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=By= Eric Zuesse
(crossposted with strategic-culture.org)

On November 16th, the great journalist on international strategic and military issues, F. William Engdahl, headlined at journal-neo, “Do We Really Want a New World War With Russia?” and he documented that, with military expenditures one-tenth of America’s, Russia achieves at least parity with the U.S. in terms of war-fighting capability. It’s a remarkable article, even though it actually brings together into one place the recent disclosures in many media, regarding vital technologies where Russia far outpaces American capabilities. Of course, that’s what’s necessary to do in order to document the extent of Russia’s areas of clear military superiority.

As to the question of whether the areas where the U.S. surpasses Russia’s military technologies might be more or fewer than Russia’s, the key point to consider is, I think, that Russia has now (as Engdahl makes clear) so greatly exceeded U.S. capabilities in certain vitally important respects, so that, at the very most, the U.S., even with all of its alliances etc., would be merely equal to Russia — the Russian military’s areas of excellence are that crucial.

Engdahl quotes one high U.S. military official as saying that Russia’s technologies for disabling U.S. weapons are so shocking that it almost makes him cry. A recent article in Defense News went into even more depth about Russia’s superiority in that particular area — and this was published before the subsequent embarrassing U.S. military back-downs in Syria and elsewhere, which have more recently (especially since 30 September 2015) been necessitated by the uncompetitive U.S. position regarding those vitally important technologies.

Of course, all of this pertains only to America’s corruptness in the expenditures of ‘defense’ dollars (how ironic to use the word “defense” to refer to the military in the world’s most-aggressive nation. Globally, “The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%).” Honesty would surely dictate a name-change to “The U.S. Department of Aggression.” But in official U.S. Newspeak, Russia is, instead, by far, the most “aggressive” nation on the planet.)

According to other measures of corruption, the U.S. is probably less corrupt than Russia is. But everyone knows that that’s highly corrupt. America typically manages to hide its corruption more skillfully than Russia hides its — but that isn’t important; the overall reality of corruption in the two countries might be not much different in degree, but only in the kinds of corruption: more high-end in America, more low-end in Russia.

Back in 2013, I headlined “How the U.S. Performs in Recent International Rankings,”  and reported that:

Corruption seems to be a rather pervasive problem in the U.S. On “Diversion of Public Funds [due to corruption],” the U.S. ranks #34. On “Irregular Payments and Bribes” (which is perhaps an even better measure of lack of corruption) we are #42. On “Public Trust in Politicians,” we are #54. On “Judicial Independence,” we are #38. On “Favoritism in Decisions of Government Officials” (otherwise known as governmental “cronyism”), we are #59. On “Organized Crime,” we are #87. On “Ethical Behavior of Firms,” we are #29. On “Reliability of Police Services,” we are #30. On “Transparency of Governmental Policymaking,” we are #56. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Challenging Regulations,” we are #37. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Settling Disputes,” we are #35. On “Burden of Government Regulation,” we are #76. On “Wastefulness of Government Spending,” we are also #76. On “Property Rights” protection (the basic law-and-order measure), we are #42.

Russia performed even worse, averaging around 110 over all those factors. 144 nations were ranked.

However, as regards corruption in the expenditure of military dollars, the U.S. is simply gigantic — and certainly far worse than Russia. On 13 May 2014, Stars and Stripes  bannered, “Decades Later, Military Still Unable to Account for Its Spending,”  and reported that: 

The military is still running behind in its decades-long quest to audit its spending and rein in waste, Department of Defense comptrollers testified Tuesday to the Senate.

Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps financial managers will be unable to fully meet a midpoint deadline set by the secretary of defense this year for mandated accounting benchmarks. Meanwhile, “serious continuing deficiencies” remain in the accounting efforts, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued Tuesday.

Nearly three decades after U.S. taxpayers gasped over $640 toilet seats and other Cold War military waste, the Department of Defense remains the last federal department still unable to conduct a financial audit despite laws passed in the 1990s that require the accounting.

The Defense Department’s Comptroller admits, in the Department’s latest available financial report: “The Department cannot produce auditable financial statements.”

In other words: that’s a dark hole, down which trillions of federal taxpayer dollars have gone, without so much as a reliable financial record having been kept regarding where and to whom and how it went down into that darkness.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]asically, the U.S. government now has been largely contracted-out, to privately controlled corporations (which collectively spend billions lobbying the U.S. Congress and financing political campaigns); and this is especially true with the Pentagon. It’s the result, since 1981, of increasing application of ‘capitalism’ (the dictatorial not  the democratic version of that) such as existed in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany, when governmental functions and assets first began to become privatized and the arms-makers became vastly enriched by the resultant asset-sales and the pouring of that money into armaments — to extend the German and Italian aristocracies’ control by conquering countries. Fascist nations are incredibly corrupt; they expand by international theft; and the US DOD (Department of ‘Defense’) is legendarily corrupt.

