| Al Jazeera, August 3, 2008 |
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Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government, has been sentenced to two years in prison. The sociologist and human rights activist was convicted for “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation,” the country’s official MENA news agency said. Shady Talaat, Ibrahim’s laywer, said the ruling by a Cairo court was flawed and that he would use his right to appeal. Ibrahim was granted bail of 10,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,890). Ibrahim, who has been living in Qatar since June 2007, says he fears arrest if he returns to Egypt. The case is among a series of lawsuits filed by members and loyalists of Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) against government critics. Accusations Prosecuting lawyers Abul Naga al-Mehrezi and Hossam Salim took the case against Ibrahim to court and accused him of defaming the country after a series of articles and speeches on citizenship and democracy in which he criticised the Egyptian government. Ibrahim said last month he wanted to return from exile, but only after assurances he would not be arrested. According to the Egyptian independent daily Al-Masri Al-Youm, Ibrahim had written to the foreign ministry asking for guarantees that he would not be held on arrival. The 69-year old went into exile citing a climate prejudicial to political opposition and human rights. A vocal critic of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, Ibrahim was quoted in the Washington Post last year as saying he preferred to remain outside Egypt for fear of being arrested “or worse”. After meeting George Bush, the US president, in June last year in Prague he was called a “dissident” by the US leader. Ibrahim, who founded the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Development Studies, was sentenced in 2001 to seven years for, again, “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation,” before being freed on appeal after spending 10 months behind bars. |
Archive for August, 2008
Exiled Egyptian activist sentenced
August 3, 2008
We lie and bluster about our nukes – and then wag our fingers at Iran
August 3, 2008By failing to disarm and breaking the rules when it suits, nuclear states are driving proliferation as much as Ahmadinejad
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- The Guardian, Tuesday July 29 2008
What is the Iranian government up to? For once the imperial coalition, overstretched in Iraq and unpopular at home, is proposing jaw, not war. The UN security council’s offer was a good one: if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment programme, it would be entitled to legally guaranteed supplies of fuel for nuclear power, assistance in building a light water reactor, foreign aid, technology transfer and the beginning of the end of economic sanctions. The US seems prepared, for the first time since the revolution, to open a diplomatic office in Tehran. But in Geneva, 10 days ago, the Iranians filibustered until the negotiations ended. On Saturday President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran has now doubled the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. A fourth round of sanctions looks inevitable.
The unequivocal statements Barack Obama and Gordon Brown made in Israel last week about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme cannot yet be justified. Nor can the unequivocal statements by some anti-war campaigners that Iran does not intend to build the bomb. Why would a country with such reserves of natural gas and so great a potential for solar power suffer sanctions and the threat of bombing to make fuel it could buy from other states, if it accepted the UN’s terms?
Those who maintain that Iran’s purposes are peaceful clutch at the National Intelligence Estimate published by the US government in November. While it judged that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, it saw the country’s civilian uranium programme as a means of developing “technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so”. The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that no fissile material has been diverted from Iran’s stocks, but raises grave questions about some of the documents it has found, which suggest research into bomb-making (Iran says the papers are forgeries). Those of us who oppose an attack on Iran are under no obligation to accept Ahmadinejad’s claims of peaceful intent.
US ‘held suspects on British territory in 2006’
August 3, 2008Terrorist suspects were held by the United States on the British territory of Diego Garcia as recently as 2006, according to senior intelligence sources. The claims, which undermine Foreign Office denials that the archipelago in the Indian Ocean has been used as a so-called ‘black site’ to facilitate extraordinary rendition, threaten to cause a diplomatic incident.
The government has repeatedly accepted US assurances that Diego Garcia has not been used to hold high-ranking members of al-Qaeda who have been flown to secret interrogation centres around the world in ‘ghost’ planes hired by the CIA. Interrogation techniques used on suspects are said to include ‘waterboarding’, a simulated drowning that Amnesty International claims is a form of torture. But now the government’s denials over Diego Garcia’s role in extraordinary rendition are crumbling. Senior American intelligence sources have claimed that the US has been holding terrorist suspects on the British territory as recently as two years ago.
