by Stephen Lendman

Asiz in better days

He’s ill, isolated and fading. His life hangs in the balance. Washington likely wants him dead. He blames America, Israel and Britain. They bear responsibility for destroying Iraq. More on him below. Medical neglect killed Slobodan Milosevic. In March 2006, he was found dead in his cell. He had heart and other health problems. He was denied proper treatment. It could have saved him. He might have lived many more years. 

Days before his death, he wrote Russia’s Foreign Ministry. He said the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) wanted him dead. So did Washington and key NATO partners. They want Aziz gone and forgotten. He’s dying from neglect.

In summer 2010, he gave his first interview. He’d been in prison nearly seven and a half years. He committed no crime, he said. He’s victimized by US imperialism.

“All decisions were taken by president Saddam Hussein. I held a political position, I did not participate in any of the crimes that were raised against me personally. Out of hundreds of complaints, nobody has mentioned me in person.”

“Being a member of the government, I had a moral responsibility to defend the government. If you go back to the history, I asked Saddam Hussein not to invade Kuwait, but I had to support the decision of the majority.”

“When the decision was taken, I said to him, this is going to lead to war with the US and it is not in our interests to wage war against the US.”

“But the decision was taken. I was the foreign minister of the country and I had to defend the country and do everything possible to explain our position. I stayed on the side of right.”

“There is nothing here any more. Nothing. For thirty years Saddam built Iraq, and now it is destroyed. There are more sick than before, more hungry.”

“The people don’t have services. People are being killed every day in the tens, if not hundreds. We are all victims of America and Britain. They killed our country.”

Iraq pre-2003 no longer exists. Washington and NATO allies destroyed the cradle of civilization. Aziz is guilty by association. He regrets surrendering to US authorities. He did so on April 24, 2003. He said goodbye to Saddam days earlier.

“Through an intermediary, I contacted the Americans,” he said. “If I could return to that time, I wish I would be martyred.” He’s endured a long ordeal. He’s ill, weak and fading.

On April 3, The Brussells Tribunal issued the following statement:

“Maliki and his gang are slowing assassinating Tariq Aziz.” He’s imprisoned in Iraq. He’s treated inhumanely. Doing so constitutes torture.  “The whole Western political class and human rights bodies should be held responsible if he dies in custody, because of their inaction and negligence.”

His son Ziad wrote to the BRussells Tribunal. “We urge politicians,  Human Rights Organisations and the media to finally take some decisive action for the release of Tareq Aziz and all other political prisoners,” he said. “Human rights should be defended.”

Former Iraq humanitarian aid coordinators, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, said so earlier. They addressed Aziz’s deplorable situation. More on that below.

Ziad said in part:

“It has been almost 10 years since my father had been taken into custody by the American forces.”

“It is also the anniversary of the assassination attempt he survived in 1980.”

It killed civilian bystanders. It “was planned and executed by the same people who are ruling Iraq today, and who are planning to execute him again, slowly and this time with nobody to see.”

He’s imprisoned in Baghdad. He suffered his fourth stroke. He “fell on the floor in the middle of the night and was left in his cell for the whole time until morning.”

“He has not been visited by a doctor, nor was he taken to the hospital, nor was he offered any medical attention of any kind since he had the stroke.”

“His ability to speak coherently is basically diminished. My mother and sisters can barely make out what he” says.  He has “inflammations and diabetic ulcers on his feet and legs.” Without immediate treatment, gangrene and amputations could follow.

Medical neglect bears full responsibility. Authorities lack compassion. “They have a specific agenda.” They want revenge.  Ziad wants the international community to know. “My father’s situation is deteriorating by the day, and I am truly afraid of what the future might hold if he is not provided with the proper care and treatment he desperately needs immediately.”

 In May 2009, Hans von Sponek addressed conditions in Iraq and Aziz’s illness. He said:

 “The Iraqi President Jamal Talabani recently spoke of the democracy that had been introduced in his country due to the US invasion of 2003.”

 “Some Iraq observers, who do not know Iraq and probably understand only little about democracy, have hastily confirmed this.”

“For them, the decreases of bloody attacks and of the number of victims prove that the six-year occupation was worthwhile…However, dead people cannot react, but their descendants can do and they do so. Twenty per cent of the Iraqi population have become refugees in their own country or live under the most incredible circumstances as tolerated but unwanted people in Syria, Jordan or in countries farther away.”

“Among them is the family of the former deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz. They live scattered in Jordan and in Yemen and fear for their patriarch.”

