I'm thinking of getting into the gas chamber biz. I reckon this industry has some real potential right now. if we get in early we can pinch Haliburton at a squeeze. 

The share float will take place very soon although consult your product disclosure statement before making any final decision.

Hello fellow activists, readers, friends, family & antagonists.  

 

I hope this email finds you well.  

 

As a Missourian transplanted to Kansas, I am writing to you from the "heart" of the American Empire. Our "glorious" Empire has long been governed by an odd and perverse conglomeration of the wealthy elite, monolithic corporations, Christian extremists, extremely well funded lobbyists and pro-Israeli forces.  

 

This coalition operates under the guise of a constitutional republic while maintaining its hold on power through consistently utilizing its wealth and influence to place its people on the ballots on both sides of the corrupt Republican/Democrat Duopoly.  

 

Those of us with a social conscience who bother to vote are almost always faced with selecting the lesser of two evils.  

 

Our rulers are the scourge of humanity, yet they trumpet the virtue of their "democracy" and "free market economy". Over the years, they have slaughtered millions of innocent civilians around the globe (see
http://www.thirdworldtravelercom/), robbed from the poor and given to the rich (see http://www.monthlyreview.org/0305yates.htm), recruited our sons and daughters to suffer or die in wars for profit against woefully weak nations which could not begin to truly threaten the domestic US (because it has been heavily shielded by our ridiculously colossal military), raped and plundered the environment, and allowed 13% of the citizenry in the world's wealthiest nation to suffer poverty. 

 

Preying on fear spawned by a national tragedy (9/11), the Bush regime has manoeuvred itself into position to shred the Constitution and to crush human rights (consider the Patriot Act, the Supreme Court-sanctioned theft of the presidency in 2000, Jose Padilla, Abu Gharib, the illegal occupation of Iraq, the erosion of Posse comitatus, large-scale corporate deregulation, and Guantanamo Bay).  

 

If we allow it to happen, the Empire will impose its cruel, avaricious agenda upon its own people through ending federal support of social programs, granting virtual free rein to corporations, establishing a state religion, abolishing the Bill of Rights, and imposing martial law. Katrina provided us a brief glimpse of their vision of the future.  

 

I recently read an essay by Albert Camus that had a profound effect upon me. I have been reflecting upon it deeply.  Here is an excerpt, which poignantly portrays a choice each human being makes, consciously or unconsciously:  

 

"All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honourable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions."  

 

Albert Camus - NEITHER VICTIMS NOR EXECUTIONERS (1946)  

 

AND, in a similar vein, I have been contemplating this:  

 

“Jihadist" or "insurgent" "non-state terrorists" have killed about 5,000 Western civilians over the last 20 years (mostly on 9/11, according to the US Administration).  

 

However the US "state terrorist" response has so far been disproportionately associated with post-invasion avoidable (excess) mortality and under-5 infant mortality in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories that now total 2.1 million and 1.7 million, respectively. Anglo-American-dominated mainstream media utterly IGNORE the huge reality of state terrorism, notably US state terrorism.

"And henceforth, the only honourable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions..."

Our main trouble at the moment is that our deceptive leaders have cleverly managed the neat trick of merging words with ammunitions.

Either way we turn, our lexicon of altruism has been hijacked by the peddlers of moralisationing and greed while they hold the guns in their hands, and smirk at our dismay...

The only escape route for the humanists, if this is what we are, is to hide or take arms, the latter being against our nature and not in our favour. Thus we are snookered.

We are snookered by our own sense of responsibility, of justice and of fair play in the face of their enormous deceptive cheating... and the bastards in control know that.

Unfortunately, we are in for more trouble ahead, unless from its smoldering ashes, the Labor party finds a messiah with balls to stand up to the trickery of Johnnee and starts to reject EVERYTHING he does. Labor nearly had one, but the fellow only had one ball...

As citizens with conscience, we have no other present choice but to keep plugging at blogging our views, hopping someone with a benevolent psychopathic powerful trait might come along and pull the plug on all those Johnnee's-Bush-Blair nonsense... Then we will be able to slowly rebuilt a path of enlightened sharing in truth — a truth necessarily fighting an average deception, not a distraught truth that has to unfairly fight this present gigantic trickery that can only get worse and worse if nothing is done to stop it...

