As the number of deaths continues unabated in Iraq –the worst since 2008- so do calls for the prosecution of those that led both the United States and Great Britain into war, George W. Bush and Tony Blair. In December alone there were 44 deaths in just one day, over 766 for the whole month and over 9,200 civilian deaths in the whole year. If Nuremberg Principles were applied, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair would have probably been condemned for their role in the Iraq war.

The Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines established after World War II to try Nazi Party members, were developed to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles can also be applied today when considering the conditions that led to the Iraq war and, in the process, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and to the devastation of a country’s infrastructure.

In January 2003, a group of American law professors warned President George W. Bush that he and senior officials of his government could be prosecuted for war crimes if their military tactics violated international humanitarian law. The group, led by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, sent similar warnings to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

Although the United States is not part of the International Criminal Court (ICC), U.S. officials could be prosecuted in other countries under the Geneva Convention, says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner likened the situation to the attempt by Spanish magistrate Baltazar Garzón to prosecute former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet when Pinochet was under house arrest in London.

Both former President George W. Bush and senior officials in his government could be tried for their responsibility for torture and other war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. Should the Nuremberg Principles be followed by an investigating tribunal former President Bush and other senior officials in his administration could be tried for violation of fundamental Nuremberg Principles.

In 2007, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, then ICC’s chief prosecutor, told The Sunday Telegraph that he could envisage a scenario in which both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then President Bush faced charges at The Hague.

Perhaps one of the most serious breaches of international law by the Bush administration was the doctrine of “preventive war.” In the case of the Iraq war, it was carried out without authorization from the U.N. Security Council in violation of the U.N. Charter, which forbids armed aggression and violations of any state’s sovereignty except for immediate self-defense.

As stated in the U.S. Constitution, international treaties agreed to by the United States are part of the “supreme law of the land.” “Launching a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify,” said Justice Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Benjamin Ferencz, also a former chief prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials, declared that “a prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity — that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”

The conduct and the consequences of the Iraq war are subsumed under “Crimes against Peace and War” of Nuremberg Principle VI, which defines as crimes against peace “(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).” In the section on war crimes, Nuremberg Principle VI includes “murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property.”

The criminal abuse of prisoners in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo are clear evidence of ill-treatment and even murder.

As for the plunder of public or private property, there is evidence that even before the war started, members of the Bush administration had already drawn up plans to privatize and sell Iraqi property particularly that related to oil.

Although there are obvious hindrances to trying a former U.S. president, a Bristish Prime Minister and their associates, such a trial is fully justified by legal precedents such as the Nuremberg Principles and by the extent of the toll in human lives that that breach of international law has exacted.

Dr. Cesar Chelala is an international public health consultant and a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award.

Last Sunday’s Washington Post carried a front-page article by Dana Priest, in which she revealed “a CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders.”  Thanks to “a multibillion-dollar black budget”—“not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia”—as well as “substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency,” the initiative has been successful, in Priest’s assessment, decimating the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, as the country’s “vibrant economy” and “swanky Bogota social scene” flourish.

The lengthy piece offers a smorgasbord of propagandistic assertions, pertaining both to Washington’s Colombia policies, and to its foreign conduct in general.  For a sampling of the latter, consider one of the core assumptions underlying Priest’s report—namely, that our noble leaders despise drugs.  The FARC’s “links with the narcotics trade” and “drug trafficking” motivated U.S. officials to destroy their organization, we’re supposed to believe.  True, CIA informants in Burma (1950s), Laos (1970s), and Afghanistan (1980s) exploited their Agency ties “to become major drug lords, expanding local opium production and shipping heroin to international markets, the United States included,” Alfred W. McCoy’s research demonstrates.  True, a few decades ago the Office of the United States Trade Representative joined “with the Departments of Commerce and State as well as leaders in Congress” for the purpose of “promoting tobacco use abroad,” the New York Timesreported in 1988, quoting health official Judith L. Mackay, who described the resulting “tobacco epidemic” devastating the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries: “smoking-related illnesses, like cancer and heart disease” had surpassed “communicable diseases as the leading cause of death in parts of Asia.”  True, the DEA shut down its Honduran office in June 1983, apparently because agent Thomas Zepeda was too scrupulous, amassing evidence implicating top-level military officials in drug smuggling—an inconvenient finding, given Honduras’ crucial role in Washington’s anti-Sandinista assault, underway at the time.