“Tariq Aziz has been seriously ill for a long time. Together with other political prisoners like the former Oil Minister, Dr. Amer Rashid and the Minister of Trade, Dr. Mohamed Medhi Saleh, he is kept imprisoned at the US Camp Cropper in the outskirts of Bagdad.”

“They have already spent there many years, often without accusation, without effective defense, without support in the sense of the Geneva Convention, without effective medical supply.”

“International legal obligations do not signify anything in this context. The letter of Ziad Aziz, the oldest son of Tariq Aziz, to a concerned friend abroad makes clear, what the situation of political prisoners and their democratic fundamental rights in Baghdad is like.”

Separately, von Sponeck and Halliday said they know Aziz. They worked with him. He’s a “highly motivated Iraqi nationalist. He cooperated with the United Nations fully whenever he believed that the benefits of the humanitarian exemption for the Iraqi people could be enhanced.”

He and Halliday want him released. In 2005 and early 2007, they raised concerns. They “made public appeals for his release on humanitarian grounds.” They made subsequent attempts to do so. He’s still imprisoned. He’s denied due process. He requires urgent medical care.

None’s forthcoming. He may not last much longer. America and complicit allies want him gone. They’re killing him slowly. Death by willful neglect constitutes premeditated murder.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.  His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.  Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

Ten years ago George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies, propaganda and cover-ups that duped or co-opted leading news institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Wars of aggression – this one blowing apart a country of 25 million people ruled by a weakened despot surrounded by far more powerful adversaries – Israel, Turkey and Iran – are major crimes under international law and the UN Charter. The Bush/Cheney war was also unconstitutional, never declared by Congress, as Senator Robert Byrd eloquently pointed out at the time. Moreover, many of the acts of torture and brutality perpetrated against the Iraqi people are illegal under various federal statutes.

Over one million Iraqis died due to the invasion, the occupation and the denial of health and safety necessities for infants, children and adults. Far more Iraqis were injured and sickened. Birth defects and cancers continue to set lethal records. Five million Iraqis became refugees, many fleeing into Jordan, Syria and other countries.

Nearly five thousand U.S. soldiers died. Many other soldiers committed suicide. Well over 150,000 Americans were injured or sickened, far more than the official Pentagon under-estimate which restricts nonfatal casualty counts only to those incurred directly in the line of fire.

So far the Iraq War has monetarily cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion. Tens of billions more will be spent for veterans disabilities and continuing expenses in Iraq. Taxpayers are paying over $600 million a year to guard the giant U.S. Embassy and its personnel in Baghdad, more than what our government spends for OSHA, whose task is to reduce the number of American workers who die every year from workplace disease and trauma, currently about 58,000.

All for what results? Before the invasion there was no al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship. Now a growing al-Qaeda in Iraq is terrorizing the country with ever bolder car bombings and suicide attacks taking dozens of lives at a time and spilling forcefully over into Syria.

Iraq is a police state with sectarian struggles between the dominant Shiites and the insurgent Sunnis who lived together peacefully and intermarried for centuries. There were no sectarian slaughters of this kind before the invasion, except for Saddam Hussein’s bloodbath against rebellious Shiites. The Shiites were egged on by President George H.W. Bush, who promptly abandoned them to the deadly strafing of Saddam’s helicopter gunships at the end of the preventable first Gulf War in 1991.

Iraq is a country in ruins with a political and wealthy upper class raking off the profits from the oil industry and the occupation. The U.S. is now widely hated in that part of Asia. Bush/Cheney ordered the use of cluster bombs, white phosphorous and depleted uranium against, for example, the people of Fallujah where infant birth deformities have skyrocketed.

As Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American analyst observed: “Complete destruction of the Iraqi national identity” and the sectarian system introduced by the U.S. invaders in 2003, where Iraqis were favored or excluded based on their sectarian and ethnic affiliations, laid the basis for the current cruel chaos and violence. It was a nasty, brutish form of divide and rule.

The results back home in our country are soldiers and their extended families suffering in many ways from broken lives. Phil Donahue’s gripping documentary Body of War ⁽¹⁾ follows the pain-wracked life of one soldier returning in 2004 from Iraq as a paraplegic. That soldier, Tomas Young, nearing the end of his devastated life, has just written a penetrating letter to George W. Bush which every American should read (http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_last_letter_20130318/).