That’s more than half of U.S. discretionary federal spending — U.S. military expenditures: a dark hole, of corruption.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd here’s how corrupt are the aristocracies of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — the three main U.S. allies in America’s war to remove Syria’s secular, non-sectarian, and consistently anti-jihadist, Shiite leader Bashar al-Assad. To talk about an alliance like that, a pro-Sunni jihadist operation, as constituting ‘the free world,’ or ‘a fight for democracy,’ is to address the public as being not merely fools but stupid fools (suckers), because there is no real freedom in aristocratic-theocratic dictatorships; there is only mind-control, and aristocrats raking in billions from the public through taxes, so as for aristocrats to become enabled to use those public dollars in order to expand their personal empire by international conquest, in conjunction with the U.S. aristocracy — the master-aristocracy (Obama repeatedly refers to it as “the one indispensable nation”), which coordinates the entire fraudulent international business enterprise.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Israeli government can be added to this list because it receives annually from U.S. taxpayers $3 billion in order to buy yet more weapons from U.S. armaments-makers, and is pushing in the U.S. Congress to increase that to $5B annually. That’s yet more money pouring into firms such as the profoundly corrupt Lockheed Martin. One of Lockheed’s top salesmen was the notorious Adnan Khashoggi, alias Adnan Kasogi. Further in that example, Lockheed is itself controlled by State Street Corporation, which is tagged in one major study as the #5 power-holder globally, and is itself controlled by Joseph L. Hooley, who meets occasionally with other ‘Wall Street’ executives and the U.S. President privately at the White House, to discuss such things as, perhaps, whether the U.S. annual donation to Israel should be increased. Is that, too, “corruption”? How can it not  be? Those people are obliged to their investors, not to the public. Because most of these operatives aren’t generally known to the public, major international business (including war-propagation) can easily be transacted amongst themselves, in private. And, normally, people such as Hooley are merely agents for a few of the three thousand or so billionaires who actually control international relations and decide whether the path will be war or no-war. Almost all of the soldiers and civilians who then bleed and die in those wars own nothing but their blood and guts. But maybe some of them vote in a democracy — the bane of all aristocrats, because democracy threatens to get in the way of aristocrats’ choices — their ‘free market,’ in which such blood and guts are valued hardly more than they are in a slaughterhouse. It’s just ‘business.’ But all international business is also very much politics, and governments. They blend into one-another.

The odd thing is that, whereas Russia, with all its low-end forms of corruption, is notoriously corrupt, the U.S., with its massive corruption at the very top — and increasingly legal there now, after the U.S. Supreme Court has done virtually eveything possible to grease its skids even more — might actually be even more so (just not as visibly  so).

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Russian system of military expenditures is diametrically opposite to America’s. Whereas the U.S. has privatized, Russia kept its military industries within the Federal Government. Any profits from weapons-sales go to the Russian government, not to mega-corporate CEOs, etc. The weapons-manufacturers are part of the government. Just like in the U.S., there are no published financial reports on its operations; but, there are financial reports every year that are reviewed by the Ministers of Defense, and, above that, by the President and the Prime Minister — these being people who are accountable to the voters, not merely to some aristocracy of corporate stockholders. In the U.S. there are no such financial reports at all. Instead, America’s politicians just see the dollars flowing into their ‘election’ (more like aristocratic selection) campaigns. War-profits are private, and the buying of politicians is just another business-expense. 

Russia is getting a far bigger bang for their military bucks — that’s for sure. As the Obama Administration tries now increasingly to strangle Russia, not just economically but also militarily, this lesser-seen component of America’s vast corruption is coming more and more to light, even if the financial operations behind it are not.

And yet, the American public think that the ‘Defense’ Department and all its contractors, and the associated national-security operations such as CIA, Homeland Security, etc., exist primarily in order to protect the American people, rather than to protect and to expand the empire of, America’s aristocracy, who, via their investment funds and ‘nonprofits,’ own the press, the military firms, etc. It’s a network of power, which benefits the more, to the extent that the public are in fear and contempt, against ‘those aliens,’ or ‘those foreigners,’ not of their own nation’s aristocracy, who are actually pulling the strings and destroying everyone else’s security and lives.

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They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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By= Eric Zuesse

 

French President Francois Hollande this week possesses more power than anyone else in the world, because he will be the key decision-maker shaping the future world-order when he meets separately on Tuesday and Thursday privately with the two men — American President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who stand on opposite sides in the great decades-long subterranean war that the U.S. aristocracy have been waging to win control over Russia and its vast natural resources such as oil, gas, timber, and crucial rare-earth minerals. The deal that Hollande will make for France is going to be crucial for the future of the entire world.

Russia is by far the world’s most resource-rich nation, which might naturally be expected to be the case since Russia is also by far the world’s largest nation in terms of its sheer physical expanse. The world’s second-most resource-rich nation, the United States, is, of course, already controlled by America’s aristocracy; but those people want their heirs to dominate Russia as well. This explains the ongoing U.S.-Russia war, even after the end of communism, the war that was begun by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 just as the Soviet Union and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact were ending, and the United States and its military alliance NATO continued and has since expanded right up to Russia’s very borders — the equivalent of Russia’s Warsaw Pact having absorbed Mexico or Canada and placed nuclear missiles right on America’s own border. 