‘With repeated use of violence more massive than any other entity on the planet can dream of mustering, Uncle Sam is the globe's dominant serial killer.  

 

This reality, so obvious to most of the world, is hidden in plain sight across the US corporate media spectrum. 

 

The United States is the United States. And that's the ultimate continuity between the Vietnam War and the US war effort in Iraq today.’ 

 

Iraq Is Not Vietnam. But ...

‘A Royal Air Force officer is about to be tried before a military court for refusing to return to Iraq because the war is illegal. Malcolm Kendall-Smith is the first British officer to face criminal charges for challenging the legality of the invasion and occupation. He is not a conscientious objector; he has completed two tours in Iraq. When he came home the last time, he studied the reasons given for attacking Iraq and concluded he was breaking the law. His position is supported by international lawyers all over the world, not least by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who said in September last year: "The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN Charter."  

 

The question of legality deeply concerns the British military brass, who sought Tony Blair's assurance on the eve of the invasion, got it and, as they now know, were lied to. They are right to worry; Britain is a signatory to the treaty that set up the International Criminal Court, which draws its codes from the Geneva Conventions and the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. The latter is clear: "To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."’ 

 

The Epic Crime That Dares Not Speak Its Name

‘The secret CIA prisons are just one link in the long chain of abominations that the Bush administration has unrolled in its so-called fight against terrorism. Rendition, the outsourcing of torture to places like Egypt, Jordan and Syria, is another. And then there are the thousands upon thousands of detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. There is little, if any, legal oversight of these detainees, or effective monitoring of the conditions in which they are being held.

 

Terrible instances of torture and other forms of abuse of detainees have come to light. The Pentagon has listed the deaths of at least 27 prisoners in American custody as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides.’ 

 

Secrets and Shame

‘Last week, a legal thunderbolt struck at the heart of the grubby conspiracy that led the United States and Britain into an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. But this searing blow didn't fall in Washington, where a media frenzy raged over a White House indictment, but in southern England, in a military courtroom, where a lone soldier stood against the full force of the great war-crime enterprise, armed only with a single, rusty, obsolete weapon: the law. 

 

While Potomac courtiers were reading the entrails of the cooked goose of Scooter Libby - the first Bushist honcho caught in the slow-grinding gears of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation – in Wiltshire, Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith faced a court martial after declaring that the Iraq war was illegal and refusing to return for his third tour of duty there, The Guardian reports. 

 

He has been charged with four counts of "disobeying a lawful command." But Kendall-Smith, a decorated medical officer in the Royal Air Force, says that his study of the recently revealed evidence about the lies, distortions and manipulations used to justify the invasion has convinced him that both the war and the occupation are "manifestly illegal." Thus any order arising from this criminal action is itself an "unlawful command," The Sunday Times reports. In fact, the RAF's own manual of law compels him to refuse such illegal orders, Kendall-Smith insists. 

 

The flight lieutenant is no ordinary war protester, and no shirker of combat - unlike, say, the pair of prissy cowards at the head of the US-British "coalition." Kendall Smith, who has dual New Zealand-British citizenship - and a pair of university degrees in medicine and Kantian moral philosophy - has served three tours at the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not claiming any conscientious objections against war in general, nor do religious scruples play any part in his stance. It is based solely on the law. 

 

Central to his case are the sinister backroom legal dealings between London and Washington in the days before the invasion. Less than two weeks before the initial "shock and awe" bombings began slaughtering civilians across Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, gave Prime Minister Tony Blair a detailed briefing full of doubts and equivocations about the legality of the coming war, adding that Britain's participation in an attack unsanctioned by the United Nations would "likely" lead to "close scrutiny" by the International Criminal Court for potential war crimes charges, The Observer reports. 

 

But Blair and Goldsmith withheld this report from Parliament, the Cabinet and British military brass, who were demanding a clear-cut legal sanction for the impending action. Then, just three days before the bloodletting began, Goldsmith suddenly produced another paper, this time for public consumption: a brief, clear, unequivocal statement that the invasion would be legal. This statement was almost certainly crafted in Washington, where Goldsmith had recently been "tutored" by the Bush gang's consiglieres, including the legal advisers to Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. 