But these events are not part of History, as the subject has been constructed in U.S. schools.  It’s common to read, every year or so, an article in one of the major papers lamenting the fact that “American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject,” as Sam Dillon wrote in a 2011 piece for the Times.  The charge is no doubt true, as far as it goes: Dillon explained that only a “few high school seniors” tested were “able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War,” for example.  But the accusation is usually leveled to highlight schools’ inadequacies, with little examination of the roles these institutions are meant to serve.  And the indictments are hardly novel: in 1915, a Times story on New York City’s public schools complained their graduates “can not spell simple words,” were incapable of finding “cities and States” on a map, and so on.  That piece explicitly critiqued graduates’ abilities to function as disciplined wage-earners, and so was more honest than the majority of today’s education coverage.  The simple fact is “that the public schools are social institutions dedicated not to meeting the self-perceived needs of their students [e.g., by providing an understanding of how the world works] but to preserving social peace and prosperity within the context of private property and the governmental structures that safeguard it,” David Nasaw concludes in his fascinating history of the subject.  Private schools, to be sure, are similar in essential respects.  And one result of this schooling is that well-educated journalists can repeat myths about U.S. foreign policy, as their well-educated readers nod in blind assent.

The notion that U.S. officials have a coherent counterdrug policy is, again, one of these myths.  In addition to the historical examples of U.S. support for drug traffickers cited above, we can note that the slur “narco-guerrilla,” which Washington uses to imply that the FARC is somehow unique for its involvement in the narcotics trade, ought to be at least supplemented by—if not abandoned in favor of—“narco-paramilitary.”  Commentators tend to discuss the paramilitaries and the Colombian state separately, presupposing the former are “rogue” entities—another myth—when it would be better to view them, with Human Rights Watch, as the Colombian Army’s unofficial “Sixth Division,” acting in close conformity with governmental aims.  Paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño admitted in March 2000 that some 70% of the armed groups’ funding came from drug trafficking, and U.S. intelligence agencies took no issue with his estimate—and “have consistently reported over a number of years that the paramilitaries are far more heavily involved than the FARC in drug cultivation, refinement and transshipment to the U.S.,” International Security specialist Doug Stokes emphasizes.

When these substances enter our country, they become a key pretext for the skyrocketing incarceration rate, which has more people imprisoned for drug offenses today than were incarcerated for all offenses in 1980, criminologist Randall Shelden has pointed out, with rates of arrest and sentencing durations especially severe for blacks.  “Every criminal prohibition has that same touch to it, doesn’t it?” legal historian Charles Whitebread once asked.  “It is enacted by US,” he stressed, “and it always regulates the conduct of THEM”—“you know, them criminals, them crazy people, them young people, them minority group members,” he added sardonically.  Reviewing the history of marijuana prohibition, Whitebread noted that, at the Marihuana Tax Act hearings in 1937, two men spoke regarding the drug’s medical effects.  One was Dr. William C. Woodward, Chief Counsel to the American Medical Association, who explained his organization had found “no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug.”  “Doctor,” a Congressman complained, “if you can’t say something good about what we are trying to do, why don’t you go home?”  The second was a Temple University pharmacologist, “who claimed that he had injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 dogs, and two of those dogs had died.”  When one Congressman asked him whether he had experimented on dogs because of some similarity they bore to humans, the pharmacologist professed ignorance: “I wouldn’t know, I am not a dog psychologist.”

That was the extent of the medical basis for outlawing marijuana in the U.S., as threadbare as the anti-drug pretexts of Washington’s Colombia policies.  Nearly four years after Plan Colombia’s 1999 announcement, for example, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that “the Departments of State and Defense [had] still not developed estimates of future program costs, defined their future roles in Colombia, identified a proposed end state, or determined how they plan[ned] to achieve it.”  But while efforts to reduce coca cultivation and cocaine production were poorly articulated—and failed consistently—other endeavors met with great success.  For example, aerial fumigation displaced some 17,000 people from the Putumayo Department, where the FARC had a major presence, in 2001 alone.  The fumigation effectively converted the land from a means of subsistence into a profit source: journalist Garry Leech pointed out that, from 2003-2004, there was “a slew of new contracts signed between multinational companies and the Colombian government,” and the events in Putumayo and elsewhere suggest that Colombia’s herbicide-spraying campaign was never really aimed at illicit crops, typically described as the main target.  It seems that if the point were to eradicate, say, coca, the solution would be relatively simple: let coca growers harvest something else.  But Plan Colombia has consistently devoted only minimal funding for alternative development schemes, indicating the peasants’ sin isn’t growing coca, but living as subsistence farmers.  That kind of activity is an inappropriate use of the land in an oil-rich region, where there are profits to be made.