Bush double-crossed the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev then, and started the post-communist U.S. war against Russia, which is now soaring toward its climax, perhaps even to World War III, under U.S. President Barack Obama’s leadership. Obama has been overthrowing Russia-allied world leaders, such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, and has been struggling to overthrow Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, but Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has now drawn the line against that, as a consequence of which the nations of Europe will now need to choose which of those two sides to ally themselves with.

.”

Hollande’s decision, which will be made this week or else soon thereafter, following his meeting on Tuesday with Obama, and his meeting on Thursday with Putin, will determine whether France will remain in alliance with the U.S., as has been the case ever since 1776, or instead switch now to ally itself with Russia, which would transform international relations and might even cause the European Union to break up.

Thus far in Hollande’s Presidency, he has been reversing his predecessor’s (the Gaullist French President Nikolas Sarkozy’s) moves toward independence from America, and he has even gone along with President Obama’s demand for France not to send to Russia the Mistral aircraft carrier ships that it had just built for Russia and to refund Russia’s advance-payments for them.

The millions of refugees from Islamic countries, especially from Syria and Libya, who are flooding into the European Union as a result of the U.S alliance’s invasions of Syria and support for Islamic jihadists who are trying to overthrow the secular non-sectarian government of Bashar al-Assad there, have created an unprecented crisis throughout the European Union, and President Hollande will be making the most important decision in all of Europe, regarding whether to remain with the U.S. overthrow-Assad alliance, or instead switch to become an ally of Russia and go aggressively against the jihadists, to destroy them and rebuild the Syrian infrastructure that the U.S. and its allies have bombed and otherwise eliminated. This ambitious program of post-jihadist Syrian reconstruction, put forward by Putin, needs European partners, and would be the only way possible to enable the millions of refugees from Syria to be restored back to their homeland and continue their lives in peace. 

If Hollande decides to continue France’s alliance with the U.S. and their participation in America’s anti-Russia military club NATO, then the EU still might break up, but the likelihood of continued expansion of the U.S.-Russian war and of its surging millions of refugees could then force some other EU member nations to leave the EU; and, so, other EU leaders will then come to the fore, as being the key decision-makers in this ongoing crisis.

If, however, Hollande decides to abandon the U.S. and choose Russia, that will constitute the beginning of a new era after the end of World War II: the post-post-post-WW-II era.

The post-WW-II era ended when the Soviet Union did.

The post-post-WW-II era began when George Herbert Walker Bush double-crossed Mikhail Gorbachev, and it is rising now toward its climax — whatever that will turn out to be.

The post-post-WW-II era, if it ever arrives, will be the end of global dominance by the U.S. aristocracy. This ‘Pax Americana’ has turned out to be instead an ever-escalating worldwide war of American global conquest, America the fascist international superpower, but merely changing Hitler’s “Deutschland über alles” into Obama’s “America the one indispensable nation.” 

Perhaps Hollande will decide that his country isn’t “dispensable,” after all. 

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They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

---

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

 

---

 

By Tom Carter, wsws.org

The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual: Part one
A blueprint for total war and military dictatorship

3 November 2015
The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available online, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be.

According to the manual, the “law of war” (i.e., the law of war according to the Pentagon) supersedes international human rights treaties as well as the US Constitution.
..
The manual authorizes the killing of civilians during armed conflict and establishes a framework for mass military detentions . Journalists, according to the manual, can be censored and punished as spies on the say-so of military officials. The manual freely discusses the use of nuclear weapons, and it does not prohibit napalm, depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs or other indiscriminate weapons.
..
The manual might have more properly been titled A Manifesto for Total War and Military Dictatorship.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he manual is an expression of the incompatibility of imperialist militarism and democracy. In the 25 years since the liquidation of the USSR, and especially over the 14 years since the launching of the so-called “war on terror,” the United States has been almost perpetually at war, seeking to offset its economic decline by threats and military violence around the world.
..
The same government that orchestrated a coup led by fascists in the Ukraine, that backs a military dictatorship and repression in Egypt, and that supports mass killings and destruction in Gaza can hardly be expected to remain true to the rule of law and democratic principles at home.

Through both the Bush and Obama administrations, the “war on terror” has been accompanied by a steady abrogation of democratic rights within the United States, including a barrage of police state legislation such as the Patriot Act, unrestricted spying on the population by the National Security Agency and other agencies, the militarization of the police, and the establishment of precedents for the detention and assassination of US citizens without charges or trial. In this context, the Pentagon manual is a significant milestone in the drive to establish the framework of a police state.

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned about the dangers posed by the “military-industrial complex.” But America’s current military-corporate-intelligence establishment has metastasized far beyond anything Eisenhower could have imagined. Bloated with unlimited cash, dripping with blood from wars of aggression, it boldly announces its independence, its hostility to democracy and the rule of law, and its readiness to carry out war crimes and other atrocities at home and abroad.