The former intelligence officers unofficially told senior Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón that Mustafa Setmarian, a Spanish-based Syrian accused of running terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, was taken to Diego Garcia in late 2005 and held there for months. The Spanish are trying to locate and arrest Setmarian for separate terrorist offences.
It is thought that more than 10 high-ranking detainees have been held on Diego Garcia or on a US navy vessel within its harbour since 2002. The suggestion, if true, is acutely embarrassing for the British government which has admitted only that planes carrying al-Qaeda suspects landed on Diego Garcia on two occasions in 2002.
However, a former senior American official familiar with conversations in the White House has also told Time magazine that in the same year Diego Garcia was used to hold and interrogate at least one terrorist suspect.
The Council of Europe has also raised concerns that the UK territory has been used to house detainees. Earlier this year Manfred Novak, the United Nations special investigator on torture, told The Observer he had talked to detainees who had been held on the archipelago in 2002, but declined to name them.
The human rights group Reprieve said it believes most of high-level detainees captured by the US have been rendered through Diego Garcia at one time or another. These include Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi accused of being one of al-Qaeda’s top strategists, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly the mastermind behind 9/11.
‘We are confident high-value prisoners have been held on Diego Garcia for interrogation and possible torture,’ said a Reprieve spokeswoman. ‘We now have sources from the CIA, the UN, the Council of Europe and a Spanish judge who will confirm this.’
Secret ‘torture memo’ gave legal cover to interrogators who acted in ‘good faith’
August 2, 2008
Jason Leopold | Online Journal, July 31, 2008
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A Justice Department legal opinion issued in August 2002 advised the CIA that its interrogators would not be prosecuted for violating anti-torture laws as long as they acted in “good faith” while using brutal techniques to obtain information from suspected terrorists, according to a previously undisclosed memo released publicly last Thursday. The closely guarded Aug. 1, 2002, memo provided the Bush administration with the legal framework to use “alternative interrogation methods” against suspected terrorists captured in the war on terror. The heavily redacted document, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act request, was signed by then Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and specifically outlined approved methods the CIA could use, such as waterboarding, during interrogations. Waterboarding has been regarded as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition. “To validate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” the Aug. 1, 2002 memo says. “Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture.” The Bybee memo was written by John Yoo, a former deputy attorney general at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and preceded a second August 2002 legal opinion about CIA interrogation methods leaked to the media in 2004. Both memos were later rescinded. The Aug. 1, 2002, legal opinion was based on a statute governing health benefits when Yoo provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture, according to a former Justice Department official. Yoo’s legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury “such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions” than the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture. Waterboarding, a brutal and painful technique in which a prisoner believes he is drowning, Yoo wrote, therefore was not considered to be torture. “That statute defined an ’emergency medical condition’ that warranted certain health benefits as a condition ‘manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)’ such that the absence of immediate medical care might reasonably be thought to result in death, organ failure, or impairment of bodily function,” Jack Goldsmith, the former head of OLC, wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency “The health benefits statute’s use of ‘severe pain’ had no relationship whatsoever to the torture statute. And even if it did, the health benefit statute did not define ‘severe pain.’ Rather it used the term ‘severe pain’ as a sign of an emergency medical condition that, if not treated, might cause organ failure and the like. . . . OLC’s clumsily definitional arbitrage didn’t seem even in the ballpark.” Yoo, who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, also drafted a March 14, 2003 document, nearly identical to the August 2002 memo he authored, that essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover if they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners. The ACLU under a FOIA request also obtained that document earlier this year. |
A QUESTION OF NOMENCLATURE
August 2, 2008Malcolm Lagauche, August 2 – 4, 2008
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| Nobody laughs at Baghdad Bob any more |
Saturday-Monday, August 2-4, 2008
When I began to work at Radio Netherlands in its English section in 1981 as a broadcaster/interviewer/news writer, I received training from a master, Hans Kramer. He quickly turned my American delivery into a more international style.