The lessons from this unnecessary quagmire should be: first, how to stop any more wars of aggression by the Washington warmongers – the same neocon draft dodgers are at it again regarding Iran and Syria. And second, the necessity to hold accountable the leading perpetrators of this brutal carnage and financial wreckage who are presently at large – fugitives from justice earning fat lecture and consulting fees.

In the nine months running up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, at least three hundred prominent, retired military officers, diplomats and national security officials publically spoke out against the Bush/Cheney drumbeats to war. Their warnings were prophetically accurate. They included retired Generals Anthony Zinni and William Odom, and Admiral Shanahan. Even Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, two of President George H.W. Bush’s closest advisors strongly opposed the invasion.

These outspoken truthsayers – notwithstanding their prestige and experience – were overwhelmed by a runaway White House, a disgraceful patsy mainstream media and an abdicatory Congress. Multi-billionaire, George Soros was also courageously outspoken. Unfortunately, prior to the invasion, he did not provide a budget and secretariat for these men and women to provide continuity and to multiply their numbers around the country, through the mass media and on Capitol Hill. By the time he came around to organizing and publicizing such an organized effort, it was after the invasion, in July 2003.

Nine months earlier, I believe George Soros could have provided the necessary resources to stop Bush/Cheney and their lies from stampeding the government, and country, into war.

Mr. Soros can still build the grassroots pressure for the exercise of the rule of law under our constitution and move Congress toward public hearings in the Senate designed to establish an investigative arm of the Justice Department to pursue the proper enforcement against Bush/Cheney and their accomplices.

After all, the Justice Department had such a special prosecutors’ office during the Watergate scandal and was moving to indict a resigned Richard Nixon before President Ford pardoned him.

Compare the Watergate break-in and obstruction of justice by Nixon with the horrendous crimes coming out of the war against Iraq – a nation that never threatened the U.S. but whose destruction takes a continuing toll on our country.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

________

NOTES

by Stephen Lendman
Note: This articles carries addenda. 

STARPOWER: Judith Miller in her heyday as leading correspondent for the New York Times.

NYT’s attempts to set the record straight are duplicitous. They come too late to matter.  On May 26, 2004, Times editors headlined “The Times and Iraq,” saying:

“Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq…We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq’s weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.”

It discussed “journalism that we are proud of.” It reflected “an accurate (picture) of the state of our knowledge at the time.”   It was based on duplicitous intelligence, hawkish neocons, and Iraqi exiles paid to lie.  Times editors admitted “a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.”

 

Information used was “controversial. (It) was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive….” “We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.

Follow-through was woefully inadequate. Credible sources were ignored. Scott Ritter was America’s former chief weapons inspector.  He vocally criticized sanctions. He opposed US intervention. He said members of his team spied on Saddam. He spoke publicly.  He said no WMDs existed. Suspect sites inspections found nothing. They’d been abandoned for years. “Presidents lie to the American people,” he stressed.

“If Rumsfeld had information about Iraqis hiding weapons, why wasn’t he sharing this information with the inspectors on the ground?”

He said Bush officials wanted war. Media scoundrels regurgitated White House claims. They showed “a collective cowardice to confront the administration.”  They demonstrated a “horrific disregard for facts and for the truth.” Americans were willfully deceived. They got false information. They got it daily.

Times editors ignored him. So did other media scoundrels. The rest is history. Pre-2003 Iraq no longer exists. The cradle of civilization was destroyed. Since 1990, millions died. Millions more were displaced. Iraq’s a dystopian wasteland. It’s one of history’s greatest crimes. It’s unsafe to live in.

Judith Miller bears much responsibility. So do Times editors. They featured her daily propaganda. They knew it lacked credibility.  On March 19, Times editors headlined “Ten Years After.” The Iraq war “still haunts the United States,” they said.

“(It) was unnecessary, costly and damaging on every level. It was based on faulty intelligence manipulated for ideological reasons.  The terrible human and economic costs over the past 10 years show why that must never happen again.”

More on that below.

When America goes to war or plans one, New York Times editors march in lockstep.  They played a lead role in supporting Washington’s Iraq war. Managed news misinformation substituted for truth and full disclosure.  Peace never had a chance. Judith Miller was a key instigator. The late Alex Cockburn called Iraq “Judy Miller’s war.”

“Lay all (her) New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003, and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda,” he said.

“With Miller, we sink to the level of straight press handout.”  She wrote daily Pentagon propaganda pieces. Times editors made them front page feature stories. Her most “sensational disclosures” were bald-faced lies. She wrote “garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive toward invasion.”