…
The Pentagon manual reflects international imperialist tendencies. Its authors state that it “benefited from the participation of officers from the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force and the Australian Royal Air Force on exchange assignments with the US Air Force.” They continue: “In addition, military lawyers from Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia reviewed and commented on a draft of the manual in 2009 as part of a review that also included comments from distinguished scholars.” (P. v)

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The manual, which “reflects many years of labor and expertise,” applies to the entire Department of Defense, which includes the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, four national intelligence agencies including the NSA, and numerous other subordinate departments and agencies, totaling 2.13 million active duty personnel and 1.1 million reservists. The manual notes, “Promulgating a DoD-wide manual on the law of war has been a long-standing goal of DoD lawyers.” (P. v) The new document supersedes various policy documents that had accumulated piecemeal within different sections of the military and intelligence agencies.
It is the outcome of a continuous effort through both Democratic and Republican administrations over a long period, including the Bush and Obama administrations. It was issued at the highest levels of the state, having been prepared by a “Law of War Working Group” that “is chaired by a representative of the DoD General Counsel and includes representatives of the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy, and Air Force; the Staff Judge Advocate to the Commandant of the Marine Corps; the offices of the General Counsels of the Military Departments; and the Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” (Pp. v-vi)

…
The Pentagon general counsel is Stephen W. Preston. Preston was general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2009 to 2012, during which time the CIA covered up its own war crimes and obstructed efforts to investigate its illegal torture program. It is unclear to what extent the manual has been reviewed or approved by any civilian authority.

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“These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law… International Law, natural law, German law, any law at all, was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do.”———Chief Justice Robert Jackson.
These words apply with full force to the Pentagon and its manual.

The significance of Nuremberg

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Law of War Manual is replete with references to the Nuremberg proceedings, a complex and significant event in the history of the post-World War II period and the history of international law. The manual opens with this tribute:
..
“After World War II, US military lawyers, trying thousands of defendants before military commissions, did, in the words of Justice Robert Jackson, ‘stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of law’ in ‘one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.’
..
Reflecting on this distinctive history, one chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff observed that ‘[T]he laws of war have a peculiarly American cast.’ And it is also true that the laws of war have shaped the US Armed Forces as much as they have shaped any other armed force in the world.” (P. ii)

The Pentagon of 2015 paying tribute to the Nuremberg precedent is like the world’s top-polluting corporation expressing appreciation for efforts to protect the environment. If the precedent of Nuremberg were applied impartially today, it would be necessary to arrest and prosecute all of the top officials in the Pentagon, the world’s leading perpetrator of illegal aggression. After the triumph of the Allies over Germany and Japan in the Second World War, the victorious powers convened international tribunals to prosecute major war criminals of the defeated powers. The most famous trial took place from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany and featured the prosecution of Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop and other leading Nazis.

…
There was an undeniable component of “victors’ justice” in the proceedings. The same week in August 1945 that the United States, the USSR, Britain and France forged an agreement to establish the International Military Tribunal, the United States committed some of the most heinous crimes of the war: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
..
Nonetheless, the democratic legal positions espoused at Nuremberg stand in sharp contrast to the corrupt and lawless American political establishment of today, which asserts the right to abduct or assassinate any person without charges or trial anywhere on earth, attack any country “preventively,” and spy on the entire world’s population.
..
At the time of the Nuremberg tribunals, a majority view emerged among the major Allied governments rejecting calls to execute leading Nazis summarily on the basis of a “political decision.” Instead, the defendants were offered a full and fair trial, during which they were permitted to call witnesses, present evidence and argue in their own defense.
..
The most important principle that emerged from the Nuremberg proceedings was the concept that the decision to launch a war of aggression is the fundamental crime from which all other war crimes flow. While the Nuremberg prosecutors exposed some of the greatest crimes in human history, they maintained that the primary crime was the decision by Hitler and his close associates to launch the war in the first place.
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The chief US prosecutor was Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. His assistant, Telford Taylor, emphasized in a memorandum to Jackson that the underlying motivations and aims of the Nazis were not the decisive legal questions: “The question of causation is important and will be discussed for many years, but it has no place in this trial, which must rather stick rigorously to the doctrine that planning and launching an aggressive war is illegal, whatever may be the factors that caused the defendants to plan and to launch.”
..
In other words, launching a war of aggression is a criminal act—a crime against peace—no matter what arguments or policies are invoked to justify it.
Similarly, the Nuremberg prosecutors rejected the argument that those who committed crimes were justifiably “following” or “relaying” orders. Nuremberg Principle IV reads, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility…provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
..
These were powerful democratic conceptions that reverberated long after the trials. During the Vietnam War, as Taylor himself noted in his memoir, “thousands of young men contended…that under the Nuremberg principles they were legally bound not to participate in what they regarded as the United States’ aggressive war.”
..
More recently, on July 12, 2013, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden invoked the Nuremberg principles to justify his refusal to conceal evidence of illegal spying. “I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945,” he said. “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore, individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