His tips on interviewing have lasted with me for almost three decades: never ask a question that can be answered by “yes,” or “no:” never make a statement, only ask questions: except for your first and last questions, never have any written down: and others.
When he discussed news writing, he stressed the virtues of brevity and accuracy. Then he stated, “And never use the word ‘terrorist.’ One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
At the time, I rarely wrote news that would border on this issue, but the statement remained with me. Today, however, the word “terrorist” is bandied about with frequency: mostly in the wrong context.
In Iraq, a resistance is in full swing. The resistance is being conducted against an occupying force, therefore, every time the word “terrorist” is used by U.S. administration officials, or by Iraqi stooges, the word is in error.
Some news agencies have softened the word by calling the resistance an “insurgency.” Again, this is false. An insurgency is an uprising against a legal entity. The current Iraqi government is illegal and those in the real government have been murdered or are in prison. Therefore, the resistance fighters in Iraq are definitely not part of an insurgency.
Let’s look at occupied France of World War II. The resistance was trying to make things difficult for the German occupiers. After the war, they were considered heroes by the U.S. who, to this day, have not failed to consistently remind France that it was American troops who helped liberate the country as well.
If we use the same logic, how can the U.S. be considered liberators of Iraq? In reality, they are the same occupiers as were the Germans of France in World War II. The only difference is that Germany did not destroy as much of France as the U.S. has in Iraq.
Therefore, the Iraqi resistance fighters are the heroes. They are trying to oust an occupying force.
The U.S. media have things backwards because they use the same terminology as the administration. They mention the “bad guys” when discussing the resistance and most U.S. citizens have fallen in line. A simple method of portraying the truth is by merely reversing the words of “bad guys” to “good guys.” This 180-degree change would then be indicative of a more truthful look at current Iraq.
Iraq has been resisting since 1991, but it was not until U.S. troops were on its soil that the resistance took on its current form. The first Gulf War killed about 250,000 Iraqis, but the killing did not stop with the 1991 cease-fire. From March 1991 to March 2003, about two million Iraqis were given a premature grave because of the illegal embargo placed on it.
Most people do not remember the bogus “no-fly zones” set up by the U.S. During the embargo years, about 850 Iraqis were killed by the antics of U.S. pilots flying over Iraq, with a few thousand more injured.
During the those years, a few proclamations were floated to the Iraqi government. One, in particular, said that if Saddam Hussein signed the document, the embargo would be lifted and he would be re-packaged by the U.S. as a man of peace, similar to the transition of Col. Ghadaffi from a terrorist to a “good Arab.”
The document called for Iraq to hand over its oil production to the U.S. and allow a few huge U.S. military bases to be constructed in the country. Saddam and associates refused to sign. In mentioning this approach to him, as well as other occurrences in Iraq at the time, Saddam Hussein stated, “Iraq has been put in a situation in which it has to choose between sacrifice and slavery.”
Today’s Iraq is in the same quandary. Some collaborators have chosen slavery. They do not realize that by cooperating with the U.S. occupier, the country’s fate has been sealed for decades.
The resistance has taken the sacrifice route. The members have sacrificed their own careers and family ties to ensure that Iraq does not fall into total slavery.
When Saddam Hussein stated that “the mother of all battles has begun” on January 17, 1991, he was ridiculed. He knew his military would not be able to fare well against the U.S., but it was a stance that someone had to take in fighting imperialism. He also knew that this was only the beginning of a long struggle that could last for years or decades.
From January 17, 1991, to April 9, 2003, Iraq resisted, but not in a way that was greatly visible. It lost many people with little loss of life for the opposition.
On April 8, 2003, the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Sahaff was giving his daily report to the world. He was known as Baghdad Bob and held a worldwide audience because of his colorful statements in English and Arabic.
