Cluster bombs – used in our war crimes against Iraq

In the early hours, two days before the attack on Iraq began, two men in their 30s, Phil Pritchard and Toby Olditch, cut through the fence surrounding the air base at Fairford in Gloucestershire and made their way towards the B52 bombers which were stationed there. The planes belonged to the US air force. The trespassers were caught by guards and found to be carrying tools and paint. They confessed that they were seeking to disable the planes, in order to prevent war crimes from being committed. This year they were tried on charges of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Last week, after long deliberations, the jury failed to reach a verdict.
(Source: The Guardian)

Here’s a simple scenario:

You see a man about to shoot a child dead. So, without harming that man in any way, you seize his gun off him and stamp it into pieces. You’ve saved the child’s life simply by damaging someone’s property.

Have you committed a crime?

If you’re saying “no,” then should your answer be any different simply because the man happens to be a soldier? Why should the state, through its armies, navies and air forces, have any more right to carry out murder than an individual?

In summing up, the judge told the jurors that using weapons “with an adverse effect on civilian populations which is disproportionate to the need to achieve the military objective” is a war crime.
(Source: The Guardian)

Please read Monbiot’s full article, linked above. It seems that juries and judges are thinking morally – whatever will Butcher Blair and his government of murderers and liars do about that?

A group of ethnic Tibetans trying to flee Tibet were shot dead by Chinese troops on September 30, at a Himalayan pass near the border of China and Nepal (Tibet is an “autonomous region” of China, having been taken over by the PRC in the 1950s). Reports are emerging that Communist party officials have attempted to silence witnesses, including Western trekkers who were in the area when the killing occurred
(Source: BoingBoing)

Yet more murder from the PRC military. And the same pattern of lying and cover-ups to hide the truth of their slaughter. I find it horrifying that I now take government denials of murder for granted. Whether it’s the US, UK or the Chinese, there’s the same callous dis-regard for human life, the same arrogance and intransigence.

Can there be any such thing as a just and noble government?

As the US rejected fresh British government criticism of Guantanamo Bay, an American soldier has made new charges that military guards brutally treated inmates at the controversial top security prison for terrorist suspects in south-eastern Cuba.

In a sworn affidavit, Heather Cerveny, a 23-year-old Marine Corps sergeant, says she met several prison guards at a club on the base where they told her over drinks of harsh abuse of detainees, she said the guards claimed the abuse was both commonplace and justified.
(Source: The Independent)

Remember, none of the “prisoners” in Guantanamo have ever been charged with anything. They’ve had no trial, no representation. And some of them are children as young as 14. They’ve been kidnapped by US forces and held illegally, some for over four years.

Please click here for Amnesty International’s report on Guantanamo.

I won’t quote the tortures carried out on these innocent people, they’ll all in the article linked at the top of this post. It makes me feel too ill to quote them on here.

But I would ask you this: how is it that this illegal imprisonment and torture camp has now been in business for half a decade? Why do the “civilised” governments of the world do nothing?

And when did the US legal system move from “innocent until proven guilty” to “guilty until proven innocent?”

Whether it’s modern China or North Korea, the old Soviet Union or modern America, we cannot allow governments to kidnap and torture people as and when they feel like it.

Who’s next? You?

THE family of a British journalist [Terry Lloyd] gunned down in Iraq called for the United States marines who opened fire on his convoy to face murder charges, and branded them “trigger-happy cowboys”.

He was shot in the back by an Iraqi machinegun then, as he was evacuated in a makeshift ambulance, shot again in the head by American forces.

His Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman was later found dead and buried, while French cameraman Fred Nerac is still officially missing.

Yesterday Mr Lloyd’s family condemned the Americans who fired on the team as “trigger-happy cowboys” who committed a “despicable, deliberate and vengeful act”.
(Source: Scotsman.com)

When I heard the news about Lloyd, I was stunned. I’ve grown up watching his steady, calm reports. He’s as familiar to me as Walter Cronkite would be to an American.