The Nuremberg precedent expressed the confidence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power emerging out of the Second World War. The American ruling class felt that it could afford, under the circumstances, not only to assert democratic principles, but to declare that these principles were universal, applying to all countries, including the United States itself.
Thus, on July 23, 1945, Jackson told the International Conference on Military Tribunals, the inter-allied body that prepared the trials, “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” [1]
Seventy years later, America’s leaders have much less in common with jurists like Jackson and Taylor than they do with Nuremberg’s defendants. While the Pentagon pays tribute to the Nuremberg precedent, a partial list of the countries subjected to US military violence since the liquidation of the USSR includes Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Nigeria and Yemen.
..
If launching a war of aggression is illegal, arrest warrants should be forthcoming for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, James Clapper, John Ashcroft, Joe Biden, John Kerry and their criminal co-conspirators. All of these individuals should be in the dock, right where Göring and company sat, on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.
Ample evidence exists for indictments. One powerful exhibit in such a trial, for example, would be a November 27, 2001 memorandum by Donald Rumsfeld that contemplates various phony justifications for a war of aggression against Iraq. Under the profoundly incriminating headline “How start?” Rumsfeld ponders the possibilities: “Saddam moves against Kurds in north? US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks? Dispute over WMD inspections? Start now thinking about inspection demands.”
..

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]umsfeld’s memorandum is one of many proofs that there was a conspiracy to launch the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the basis of lies and pretexts. As a result of this illegal aggression, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives, if not more, and millions have been turned into refugees. An entire society has been devastated, leading to the rise of movements such as ISIS, and trillions of dollars worth of property have been destroyed or wasted.
The Nuremberg trials featured similar exposures of the criminal Nazi conspiracy to invade Poland based on false pretenses. To provide a casus belli for the war they had already decided to launch, the Nazis staged a provocation known as the Gleiwitz incident. During the Nuremberg proceedings, this incident was exposed as a staged attack on a German radio station by German forces posing as Poles. Hitler had boasted to his generals: “Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”

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Do as I say, not as I do
[dropcap]N[/dropcap]otwithstanding its repeated invocations of the Nuremberg precedent, the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual features a strong element of “do as I say, not as I do.”
..
For example, on the subject of aggressive war, the document declares, “Aggression is the most serious and dangerous form of the illegal use of force… Initiating a war of aggression is a serious international crime.” (P. 44) This is a plain statement of the Nuremberg precedent.
..
However, as one reads further, it emerges that this principle applies only to countries other than the United States. The manual notes that the US has refused to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC), under which the US could be prosecuted for crimes of aggression.
..
The document states, “The United States has expressed the view that the definition of the act of aggression in the Kampala amendments to the Rome Statute does not reflect customary international law.” (P. 45) The US also expressed “concerns regarding the possibility of the ICC exercising jurisdiction over the crime of aggression without a prior determination by the Security Council that a State has committed an act of aggression.” (P. 1,112) Such a Security Council determination, of course, would be subject to a US veto.
The refusal of the United States to recognize the authority of the ICC has deep historical significance. The United States played a leading role in establishing the Nuremberg precedent, but now refuses to submit to its enforcement. This amounts to an admission that if the United States were subject to an impartial application of the Nuremberg precedent today, virtually all of official Washington would have to be transported to jail. It exposes as fraudulent all of America’s posturing as a kind of self-appointed “world policeman” with the authority to sanction and attack other states that allegedly violate international law.
..
Similarly, the Pentagon manual declares that torture is illegal: “For example, it would be unlawful, of course, to use torture or abuse to interrogate detainees for purposes of gathering information.” (P. 309) But the document fails to explain how the CIA came to implement a systematic and sadistic torture program with the integral participation of high-level officials in the White House, for which nobody has ever been held accountable.
..
The manual is full of caveats, disclaimers and weasel words. For example: “This manual is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity against the United States, its departments, agencies, or other entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.” (P.1) In other words, the law of war does not apply to us, only to you. Passages like this reveal that the “law of war” manual does not represent “law” as such, but policies determined unilaterally by the Pentagon.
..
The Pentagon’s hypocrisy (and sometimes plain incoherence) on the subjects of torture and aggression is an expression of the crisis of bourgeois rule in the United States and the contradictions of American foreign policy. On the one hand, the US constantly seeks to dress up its imperialist projects in the costume of international legality. To justify the first Gulf war (1991), America denounced Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as illegal “aggression.”
..
Just last year, American political leaders were denouncing Russian “aggression” in Ukraine. After the United States orchestrated a coup in Ukraine, and while American commandos and dollars were pouring in, John Kerry accused Russia of violating Ukraine’s “national sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.” Obama declared, “There is a strong belief that Russia’s action is violating international law.”
..
On the other hand, notwithstanding all the talk about international law, national sovereignty, and territorial integrity, America invades and bombs anywhere it sees fit, without any regard for such considerations. Where the United States can obtain international legal approval for its aggression, it does so, but otherwise the aggression takes place anyway.
..
The manual states, “[T]he authority to take actions under the law of war would be viewed as emanating from the State’s rights as a sovereign entity rather than from any particular instrument of international law.” In other words, the United States can freely ignore treaties and conventions and other “instruments of international law”—such as the Geneva Convention of 1949, which the United States announced in 2002 that it would not follow—while still claiming to adhere to its own version of international law.
..
At the Nuremberg trials, Jackson characterized the Nazi regime as essentially a monstrous criminal enterprise, a giant illegal conspiracy that invoked “law” only in the most tendentious, cynical and self-serving manner. The defendants, Jackson declared, “are surprised that there is any such thing as law. These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law… International Law, natural law, German law, any law at all, was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do.” These words apply with full force to the Pentagon and its manual.
..
The manual explicitly gives the Pentagon a green light at any future time to repudiate the principles it ostensibly lays down. Its authors write that the document does not “preclude the Department from subsequently changing its interpretation of the law.” (P. 1)

