Two more retired US generals called overnight on Donald Rumsfeld to resign as US defence secretary, adding to a deepening rift within the Pentagon.

Six generals – two of whom commanded troops in Iraq – have now called on Mr Rumsfeld to stand down over his leadership of the war.

Retired Major General John Riggs told National Public Radio that Mr Rumsfeld had helped create an atmosphere of “arrogance” among the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. “They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that’s a mistake, and that’s why I think he should resign,” he said.
(Source: The Guardian)

Awwww, poor wittle Rummy! Everyone’s against him! Neocons, lefties, 72% of US troops serving in Iraq. Well, not quite everyone. Bush has, obviously, already issued a defence of his embattled defence secretary.

Typically, these statements by generals haven’t got the coverage they deserve on the mass media. For generals to criticise government officials while a war is still being waged is an enormously unusual situation. These kind of attacks on policy are normally saved for weighty memoirs published decades after the cessation of hostilities.

It’s yet another example of how the America’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq is creating huge fallout back at home. The cracks are beginning to appear in the US ruling classes and cant is being replaced with accusations and blame-dodging.

Six generals. Six.

Those are six pillars of the US military. You don’t get to be an American general by being a tree-hugging Commie, after all. That these military leaders have chosen to lambast US foreign policy proves that the neocon whitewashing of the Iraq crusade is failing drastically. It’s also a pretty sharp warning that the PNAC‘s wet dream of everlasting war may not be shared by the US military.

How will the American right criticise these generals, how will they trivialise their concerns and attack their characters?

How can you wage war when your own generals turn on you?

An RAF doctor who refused to serve in Iraq has been sentenced to eight months in jail and dismissed from the service.

Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, 37, was found guilty of five charges of disobeying orders after he refused to go to Basra last June.

He claimed his actions were justified as the UK involvement was illegal.
(Source: BBC News)

Kendall-Smith has already served twice in Iraq. What would make this officer risk his entire career, his reputation and his freedom? Here’s Kendall-Smith’s own words:

“I have evidence that the Americans were on a par with Nazi Germany with its actions in the Persian Gulf. I have documents in my possession which support my assertions,” he told the court. “This is on the basis that on-going acts of aggression in Iraq and systematically applied war crimes provide a moral equivalent between the US and Nazi Germany.”

Kendall-Smith told the court that he considered the war in Iraq to be the equivalent of an “imperial invasion and occupation”. He said he was extremely disturbed by America’s “imperial campaign of military conquest”, which was in direct conflict with his duties.

He added: “It struck me as incongruous and disturbing that the US air force published the phrase ‘global power for America’ on their documentation during the conflict. I found that the phrase ‘global power for America’ was imperial.”
(Source: The Guardian)

This evidence he speaks of isn’t some paranoid lefty fantasy: it’s the many reports of torture and murder carried out by US forces. It’s the photographs of grinning soldiers next to Iraqi prisoners they’ve beaten to death. It’s TV footage of US soldiers shooting unarmed, injured Iraqis dead.

From torture prisons like Abu Ghraib to the installation of a puppet government, the US invasion of Iraq seems to have been copied from the Nazi occupation of France and other countries. Similarly, the Nazi’s justified their actions by saying they were pre-emptively attacking a danger to their nation. And that they were “liberating” those peoples. The Nazi’s also had their own troublesome “insurgents” – we call them the French Resistance.

Kendall-Smith has been publically villified by the judge presiding over this trial. His honour has been trashed and at the very least he will never serve in the RAF again (he’s appealing against the jail term). And yet, this man is a soldier who should be the model for every soldier in the world. He’s refusing to follow orders which he believes to be illegal. We’ve been all through this before:

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.

Before the end of World War II, the Allies suspected such a defense might be employed, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which specifically stated that this was not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.
(Source: Wikipedia)

A soldier must remain a human being. When they become robots, that’s when the atrocities are committed. Millions of people died in concentration camps because soldiers followed orders without ever questioning them.

That Kendall-Smith is being punished for refusing to take part in a barbaric, illegal occupation based on false grounds is astounding. This is a solider that deserves a medal, not a jail sentence.

The Bush administration has sent undercover forces into Iran, and has stepped up secret planning for a possible major air attack on the country, according to the renowned US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

One former senior intelligence official is quoted as saying that Mr Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a potential “Adolf Hitler”. According to a senior Pentagon adviser on the “war on terror”, “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war”. The danger, he adds, is that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability”.
(Source: The Independent)

In case you’re wondering about Seymour Hersh’s credentials:

Seymour Myron (Sy) Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and author based in New York City. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker on military and security matters. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US Military’s treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.
(Source: Wikipedia)

In my far less qualified opinion, I also believe that the US is building towards attacking Iran. It’s stated reasons for doing so are as false as the reasons it gave for its attack on Iraq. As I write this, the same gang of corrupt supporters of murder are starting their media campaign against Iran. They are the paid mouthpieces for the PNAC cabal, they will be selling the lie of why America must invade Iran to the world. The real reasons remain the same: oil and power.

What we have to decide as free citizens is what we’re going to do about it. As Britons, we have the freedom to protest, to stop our government once again playing sidekick to Bush’s slaughter. These aren’t freedoms granted to us by kings or Parliaments, these are freedoms we’ve won for ourselves, over centuries of struggle, against our ruling classes.

And now Butcher Blair is removing our right to protest. The anti-terrorism laws aren’t being used to fight terrorists, they’re being used to harrass pensioners and silence political opponents.

So, I believe you have to scream now. You have to fight and shout and march and sing and type and do everything possible to Stop The War.

Because if you don’t, you might never have the chance to open your mouth again.

A British cameraman shot dead in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli soldier was murdered, an inquest jury has decided.

James Miller, 34, from Devon, was shot by a soldier from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) while making a film in a Palestinian refugee camp in 2003.

An Israeli investigation in April 2005 cleared a soldier of misusing firearms.
(Source: BBC News)

So, yet again, we have a slight difference of opinion here. The IDF and Israeli Defence Force claim there was no misuse of firearms. Whereas a British jury says it was murder.

The mindset of a murderer is a totally illogical zone. A suicide bomber can calmly board an Israeli bus, sit down next to innocent travellers and then murder them. In their insane, deranged minds, this is somehow justifiable. Similarly, the IDF can shoot innocent Palestinians, bulldoze peace protestors to death and murder journalists without even a flicker of remorse. Opposing sides, identical lunatic, Nazi mindsets.

Of course, the average suicide bomber or Israeli soldier is a mere beginner at murder compared to grand masters like Saddam Hussein or Tony Blair. These men are monsters, smiling and justifying their slaughter of innocents with the kind of arrogant imperiousness that only the criminally insane can muster. Strange that only one of them is on trial for war crimes.

The jury spokeswoman added: “It is a fact that from day one of this inquest the Israeli authorities have not been forthcoming in the investigation into the circumstances surrounding Mr Miller’s death.”

[Metropolitan Police Det Insp] Mr Anderson said: “Israel has been uncooperative with the Metropolitan Police in that they haven’t allowed us access to interview soldiers and witnesses.”
(Source: BBC News)

James Miller is dead, murdered by an IDF soldier, a force that, ironically, every day more closely resembles Sturmabteilung. Dissenters are silenced and “all opposition is stamped into the ground.” A world turned upside down?