“She was a witting cheerleader for war. She knew what she was doing.” So did Times editors. They supported what they should have stopped.  They had ample evidence. Hussein Kamel was Saddam’s son-in-law. He headed Iraq’s weapons programs. He defected with crates of state secrets.  US intelligence operatives debriefed him. No nuclear program existed. After the Gulf War, “Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and missiles to deliver them,” he said.

The Times reported it. It then buried what he said and forgot it. It never resurfaced in the run-up to the 2003 war. Lies substituted for truth.  On July 1, 2003, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) headlined “The Great WMD Hunt,” saying:

“Within the press, perhaps the most energetic disseminator of “inactionable intelligence” on Iraq’s putative weapons has been the New York Times’ Judith Miller.”

She “accumulated a bulging clippings file over the years full of splashy, yet often maddeningly unverifiable, exposes alleging various Iraqi arms shenanigans.” Reports about them included:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.  It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/new-york-times-hypocrisy/

••••••

ADDENDUM 1

Iraq War: a Liberal Hawk Repents

From Pierre Tristam, About.com Guide [October 9, 2011]

WMD Duo: Judith Miller, whose reporting on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction would embarrass an inattentive New York Times, with Bill Keller of The Times, who now admits to inattention. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)There was the “I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club” column, back on Feb. 8, 2003, when Bill Keller, then a columnist for the war-cheering New York Times, imagined a victorious invasion: “If all this goes smoothly — and even if it goes a little less smoothly — Mr. Bush will hear a chorus of supporters claiming vindication. I imagine a triumphalist editorial or two in the neoconservative press. Pundits who earlier urged Mr. Bush to ignore Congress and the U.N. will assure him that he can now safely disregard everyone who caviled at the threshold of war, and urge him to get on with the next liberation in the series.”And even if it goes a little less smoothly.There was his “Fear on the Home Front” column from Feb.; 22, 2003, that included this prediction, now equally, spectacularly wrong: “First, Al Qaeda terrorists do not need the pretext of an Iraq war to come after us. They will attack us, unprovoked, repeatedly and in as spectacular a fashion as their lethal ingenuity allows, regardless of what we do in Iraq. We know this, because they have done it.” Al-Qaeda, of course, didn’t need to attack after the United States essentially attacked itself by invading Iraq, and beginning a spiral downward, at a cost of $1 trillion, and 4,500 American lives, and 100,000 Iraqi lives, that has yet to end.

And there was this, in a column written a few days before Keller was appointed executive editor: “The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.”

The last two lines said it all. The war we won: The war was never won, still isn’t, and never will be. And it led to the wars we now face, among them the enduring ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bill Keller was just returned to the OpEd pages of the Times. In early September, he penned an essayrepenting his support for the war. The piece has its problems. But it’s indicative of the degree to which too many bright liberals suspended disbelief in the Bush administration’s follies for a bet, a foolish bet, that they were on the right side of history with their support for war.

Here’s an analysis of the Keller piece and the hawkish liberals’ shift: “Iraq War: When Liberal Hawks Like Bill Keller Repent.”

ADDENDUM 2

by John Grooms on Tue, Jan 4, 2011  / Source: Creative Loafing Charlotte

Short and sweet: Judith Miller is either appallingly cynical or utterly self-unaware. Either way, she wins the Hypocrite for the Ages trophy.

The former New York Times reporter, you remember, deservedly caught unholy hell for her role in pushing the Bush administration’s lies about WMDs in Iraq. She wrote a series of stories for theTimes — based on B.S. spoonfed to her by Cheney & Co.’s favorite puppet, Ahmad Chalabi — claiming that there was clear evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam was working to acquire nuclear weapons. The stories were all written and published without verifying the evidence. The Bushies then turned around and used Miller’s “reporting” as grounds for the invasion. When her shoddy work exploded in her face — about the same time IED’s were exploding, much more literally, in American soldiers’ faces — Miller defended her reporting thusly: “[M]y job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

No, Ms. Miller, your job, particularly in such a highly charged, dangerous situation, was to be sure you were telling the truth. In any case, Miller is now a paid analyst on Fox News (there’s a shock), where last weekend she  accused WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange of being “a bad journalist.” The reason? Now get this: “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone.”

In my fantasy world, when an irresponsible journalist who helped pave the way to a genuine catastrophe calls someone else irresponsible, a bucketload of bullshit drops on his/her head. But that’s just in my fantasy.  In real life, no one on the Fox News show batted an eye, and Miller goes to work this week for the ultra-conservative site Newsmax.com.

¶