Footnotes:
[1]: See http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/jack44.asp.
To be continued

 

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Obama U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has quietly issued its important Law of War Manual, and, unlike its predecessor, the 1956 U.S. Army Field Manual, which was not designed to approve of the worst practices by both the United States and its enemies in World War II, or after 9/11, this new document has been alleged specifically to do just that: to allow such attacks as the United States did on Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and in Iraq, and elsewhere. 

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Eric Zuesse

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First here will be a summary of previous news reports about this historically important document; then, extensive quotations from the actual document itself will be provided, relating to the allegations in those previous news reports. Finally will be conclusions regarding whether, or the extent to which, those earlier news reports about it were true.

EARLIER REPORTS ABOUT THE MANUAL:

The document was first reported by DoD in a curt press release on June 12th, with a short-lived link to the source-document, and headlined, “DoD Announces New Law of War Manual.” This press release was published and discussed only in a few military newsmedia, not in the general press.

The document was then anonymously reported on June 25th, at the non-military site, 

http://respect-discussion.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-usa-writes-their-own-version-of.html, 

under the headline, “The USA writes their own version of ‘International Law’: Pentagon Rewrites ‘Law of War’ Declaring ‘Belligerent’ Journalists as Legitimate Targets.”

That news article attracted some attention from journalists, but no link was provided to the actual document, which the U.S. DoD removed promptly after issuing it.

A professor of journalism was quoted there as being opposed to the document’s allegedly allowing America’s embedded war journalists to kill the other side’s journalists. He said: “It gives them license to attack or even murder journalists that they don’t particularly like but aren’t on the other side.” 

Patrick Martin at the World Socialist Web Site, then headlined on August 11th, “Pentagon manual justifies war crimes and press censorship,” and he reported that the Committee to Protect Journalists was obsessed with the document’s implications regarding journalists. A link was provided to the document, but the link is dead.

Then, Sherwood Ross headlined at opednews on August 13th, “Boyle: New Pentagon War Manual Reduces Us to ‘Level of Nazis’,” and he interviewed the famous expert on international law, Francis Boyle, about it, who had read the report. Ross opened: “The Pentagon’s new Law of War Manual(LOWM) sanctioning nuclear attacks and the killing of civilians, ‘reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War,’ says international law authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.” Ross continued: “Boyle points out the new manual is designed to supplant the 1956 U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 written by Richard Baxter, the world’s leading authority on the Laws of War. Baxter was the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Judge on the International Court of Justice. Boyle was his top student.”

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The Pentagon’s new Law of War Manual(LOWM) sanctioning nuclear attacks and the killing of civilians, ‘reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War”

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Ross did not link to the actual document. The only new information he provided about it consisted of Boyle’s opinions about it.

Though the DoD removed the document, someone had fortunately already copied it into the Web Archive, and I have linked to it there, at the top of the present article, to make the source-document easily accessible to the general public. The document is 1,204 pages. So, finally, the general public can see the document and make their own judgments about it. What follows will concern specifically the claims about it that were made in those prior news articles, and will compare those claims with the relevant actual statements in the document itself. Reading what the document says is worthwhile, because its predecessor, the Army Field Manual, became central in the news coverage about torture and other Bush Administration war-crimes.

THE DOCUMENT:

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]irst of all, regarding “journalists,” the document, in Chapter 4, says: “4.24.2 Journalists and other media representatives are regarded as civilians;471 i.e., journalism does not constitute taking a direct part in hostilities such that such a person would be deprived of protection from being made the object of attack.472.” Consequently, the journalism professor’s remark is dubious, at best, but probably can be considered to be outright false.

The charge by the international lawyer, Professor Boyle, is a different matter altogether.

This document says, in Chapter 5: “5.3.1 Responsibility of the Party Controlling Civilian 5.3.1 Persons and Objects. The party controlling civilians and civilian objects has the primary responsibility for the protection of civilians and civilian objects.13[13 See  J. Fred Buzhardt, DoD General Counsel, Letter to Senator Edward Kennedy, Sept. 22, 1972. …] The party controlling the civilian population generally has the greater opportunity to minimize risk to civilians.14[14  FINAL  REPORT ON  THE PERSIAN  GULF  WAR  614. …] Civilians also may share in the responsibility to take precautions for their own protection.15[15 U.S. Comments on the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Memorandum on the Applicability of International Humanitarian Law in the Gulf Region, Jan. 11, 1991. …]” This is directly counter to what Professor Boyle was alleged to have charged about the document.

