Nuremberg, for actions taken in Afghanistan and
Iraq in recent years, it might have to convict itself-if only for the sake of
consistency. Justice is no respecter of person. Can anyone sincerely maintain
that what was a crime for Hermann Goering and Alfred Jodl is not equally a crime
for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney?
Evidently, leaders of the Bush administration have given serious consideration
to the possibility that their actions might lead to an indictment for war
crimes, and they have taken legal measures to minimize their exposure to such
prosecution.
In a January 25, 2002, memorandum obtained and publicized recently by Newsweek,
Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, outlined the pros and cons of the
government's decisions about the treatment of prisoners in the so-called war on
terrorism. Gonzales agreed with President George W. Bush that because "the war
against terrorism is a new kind of war," the Geneva Convention III on the
Treatment of Prisoners of War need not be heeded. As Gonzales wrote, "this new
paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy
prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions . . . . [It] eliminates any
argument regarding the need for case-by-case determinations of POW status." An
official presidential etermination that the Geneva Convention "does not apply to
al Qaeda and the Taliban,"
Gonzales opined, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal
prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C.
2441)." That statute, he added pointedly, "prohibits the commission of a 'war
crime' by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials. . . . Adhering to
your determination that [the Geneva Convention] does not apply would guard
effectively against misconstruction or misapplication of [the War Crimes Act]. .
." and thus would serve as "a solid defense to any future prosecution."
Not for nothing were administration officials worried about a potential
indictment for war crimes. I am neither a lawyer nor an expert on the Geneva
Conventions, but as I consider how the U.S. government planned its recent
military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and how it has conducted-and continues
to conduct-those actions, I encounter time and again prima facie evidence that
U.S. leaders and their armed forces in the field have committed crimes against
peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity as defined by the Charter of the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945.
First, in the light of voluminous evidence now available to everybody, it seems
clear that leaders and advisers of the Bush administration engaged in "planning,
preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression." After all, Iraq posed
no threat to the United States. Its government had neither the means nor the
intention of waging war against this country; nor did it issue any threat to
harm the United States. That high officials of the U.S. government and their
supporters in the news media and elsewhere openly made many false statements to
justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq surely exonerates nobody; if
anything, those statements cast the guilty parties in an even starker light.
Second, in the light of voluminous evidence now available to everybody, it seems
clear that Bush administration leaders and military personnel acting in
obedience to those leaders have committed "violations of the laws or customs of
war," including "murder . . . of civilian population of or in occupied
territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war . . . plunder of public
or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or
devastation not justified by military necessity." The perpetrators' baseless
pleas of military necessity, of course, cannot absolve them for their actual
crimes as defined above.
The latest outrage, reported in the Washington Post on May 20,
2004, involved the killing by U.S. forces of more than forty civilians, most of
them women and children, in the village of Makr al-Deeb in western Iraq. A U.S.
military official in Baghdad said that "our sense is that this was a legitimate
military target. We suspect that this was a smuggler or foreign-fighter" route.
"It's our estimation right now that the [Iraqi] personnel involved in this
matter were part of the foreign-fighter safe house." So, on the basis of
suspicion of trafficking in unauthorized migrants, U.S. military forces, without
warning, used aerial bombardments and strafing with high-powered guns to
obliterate an entire village. An Iraqi witness at the scene told the Associated
Press Television Network: " The planes came in and shot the whole family. They
kept shooting [from approximately 2:45 a.m.] until the morning, until they
destroyed all the houses. They didn't leave anything." In a May 21 follow-up
report, Associated Press writer Scheherezade Faramarzi quoted a survivor of the
attack, Madhi Nawaf, who said: "One of [the dead] was my daughter. I found her a
few steps from the house, her 2-year-old son Raad in her arms. Her 1-year-old
son, Raed, was lying nearby, missing his head."
U.S. forces claim that they were fired upon first, but Iraqis on the scene
maintain that the Americans attacked people who had gathered in the village the
previous evening for a wedding celebration and that no shooting had taken place
prior to the U.S. attack. Regardless of whether U.S. intelligence about a
"foreign-fighter safe house" happened to be accurate or not, however, the
killing of the village's noncombatant inhabitants willy-nilly, firing from
aircraft at a distance too great to discriminate among persons in targeting and
also using bombs that cannot discriminate in any event, looks very much like a
war crime. Another survivor of the attack, Sheik Dahan Haraj, denied the U.S.
claims and asked the obvious question: If the American soldiers suspected that
foreign fighters were in the village, "why not seal off the area and make sure
they were indeed foreign fighters?"
In any event, the U.S. action was in this case, as it has been in countless
others, wholly out of proportion to the underlying justification. This sort of
attack has been going on in Afghanistan for almost three years and in Iraq ever
since the U.S. invasion began in March 2003. Anybody can easily fill a cabinet
with such news reports filed by journalists from many different countries. As
Human Rights Watch concluded in a report last October, U.S. actions "reveal a
pattern of over-aggressive tactics, excessive shooting in residential areas and
hasty reliance on lethal force."
Although the U.S. commanders exhibit insouciance about civilian casualties among
the Afghan and Iraqi populations-in the immortal words of General Tommy Franks,
"We don't do body counts". Responsible estimates of the number of civilians
killed in the recent U.S. military actions range from 1,000 to 5,000 in
Afghanistan and from 9,000 to 11,000 (in some estimates as many as 35,000 or
more) in Iraq. In addition, thousands of noncombatants have been wounded
seriously or have suffered the wanton destruction of their homes and other
property. Still, every day, the grisly toll continues to mount. Thus, "crimes
against humanity," including "murder . . . and other inhumane acts committed
against any civilian population" seem sufficiently obvious to justify a
prosecution under the terms of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Anyone can guess, of course, how the perpetrators of these crimes might seek to
excuse their actions-worse yet, to take public credit for them and to seek
reelection to public office on the basis of having taken them proudly and
enthusiastically while swathed magnificently in the Stars and Stripes (exception
being made for the now-globally-publicized "abuse" of prisoners, of course,
those actions having been officially designated as "un-American"). But just
recall how far the Nazis got at Nuremberg when they invoked the same sorts of
excuses.
Did not Goering plead, for example, that operation of the concentration camps
was necessary to preserve order? Did he not say, "It was a question of removing
danger"?
No surprise, of course, if accused criminals offer excuses for their
crimes-although Hitler's minister of munitions Albert Speer was remarkably
contrite at Nuremberg, saying "it is my unquestionable duty to assume my share
of responsibility for the disaster of the German people."
Especially rare is admission of guilt by government officials: rulers and state
functionaries habitually consider themselves above the laws that apply to other
people. In Shakespeare's Richard III, even bloodstained Gloucester had an
excuse, but Lady Anne, the slain king's widow, amidst the aftermath of the
mayhem, was not buying it: "Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make no
excuse, but to hang thyself." As Lady Anne said to Gloucester, so others now
might say to the leaders of the U.S. government:
"For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell, Fill'd it with cursing cries and
deep exclaims. If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds, Behold this pattern of
thy butcheries"
We need not prejudge, of course. Let all the accused have their day in court.
Consistency requires nothing less.
