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9/11-15/08 
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WAR CRIMES
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IMPORTANT TO KNOW:
In the year 1900, 75% of Congressional daily
business was in service of "private petitions",
brought to Congress by The American People.
Today, that figure stands at 3%, meaning that
97%of all Congressional business originates from
either the Representatives themselves, Corporate
America, or professional lobbyists.
With the recent string of failures by Congress to
defend our Constitution it is now necessary for our
people to assert our own Constitutional authority
to remove corrupt government and provide our
nation a new and legitimate one. But what can we
do when our elections are rigged and our
candidates are sponsored by the same people
corrupting the present government? Brilliantly,
our Constitution anticipated just such a situation
and provided us the right of Impeachment and the
10th Amendment, which together allow the People
to act in a legal, non-violent way to overcome any
such a threat to American Liberty.
WAR PROFITEERS:
151 Congressmen Derive Financial Profit From WarBlood money stains the hands of more than 25% of members of the U.S. House and SenateBy Ralph ForbesWho profits from the Iraq war? More than a quarter of senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq.
According to the latest reports, 151 members of Congress invested close to a quarter-billion in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to FedSpending.org, a website of the watchdog group OMBWatch.
Congressmen gave themselves a loophole so they only have to report their assets in broad ranges. Thus, they can be off as much as 160 percent. (Try giving the IRS an estimate like that.) In 2004, the first full year after the present Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers—both hawks and doves—invested between $74.9 million and $161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD. In 2006 Democrats had at least $3.7 million invested in the defense sector alone, compared to the Republicans’ “only” $577,500. As the war raged on, so did the billions of profits—and personal investments by Congress members in war contractors, which increased 5 percent from 2004 to 2006.
Investments in these contractors yielded Congress members between $15.8 million and $62 million in personal income from 2004 through 2006, through dividends, capital gains, royalties and interest. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who are two of Congress’s wealthiest members, were among the lawmakers who garnered the most income from war contractors between 2004 and 2006: Sensenbrenner got at least $3.2 million and Kerry reaped at least $2.6 million.
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees which oversee the Iraq war had between $32 million and $44 million invested in companies with DoD contracts.
War hawk Sen. Joe Lieberman (IConn.), chairman of the defense-relatedSenate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had at least $51,000 invested in these companies in 2006.
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who voted for Bush’s war, had stock in defense companies, such as Honeywell, Boeing and Raytheon, but sold the stock in May 2007.
Of the 151 members whose investments are tied to the “defense” (war) industry, as far as we know, not one of them offered to donate their bloodstained profits to the national treasury to offset the terrible debt they have imposed. Has one of them even offered to donate one cent of their war profits to lessen the debt that increases more than $1 million a minute?
When our boys and girls are wounded the government bills them to return their reenlistment bonus. They have to return any pay they received while they were hospitalized. They have to pay for their helmets and uniforms that are destroyed in the hell of war. But they keep on fighting for these politicians’ right to keep their war profits.
• Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) $3,001,006 to $5,015,001
• Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) $250,001 to $500,000
• Rep. Kenny Ewell Marchant (R-Tex.) $162,074 to $162,074
• Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) $115,002 to $300,000
• Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) $115,002 to $300,000
• Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) $100,870 to $100,870
• Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) $65,646 to $65,646
• Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) $50,008 to $227,000
• Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) $50,001 to $100,000
• Rep. Stephen Ira Cohen (D-Tenn.) $45,003 to $150,000Contact freelance writer Ralph Forbes at justrite@ipa.net.WAR CRIMES: Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/congress/?q=node/77531&id=8583196
1. Impeachment is OFF the Table! (So Forget About It)
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.© 2008 Consortium News All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79761/2. Secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda:
The scheme reaches all the way to the Bush White House, where top officials recruit-ed dozens of "military analysts" to spread favorable views of the war via every major news channel -- without revealing they were working from Pentagon scripts and often lobbying for major military contractors.
Spreading "covert propaganda" is illegal under federal law. Congress must investigate these military pundits and their ties to the Bush administration, defense contractors and our national news media.3. Has the United States committed war crimes with regard to its initiation and conduct of the war against Iraq? As investigators we believe that the United States and its leaders have committed international crimes. Although we cannot bring them to justice, we can reveal their criminal conduct to the people of the United States, and to the world with the hope that U.S. conduct will be repudiated, conduct, which by the way, still continues. The U.S. still occupies parts of Iraq.
Today I want to outline for you the legal framework in which we are operating and explain some of the broad principles of law applicable to judging the United States' conduct.War crimes are violations by a country, its civilians, or its military personnel of the international laws of war. The laws of war are laws that must be obeyed by the United States, its officials and its military, and by the UN. The laws are contained in treaties that the U.S. has signed, for example the Geneva Convention of 1949 on Prisoners of War. They are reflected in what is called customary international law. This law has arisen over hundreds if not thousands of years.War crimes are divided into two broad categories. The first are called crimes against peace. Crimes against peace include the planning, preparation, or initiation of a war of aggression. In other words one country cannot make aggressive war against another country. Nor can a country settle a dispute by war; it must always, and in good faith, negotiate a settlement. The second category are what we can call crimes against humanity; I am including here crimes against civilians and soldiers. These are violations of the rules as to the means and manner by which war is to be conducted once begun. These include the following prohibitions: killing of civilians, indiscriminate bombing, the use of certain types of weapons, killing of defenseless soldiers, ill treatment of POWs and attacks on non-military targets.