The document continues: “5.3.2 Essentially Negative Duties to Respect Civilians and to Refrain From Directing Military Operations Against Them. In general, military operations must not be directed against enemy civilians.16 In particular:

• Civilians must not be made the object of attack;17

• Military objectives may not be attacked when the expected incidental loss of life and injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained;18

• Civilians must not be used as shields or as hostages;19 and

• Measures of intimidation or terrorism against the civilian population are prohibited, including acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population.20″

Furthermore: “5.3.3 Affirmative Duties to Take Feasible Precautions for the Protection of Civilians and Other Protected Persons and Objects. Parties to a conflict must take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to the civilian population and other protected persons and objects.27 Feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian objects must be taken when planning and conducting attacks.28”

Moreover: “5.5.2 Parties to a conflict must conduct attacks in accordance with the principles of distinction and proportionality. In particular, the following rules must be observed:

• Combatants may make military objectives the object of attack, but may not direct attacks against civilians, civilian objects, or other protected persons and objects.66

• Combatants must refrain from attacks in which the expected loss of life or injury to civilians, and damage to civilian objects incidental to the attack, would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.67

• Combatants must take feasible precautions in conducting attacks to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and other protected persons and objects.68

• In conducting attacks, combatants must assess in good faith the information that is available to them.69

• Combatants may not kill or wound the enemy by resort to perfidy.70

• Specific rules apply to the use of certain types of weapons.71”

In addition: “5.5.3.2 AP I Presumptions in Favor of Civilian Status in Conducting Attacks. In the context of conducting attacks, certain provisions of AP I reflect a presumption in favor of civilian status in cases of doubt. Article 52(3) of AP I provides that ‘[i]n case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military actions, it shall be presumed not to be so used.’76 Article 50(1) of AP I provides that ‘[i]n case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.’”

Then, there is this: “5.15 UNDEFENDED CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES. Attack, by whatever means, of a village, town, or city that is undefended is prohibited.360 Undefended villages, towns, or cities may, however, be captured.”

Furthermore: “5.17 SEIZURE AND DESTRUCTION OF ENEMY PROPERTY. Outside the context of attacks, certain rules apply to the seizure and destruction of enemy property:

• Enemy property may not be seized or destroyed unless imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.”

These features too are not in accord with the phrase ‘reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War.’

However, then, there is also this in Chapter 6, under “6.5 Lawful Weapons”:

“6.5.1 Certain types of weapons, however, are subject to specific rules that apply to their use by the U.S. armed forces. These rules may reflect U.S. obligations under international law or national policy. These weapons include:

• mines, booby-traps, and other devices (except certain specific classes of prohibited mines, booby-traps, and other devices);38

• explosive ordnance.45

6.5.2 Other Examples of Lawful Weapons. In particular, aside from the rules prohibiting weapons calculated to cause superfluous injury and inherently indiscriminate weapons,46 there are no law of war rules specifically prohibiting or restricting the following types of weapons by the U.S. armed forces: …

• depleted uranium munitions;51”

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ines, cluster munitions, incendiary weapons, herbicides, nuclear weapons, and depleted uranium munitions, are all almost uncontrollably violative of the restrictions that were set forth in Chapter 5, preceding.

There are also passages like this:

“6.5.4.4 Expanding Bullets. The law of war does not prohibit the use of bullets that expand or flatten easily in the human body. Like other weapons, such bullets are only prohibited if they are calculated to cause superfluous injury.74 The U.S. armed forces have used expanding bullets in various counterterrorism and hostage rescue operations, some of which have been conducted in the context of armed conflict.

The 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets prohibits the use of expanding bullets in armed conflicts in which all States that are parties to the conflict are also Party to the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets.75 The United States is not a Party to the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets, in part because evidence was not presented at the diplomatic conference that expanding bullets produced unnecessarily severe or cruel wounds.76”

The United States still has not gone as far as the 1899 Declaration on Expanding Bullets. The U.S. presumption is instead that expanding bullets have not “produced unnecessarily severe or cruel wounds.” This is like George W. Bush saying that waterboarding, etc., aren’t “torture.” The document goes on to explain that, “expanding bullets are widely used by law enforcement agencies today, which also supports the conclusion that States do not regard such bullets are inherently inhumane or needlessly cruel.81” And, of course, the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court do not think that the death penalty is either “cruel” or “unusual” punishment. Perhaps Obama is a closeted Republican himself.

The use of depleted uranium was justified by an American Ambassador’s statement asserting that, “The environmental and long-term health effects of the use of depleted uranium munitions have been thoroughly investigated by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environmental Program, the International Atomic Energy Agency, NATO, the Centres for Disease Control, the European Commission, and others. None of these inquiries has documented long-term environmental or health effects attributable to use of these munitions.”