Sahaff was telling the audience how the U.S. troops were going to be bogged down in Iraq. One reporter shouted, “Look, the Americans are already in Baghdad.” Sahaff turned around to see a U.S. tank about 200 meters in the distance. He took the microphone and said:
Do not be hasty because your disappointments will be huge … You will reap nothing from this aggressive war, which you launched on Iraq, except for disgrace and defeat … We will embroil them, confuse them, and keep them in the quagmire … They cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them. They are the ones who will find themselves under siege.
He walked away, never again to be seen in public.
For the next few months, websites sprung up laughing at Sahaff and his last statement in particular. T-shirts and coffee mugs were made mocking his statement.
Sahaff went to the U.S. authorities and they laughed at him, not taking him prisoner. This, in essence, was a statement meaning, “You’re not even worth capturing.”
A few months later, while being interviewed in the U.A.E., where he relocated, a reporter asked Sahaff about his last statement. At the time, the resistance was in its formative stages, but not as active as today. Sahaff refused to take back the statement and said, “Let history speak about this matter.”
Today, the resistance is solid and every day we read or hear about another plan to placate the Iraqis. Plans change, but the effectiveness of the resistance does not.
Today, when one looks back at Sahaff’s statement, nobody seems to be laughing anymore.
Ulema ask US to accept failure in Afghanistan
August 2, 2008Staff Report
PESHAWAR: Ittehad Ulema-e-Afghanistan, an organisation of Afghan refugee religious scholars, has urged the US to declare its failure in Afghanistan and immediately withdraw NATO forces from the country, saying that the people of Afghanistan are able to reconstruct their homeland.
According to a pamphlet issued to press on Friday, the Afghan ulema led by Abdullah made three demands from President Bush.
The first demand is to announce US failure in Afghanistan; the second is to withdraw US and allied forces from Afghanistan and the third is to compensate the Afghan government for killing of thousands of people and damaging their houses and property.
“Let the Afghans be free and give them an opportunity to rebuild their country,” the Ittehad Ulema-e-Afghanistan said, adding that after US forces’ arrival and attacks in Afghanistan, the situation became from bad to worse.
It further said that jihad had become obligatory for all the Muslims whether men or women as the non-Muslims were trying to occupy Afghanistan and use it for their bad designs in the region.
The organisation said that atrocities have doubled after the US invasion on Afghanistan and vowed that through jihad they will free their nationals from the US and allied forces’ atrocities.
To Provoke War
August 2, 2008Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them
By Faiz | Think Progress, July 31, 2008
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.
In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.
During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:
HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.
Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.
Watch it:
Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz was that, “if you get the right incident, the American public will support” it.
“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.”
Transcript:
HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…
There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.
And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.
So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.
But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re into it.
…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.
Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In one of David Manning’s famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:
“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”
In the end, of course, we didn’t do this. We just didn’t bother with any pretext at all.
The Crisis in Pakistan
August 2, 2008Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation, August 1, 2008
Here’s a choice for would be foreign policy makers: is the solution to the current crisis in Pakistan (a) a comprehensive Pakistan-India accord, with full Iranian and Russian support, to strengthen Pakistan’s civilian government and assert civilian control over Pakistan’s rogue ISI intelligence agency, or (b) stepped-up US military intervention in Afghanistan, unilateral US strikes into Pakistan’s lawless border areas in the northwest, and thuggish American threats aimed at Pakistan’s fledging regime?
If you picked (a), good for you. If you picked (b), well, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain might offer you a job.
Recent revelations in the New York Times about Pakistan’s ISI and its ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, including reports that the ISI was indeed responsible for the deadly bombing at India’s embassy in Afghanistan, have pushed the Afghan-Pakistan-India nexus to the very front of the news.
But greater US attacks and more US troops in Afghanistan aren’t the answer.
The answer lies in talks between India and Pakistan. India’s Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s Yousuf Raza Gilani, the two leaders, held the first meeting between leaders of the two countries in fifteen months this week, and Pakistan’s foreign minister was optimistic, saying that the talks had helped “clear the air” between the two nuclear-armed rivals which have fought three wars, two over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. “A lot of steam had been let out of the pressure cooker. The dish we’re going to cook is going to be for the betterment of the region,” he said.