Any violation of these two sets of laws is a war crime; if the violations are done on purpose, recklessly or knowingly, they are considered very serious and called grave breaches; Nazis and Japanese following World War II were hanged for such grave breaches.
First, I want to discuss crimes against peace and give you some sense of its application here. This prohibition is embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, the Nuremberg Charter, which is the law under which the Nazis were tried, and a treaty called the Kellogg-Briand pact. As the Nuremberg Charter defines,- Crimes against peace:
- Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
- Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
The United Nations Charter is the highest expression of this prohibition on aggressive war and sets down very rigorous rules for avoiding the use of force - rules which were flagrantly violated by the United States and a Security Council it controlled. Article 2131 of the UN Charter requires that international disputes be settled by peaceful means so that international peace, security and justice are not endangered; Article 2141 requires that force shall not by used in any manner that is inconsistent with the purposes of the UN and Article 33 requires that parties to a dispute shall first of all seek a solution by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies, or other peaceful means. Not until all such means are exhausted can force be used.
So, taken together we have two basic rules: a nation cannot plan and make war, and second, if there is a dispute, the nations must exhaust every means of settlement - every means. There is strong evidence, some of which is presented in the papers here, that the U.S. violated both of these basic laws. These facts are not hidden.War Crimes Committed Against the People of Iraq
In the course of his war against Iraq, president Bush killed thousands of civilians, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, and left the country in ruins. In a nation whose level of development was the envy of the region, the electrical system is now crippled, the sanitation system is gone, the communication system destroyed, and famine and disease claim hundreds of lives a day. Besides being offensive to any standard of civilized conduct, this campaign of systematic destruction also violated international law repeatedly by disregarding the rights of noncombatants, destroying Iraqi infrastructure, and using excessive force against Iraqi troops.
President Bush popularized the myth of a clean war against Iraq and actively misinformed the public about what his policies really involved. While he asserted that he was at war with Saddam Hussein alone and indeed that the U.S. military was utilizing technologies that would spare the civilian population, the bleak reality in the cities and towns throughout Iraq offers a painful refutation of the President's claims.
Congressional testimony of The Winter Soldier; the war crimes committed are outrageous.
Scott Ewing, who served for three years as a cavalry scout in the U.S. army, described his unit's "block-by-block" raid of the entire city of Talafar in September of 2005. Ewing said tactics were particularly brutal in the Sarai neighborhood of the city, which the U.S. military had identified as an insurgent stronghold. "We were told to search aggressively to teach the residents a lesson not to harbor terrorists," Ewing testified. The result of those orders was doors kicked in, homes ransacked-and nothing found in the way of weapons. The Army then moved northward, and continued to terrorize innocent Iraqis.
Ewing described one incident in which the military rounded up every male of military age and detained about 500 Iraqis in a barbed-wire enclosure as their families watched across the street. A "masked man," as Ewing described him, then walked the line of detained Iraqis and gave either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. In the end, 50 men were zip tied and taken away, with the crimes they were accused of written on their hands. Ewing said he had no idea what happened next to these 50 men. "It's hard for me to believe," Ewing said, "that the Iraqis who witnessed this could take seriously our version of justice and democracy"
Ewing concluded his speech by noting, ironically, that "The only war our country has really waged well is a propaganda war on its own people."
Chris Arendt's strikingly youthful appearance was made all the more chilling when he referred to himself as a former "concentration camp guard" at Guantanamo. With disgust, Arendt recalled the dehumanizing absurdity of practicing to shackle detainees, in preparation for the "big game" of shackling actual detainees. He said , to applause from the audience, that he considered imprisoning human beings for five years away from their friends and families, without ever explaining why, to be torture in and of itself. "If that wasn't enough," Arendt said, "there were other methods to make sure we got around to torturing people."
Arendt testified that detainees were kept in rooms 10 to 20 degrees in temperature, blasted with loud music, and shackled to the floor by their hands and feet. Arendt also described how detainees viewed as unruly would be pepper sprayed and forcibly removed from their cells.
"These are all on tape," Arendt noted. "The government makes sure all of these are on tape."
Complete video of testimony at http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier/testimony
- Crimes against peace:
Guantánamo children
- The Guardian,
- Saturday July 19, 2008
In a submission to the UN in May, the Pentagon said that no more than eight youths, aged 13 to 17 at time of capture, were held at Guantánamo Bay. But a prisoner list released in 2006 in response to US freedom of information act litigation names 21 inmates under 18 when they arrived. A separate defence department admission brings the total to 22. Testimonies collected by the charity Reprieve, which represents 30 inmates at Guantánamo, indicate the actual number is much higher.
Guantánamo's child prisoners came from all over the world: they were Afghan, Yemeni, Saudi, Russian, Uighuri, and Canadian. Five of them are still there. They are: Mohammed el Gharani, aged 14-15 when he was seized while praying in a Karachi mosque; Hassan bin Attash, aged 16-17 when seized in Pakistan, and rendered to Jordan where he endured 16 months of torture before being transferred; Faris Muslim Al Ansari, an Afghan-Yemeni who was 17 when captured; Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan who was 17 when seized and faces trial by military commission; and Omar Khadr.
- Arundhati Roy