However, according to Al Jazeera’s Dahr Jamail, on 15 March 2013: “Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing. As shocking as these statistics are, due to a lack of adequate documentation, research, and reporting of cases, the actual rate of cancer and other diseases is likely to be much higher than even these figures suggest.” If those figures are accurate, then the reasonable presumption would be that depleted uranium should have been banned long ago. Continuing to assert that it’s not as dangerous a material as people think it is, seems likely to be based on cover-up, rather than on science. Until there is proof that it’s not that toxic, the presumption should be that it must be outlawed.

Finally, though the press reports on this document have not generally focused on the issue of torture, it’s worth pointing out what the document does say, about that:

“5.26.2 Information Gathering. The employment of measures necessary for obtaining information about the enemy and their country is considered permissible.727

Information gathering measures, however, may not violate specific law of war rules.728

For example, it would be unlawful, of course, to use torture or abuse to interrogate detainees for purposes of gathering information.”

And: “9.8.1 Humane Treatment During Interrogation. Interrogation must be carried out in a manner consistent with the requirements for humane treatment, including the prohibition against acts of violence or intimidation, and insults.153

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on POWs to secure from them information of any kind whatever.154 POWs who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.155

Prohibited means include imposing inhumane conditions,156 denial of medical treatment, or the use of mind-altering chemicals.157”

Those provisions would eliminate George W. Bush’s ‘justification’ for the use of tortures such as waterboarding, and humiliation. 

Furthermore: “8.2.1 Protection Against Violence, Torture, and Cruel Treatment. Detainees must be protected against violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and any form of corporal punishment.29”  

Therefore, even if Bush’s approved forms of torture were otherwise allowable under Obama’s new legal regime, some of those forms, such as waterboarding, and even “insults,” would be excluded by this provision.

Moreover: “8.2.4 Threats to Commit Inhumane Treatment. Threats to commit the unlawful acts described above (i.e., violence against detainees, or humiliating or degrading treatment, or biological or medical experiments) are also prohibited.37”

And: “8.14.4.1 U.S. Policy Prohibiting Transfers in Cases in Which Detainees Would Likely Be Tortured. U.S. policy provides that no person shall be transferred to another State if it is more likely than not that the person would be tortured in the receiving country.”

Therefore, specifically as regards torture, the Obama system emphatically and clearly excludes what the Bush interpretation of the U.S. Army Field Manual  allowed.

CONCLUSIONS:

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat seems undeniable about the Law of War Manual, is that there are self-contradictions within it. To assert that it “reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War,” is going too far. But, to say that it’s hypocritical (except, perhaps, on torture, where it’s clearly a repudiation of GWB’s practices), seems safely true.

This being so, Obama’s Law of War Manual  should ultimately be judged by Obama’s actions as the U.S. Commander in Chief, and not merely by the document’s words. Actions speak truer than words, even if they don’t speak louder than words (and plenty of people still think that Obama isn’t a Republican in ‘Democratic’ verbal garb: they’re not tone-deaf, but they surely are action-deaf; lots of people judge by words not actions). For example: it was Obama himself who arranged the bloody coup in Ukraine and the resulting necessary ethnic cleansing there in order to exterminate or else drive out the residents in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90+% for the Ukrainian President whom Obama’s people (via their Ukrainian agents) had overthrown. Cluster bombs, firebombs, and other such munitions have been used by their stooges for this purpose, that ethnic cleansing: against the residents there. Obama has spoken publicly many times defending what they are doing, but using euphemisms to refer to it. He is certainly behind the coup and its follow-through in the ethnic cleansing, and none of it would be happening if he did not approve of it. Judging the mere words of Obama’s Law of War Manual  by Obama’s actions (such as in Ukraine, but also Syria, and Libya) is judging it by how he actually interprets it, and this technique of interpreting the document provides the answer to the document’s real meaning. It answers the question whenever there are contradictions within the document (as there indeed are).

Consequently, what Francis Boyle was reported to have said is, in the final analysis, true, at least in practical terms — which is all that really counts — except on torture, where his allegation is simply false.

Obama’s intent, like that of anyone, must be drawn from his actions, his decisons, not from his words, whenever the words and the actions don’t jibe, don’t match. When his Administration produced its Law of War Manual, it should be interpreted to mean what his Administration has done and is doing, not by its words, wherever there is a contradiction between those two.

This also means that no matter how much one reads the document itself, some of what one is reading is deception if it’s not being interpreted by, and in the light of, an even more careful reading of Obama’s relevant actions regarding the matters to which the document pertains.

Otherwise, the document is being read in a way that confuses its policy statements with its propaganda statements.

Parts of the document are propaganda. The purpose isn’t to fool the public, who won’t read the document (and Obama apparently doesn’t want them to). The purpose of the propaganda is to enable future presidents to say, “But if you will look at this part of the Manual, you will see that what we are doing is perfectly legal.” Those mutually contradictory passages are there in order to provide answers which will satisfy both  the ‘hawks’ and  the ‘doves.’

Investigative historian They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

…

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD,  HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO.  EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS. 

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