Trudy Rubin, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, described the comments of Pakistan’s foreign minister on the importance of improving India-Pakistan ties:
Better relations with India “are a top priority,” Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi told guests, emphatically, at a recent private dinner in Villanova, organized by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. Speaking the elegant English of a Cambridge University graduate, he insisted: “There is a large constituency on both sides that wants normalization. There may be hiccups, but we will forge ahead.”
This policy–if Pakistan’s new civilian government really pursues it–is of crucial importance to the United States and the wider world.
Pakistan Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Quereshi said here on Thursday that Islamabad’s response to a blast outside the Pakistan consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, was “measured” and it adopted the same attitude towards the blast outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul.
“We believe charges and counter-charges would not help. It is easy to indulge in blame game. What we need is solutions to resolve issues,” he told journalists.
Of course, the problems between India and Pakistan aren’t just hiccups. The United States, Afghanistan, and India have all accused Pakistan’s ISI of supporting the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other anti-Indian terrorist groups in a campaign of violence against India. And Pakistan, not without some justification, has accused India and Afghanistan of supporting terrorists against Pakistan in that country’s Baluchistan province and elsewhere:
Ruling Pakistan People’s Party leader Rehman Malik, who functions as the interior minister and is a confidant of party chief Asif Ali Zardari, appealed to Pakistan’s western allies, including the US, to stop India and Afghanistan’s alleged activities.
“India wants to destabilise FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). What India and (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai are doing must stop. They must stop this,” he told reporters in Washington yesterday. …
Though Pakistan has always blamed foreign hands for stirring trouble in Balochistan and the North West Frontier Province, this is the first time since the February 18 election that a senior government official has blamed India for fomenting unrest in the country.
Pakistan has seen the Islamists are critical to securing Islamabad’s control of Afghanistan since the 1970s, and it sees controlling Afghanistan as a way of countering Indian influence in the region. India, for its part, has worked closely with Iran and Russia over the years against Pakistan and the Taliban, and India used its ties to the non-Islamist, non-Pashtun Northern Alliance in Afghanistan as a way of weakening Pakistani influence in Iran and central Asia. (For most of the years after the 1970s, the United States supported Pakistan, the Islamists, and even the Taliban.)
It ain’t beanbag when two nuclear powers start accusing each other of close-to-war actions. Is this the kind of situation in which the United States wants to go into, guns blazing? I hope not. The remote chance that some nutball Islamists in Al Qaeda might do something nasty to the United States pales in significance against the real-world threats to the people of Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan posed by Islamic fundamentalists and other extremists, including Hindu fanatics.
In fact, the United States is singularly ill-equipped to go bungling into that part of the world like some drunken sheriff. Last time we did, post-1979, when we supported the Afghan warlords and Islamist crazies against the USSR, we helped create the very problem we’re trying to solve now. Many of the extremists holed up in Quetta, the Northwest Frontier Province, and the tribal agencies are people America armed and trained a generation ago.
So let’s let India and the new government of Pakistan handle their own problems. They’ll need immense diplomatic support from the rest of the world, including the UN and the US, but also including Iran, Russia, China, and others. Pakistan is fragile. Its new government, having already lost one major coalition partner, is trying to bring ISI under civilian control at the same time they are trying to force General Pervez Musharraf out of office and reorganize the corrupt, pro-Islamist army command. For my part, I believe they’ll do better without heavy-handed US threats, which only aid extremists and ultranationalists.
Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan).
© 2008 The Nation
Correspondence exchanged with the International Criminal Court in The Hague
August 1, 2008| By Robert Thompson | Axis of Logic, July 31, 2008 |   |
To Mr Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court
Dear Mr Moreno-Ocampo,
For over fifty years I have been a lawyer (now in retirement), and during that time I have had practical hands-on experience of international law at the highest level and criminal law (among other disciplines) at all levels. My experience has also caused me in many fields to work under two very different judicial systems, namely that in operation in England and Wales and that applied in France.