At first, I thought it must be a friendly fire incident, a horrible tragedy but one of the dangers of being a war correspondent.

But the truth is much darker:

American troops then started firing at both the clearly marked television vehicles driven by the ITN team. Lloyd was killed outright when he was hit in the head by an American bullet as he was being taken for medical treatment by an Iraqi civilian. “I am sure it was the intention of those who opened fire to kill or cause serious injury to those inside the minibus,” Mr Walker said.

“I have no doubt it was the fact that the vehicle stopped to pick up survivors that prompted the Americans to fire at the vehicle.”
(Source: The Independent)

The US troops were deliberately targeting the vehicle precisely because it was being used as an ambulance. Maybe the fact the vehicle was marked clearly that made it a target: all throughout the illegal invasion of Iraq, the US military has frequently murdered journalists not attached to US units.

I doubt we’ll ever learn the truth since the US government and military don’t care what their troops do. They can murder journalists, shoot injured civilians on video, torture prisoners to death and that’s all hunky dory. They and their followers have a Nazi mindset: only the lives of Americans matter. Everyone else is a subhuman and has no rights. As for any investigation:

The Royal Military Police (RMP) carried out an investigation into the incident. Major Kay Roberts, an RMP investigator, testified at the inquest on Terry Lloyd that a videotape of the incident, taken by a cameraman attached to the US unit that killed Terry Lloyd, had been edited before it had been passed on to the British investigation. The RMP forensics expert who examined the tape concluded that about 15 minutes had been removed from the start of the recording. Roberts testified at the inquest that she was sent the tape “many months” after the incident[4] and that the she was told by the US authorities that the footage they handed over was “everything that they had”.
(Source: Wikipedia)

That’s the US army way – if the evidence is damning, just tamper with it. And then have your own whitewash which gives you the result you want:

A US Defence Department spokesman said: “An investigation into the circumstances surrounding the incident was completed in May 2003.

“The investigation determined that US forces followed the applicable rules of engagement.”
(Source: Scotsman.com)

I’ll leave the final words to Terry Lloyd’s widow:

Lloyd’s widow, Lynn, said: “This was not a friendly fire incident or a crossfire incident, it was a despicable, deliberate, vengeful act, particularly as it came many minutes after the initial exchange.”
(Source: The Independent)

“We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear.

“As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren’t invited certainly by those in Iraq at the time.”

He added: “Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance.”

“I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.”
(Source: BBC News)

Who said the above? A “bleeding-heart liberal,” which is neocon speak for anyone who doesn’t share their neo-Nazi agenda? A hippy? Filthy, unwashed anarcho-veggie peacenik?

Nope.

The above opinion is that of Sir Richard Dannatt, the current head of the British Army.

Every time someone on the left calls for our forces to be withdrawn from Iraq, they’re derided by the Blairite junta as being unrealistic and unfamiliar with the realities of military occupations. Naive dreamers, that’s how we’re portrayed.

Does that also apply to the head of the British Army? Is he unaware of the military realities?

I can’t wait to see how the Blair government rubbishes Dannatt’s attack tomorrow, much as Bush rubbished the the death count of his mass-murder.

How will they spin this? They can’t, after all, call Dannatt an embittered old general like they have previous military critics – he’s the serving head.

Perhaps they’ll say he’s clinically insane. Or smells. Or perhaps they’ll point at a dog on a skateboard, that’s generally enough to distract the British mass media nowadays.

Every day, the news from Iraq is more and more conclusively damning of Bush and Blair’s illegal invasion. And everyday, the warmongers who ordered the slaughter bend into ever more ridiculous shapes, trying to convince us that black is white. What will they make of the following:

BBC political editor Nick Robinson described Sir Richard’s remarks as “quite extraordinary”.

He said the new head of British army was “effectively saying we are making the situation worse in Iraq and worse for ourselves around the world by being in Iraq”.

The comments “directly contradicted so much of what the government had said”, our correspondent added.
(Source: BBC News)

Spin that, you murderers.