A Guatemalan peasant made a similar point to author-activist Kevin Danaher, when he visited her country in 1984—shortly after School of the Americas alumnus Ríos Montt had completed his genocidal tear through the countryside.  The woman, Danaher writes, “told us that soldiers had come to her home one night and hacked her husband to death, right in front of her and her three children;” the man “was a subversive,” in the military’s eyes, “because he was helping other peasants learn how to raise rabbits as a source of food and money.”  Danaher struggled to understand the connection between this effort at self-sufficiency, and the brutal end its advocate met.  “Look,” the widow explained, “the plantations down along the coast that grow export crops are owned by generals and rich men who control the government.  A big part of their profit comes from the fact that we peasants are so poor we are forced to migrate to the plantations each year and work for miserable wages in order to survive.”  Were she and other Guatemalan peasants to become self-reliant, they “would never work on the plantations again”—an indication of the severe threat rabbit-raising posed.

This woman’s remarks indicated who Washington’s real enemy was in Guatemala, and throughout the world.  The U.S. government was not opposed merely to “Communists,” real or imagined, during the Cold War, and in Colombia its policies have helped ruin—or end—the lives of millions of destitute individuals beyond the FARC’s top officials.  Of course, Sunday’s Post article ignores this fact, portraying the struggle as one between the U.S. government and its Colombian allies on one side, and aggressive guerrillas on the other.  But we can expect little else from this mythmaker of record.

“America’s nightmare of the opposition with a huge empire, the Soviet Union, will repeat again. By 2025, the Union will be re-established in some form,” Pavel Sviridov said. He talked about it, as well as about the future of Ukraine and its political leaders with Pravda.Ru.

“I am a futurist, I study possible variants of the future. I assume that by 2025, the Soviet Union will be recreated in some form. There is an axis of Russia-Kazakhstan-Belarus-Ukraine and possibly Armenia or Kyrgyzstan. They will come to a new unified agreement, and, most likely, it will be based on the Customs Union. For the time being, they build an economic platform. This will be the union, where no one will try to find out, who has got a larger piece of the pie. All will understand that the union is good for all, both socially and politically.

“I’d like to recall the words from a native of Kharkov, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who said that without Ukraine, Russia would always be a regional state, and with Ukraine it would always be a great power.

“The nightmare for the U.S., when it had to confront the vast empire of the Soviet Union for a century, will repeat. What is happening now is not a game of Europe to attract Ukraine. This is a game of the U.S. to prevent an attempt to recreate the Soviet Union.

“As for Yanukovych, he will most likely step down before his powers expire. I believe that the Ukrainian opposition will make him a scapegoat. He will be showered with criticism. He will be viewed as a traitor, who ruined Ukraine’s association with Europe. They will simply make him go.

“The political and astrological forecast for Yulia Tymoshenko is not encouraging either. Most likely, she carries the cross like Khodorkovsky does in Russia. That is, she has been knocked out of political struggle seriously and for long. She was removed from the forefront of political life, and that’s where she is going to stay. We can see the same with ex-president Viktor Yushchenko – his political career is over with.

“As for Klitschko, I like him as a man,who defends his rightness specifically in the ring. He is a fighter by nature, but, unfortunately, he is not a very good politician. The overall picture suggests that they most likely use him somehow, and he will not make a serious political career. He is clearly not a leader, and at some point he will understand this.

“The protests in Ukraine are only beginning and, in my opinion, they will become even stronger during New Year and Christmas holidays. Oleg Tyagnibok is a more prospective figure. I think he was not ready for cameras and attention, but during the second half of 2014, he will surely turn into a national leader.

“Although I think that Yanukovych will step down earlier. Perhaps they will form an interim administration, but it is possible that he will make significant concessions and reshapes his team to change the government. This, of course, will change circumstances.

“Another “hero of Maidan” is Arseny Yatsenyuk. He is the most ardent pro-Western opposition activist. However, he lost.

“If we talk about the prospects of Ukraine, most likely, it will benefit from the alliance with Russia and will not rush to Europe. Ukraine will prefer to inflate its credentials. That is, the Ukrainians will insist that they do not need associate membership – they need full-fledged partnership.

“There are many interesting conflicts around. How can one compare the scope of the Customs Union with Russia’s WTO membership? They are mutually exclusive factors. It is impossible to be a little bit pregnant. So it’s either the Customs Union or the WTO. Ukraine is facing the same situation. Inevitably, Russia will do everything possible to make Ukraine choose Russian carrots, rather than European sticks. But maybe there is a steel hook inside carrots?

In general, in my opinion, we are one nation. It would be logical if Russians still travelled to Ukraine’s Crimea for summer holidays, and Ukraine would be a continuation of Russia. In turn, Russians would believe that Ukraine is the mother of Russian cities, from where Russia started. I think that our countries have great historical future.

Pravda.Ru

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