I was greatly upset to hear on the radio that you had decided to seek an arrest warrant against Mr Omar el-Basheer, the current President of Sudan, for his alleged personal responsibility for crimes committed in Darfour, but that you had no desire to initiate proceedings against either Mr George Walker Bush, the current President of the United States of America, or Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for their admitted personal responsibility for crimes affecting Iraq.
To an experienced lawyer such as I am this seems an extraordinary attitude on your part, since it would seem normal to act first in cases where the accused person admits (and even boasts of) extremely serious breaches of the Nuremberg Principles, as well as provisions of certain Geneva Conventions.
It also seems to me that there is a difference of scale in the offences which either apply or could apply to the facts. The thousands of victims of repression in Darfour are much fewer in number than the victims of the actions of Mr Bush and Mr Blair (and many of those to whom they gave orders) when they decided to wage war against the people of Iraq and subsequently to occupy that country.
It seems to me that you, as Chief Prosecutor at the I.C.C., have an absolute duty to pursue those who admit that they have acted in ways which are so seriously in breach of international criminal law.
If you take the trouble to re-read the Nuremberg Principles, you will find in Principle VI extremely clear definitions of Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, and Principle VII adds that complicity in any one or more of these crimes set out in Principle VI is also a crime under international law.
If you consider these simply definitions, it seems impossible for you not to draw the conclusion that these two men (and many of their advisers and servants) are clearly guilty of Crimes against Peace and also appear to have been complicit in both War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.
A summary of these three forms of criminality under Principle VI can be made as follows:
a) Crimes against Peace, in that they planned, prepared, initiated and waged a war of aggression against Iraq in direct violation of the international agreement set out in clearly worded United Nations Security Council Resolutions;
b) War Crimes, in that they were party to the ill-treatment and deportation of civilians, and prisoners of war, such as those who were sent to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and also in the destruction of cities, towns and villages in Iraq (there have also been the use of torture on prisoners);
c) Crimes against Humanity, in that they were involved in the murder and extermination of civilians (as in Fallujah) and the deportation of civilians to Guantanamo Bay.
Under Principle VII things look even worse for both men, since they have been complicit in many crimes committed in many countries including those already mentioned.
I have limited myself in this letter to specific crimes committed in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, but similar points can be made concerning both men (and their advisers and servants) regarding other lands, particularly the Lebanon and Palestine, under Principle VII, for having provided the aggressors with vast quantities of arms knowing full well that they would be used for unjustified aggression.
The obvious question is therefore why you do not immediately seek arrest warrants against Mr George Walker Bush and Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (and some of the others suggested above). The fact that the United States of America refuses to recognise the I.C.C. should not prevent your so doing, since these people could be arrested if and when they might dare to enter any country which does recognise the Court.
I would be very happy to hear from you, but I do not intend holding my breath while waiting, since your decision to act against Mr Omar el-Basheer seems to be a sign both of shocking partiality against such a man while failing to act against much worse offenders and of an unwillingness to act against persons for the sole reason that they are powerful.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Thompson
Avocat Honoraire au Barreau de Boulogne-sur-Mer
22 rue de l’Eglise
62990 RIMBOVAL
FRANCE
-o-o-o-
Reply received:
Our reference: OTP-CR-302/08
The Hague, 28 July 2008
Dear Sir, Madam,
The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court acknowledges receipt of your documents/letter.
This communication has been duly entered in the Correspondence Register of the Office. We will give consideration to this communication, as appropriate, in accordance with the provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
As soon as a decision is reached, we will inform you, in writing, and provide you with reasons for this decision.
Yours sincerely,
Head of Information & Evidence Unit
Office of the Prosecutor
-o-o-o-
Further letter from Robert Thompson:
Rimboval, 31st July 2008
Your reference : OTP-CR-302/08
Dear Sirs,
I thank you for your letter of 28th July 2008, and note the situation, and I await with interest receiving the decision which will be taken on the subject of the crimes committed by the person whom I named – i.e. Mr George Walker Bush and Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair – under the terms of Principles VI and VII of the Nuremberg Principles.
Yours faithfully,
Robert Thompson
Peace and Justice Post 