 

Leading this pack of war-baying legal beagles was George W. Bush's top counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who had overseen the White House's own efforts to weasel out of potential war crimes charges by declaring - without any basis in Anglo-American jurisprudence or the U.S. Constitution – that Bush was not bound by any law whatsoever in any military action he undertook: a blank check for aggression, murder and torture that Bush has gleefully cashed over and over. Alberto and the boys leaned hard on Goldsmith, who finally caved in and replicated the Americans' contorted and specious legal arguments for launching the attack. 

 

Of course, Kendall-Smith knew none of this during his first two tours in Iraq: Goldsmith's Bush-induced backflip was only divulged in April 2005. Nor did he know then of the "Downing Street Memos," the "smoking gun" minutes that record Blair's inner circle dutifully lining up behind Bush's hell-bent drive for war - as far back as 2002 - and their conspiracy with the Bush gang to manipulate their countries into war. 

 

The memos, which emerged in May 2005 and have never been denied or repudiated by the British government, show Blair's slavish acquiescence in Bush's criminal scheme to "fix the facts and the intelligence around the policy" of unprovoked military aggression. Confronted with this new evidence – and revelations about the mountain of doubts expressed by US intelligence before the invasion but deliberately ignored by the Bushist war party - Kendall-Smith took the only honorable course for a soldier who has been duped into serving an evil cause. 

 

The moral rigor of his defiance has sent tremors through the British military establishment, already shaken by the strange, unexplained shooting deaths of two military inspectors investigating atrocity allegations in Iraq, The Guardian reports. British brass are panicky about the Goldsmith revelations; indeed, the leader of the British invasion force, Admiral Michael Boyce, said that he now believed his country's military did not have "the legal cover necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes," The Observer reports. Boyce added that if he and his officers were eventually put on trial for waging aggressive war, he'd make sure that Blair and Goldsmith were in the dock beside them. 

 

Bush, Blair and their minions have committed a monstrous crime, and they know it - hence all the convolutions, before the war and after, to inoculate themselves from prosecution. But with Kendall-Smith and Fitzgerald, the long-moribund figure of the law is re-awakening. It's weak, it's bleary, it certainly might fail. But now the conspirators will have to live cowering in its shadow for the rest of their days.’

 

 

Chris Floyd  

 

November 3, 2005

 

‘MPs organising the campaign to impeach Tony Blair believe they have enough support to force a highly damaging Commons investigation into the Prime Minister’s pre-war conduct.  

 

A renewed attempt to impeach Blair over claims he misled parliament in making his case for war against Iraq, will be made in the Commons within the next two weeks.  

 

The impeachment process effectively stalled last year when just 23 MPs signed a Commons motion. But the scale of the government’s defeat on its anti-terror legislation last week – where 49 Labour MPs rebelled – has galvanised the momentum for proceedings to be invoked.  

 

Organisers say they are expecting 200 cross-party signatures, including those of former government ministers, to force the Commons to set up a Privy Council investigation that would examine in detail the case for impeachment against Blair.’  

 

Blair Faces New Inquiry Into Iraq War

 

 

 

 

For all those interested, here is the direct link to the petition page on Australian War Criminals:

 

http://australianwarcriminals.jitgede.com/scripts/JSDB11P_List.asp 

 

Please add your comments and signature.

 

Cheers.

‘But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC that white phosphorus "was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants". He claimed "it is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal." This denial has been accepted by most of the mainstream media. UN conventions, the Times said, "ban its use on civilian but not military targets". But the word "civilian" does not occur in the chemical weapons convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.  

 

The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people, rather than poisoning them, and is covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the US has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic. The gas it produces attacks the mucous membranes, the eyes and the lungs. As Peter Kaiser of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told the BBC last week: "If ... the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because ... any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons."  

 

The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence: "It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets."’ 

 

Behind The Phosphorus Clouds Are War Crimes Within War Crimes

From the New York Post

Battle Zone

By LARRY CELONA
and PERRY CHIARAMONTE

November 23, 2005 - A soldier just home from Iraq sprang into action yesterday when a busy Brooklyn street suddenly turned into a battlefield — and didn't even realize he'd been wounded as he worked to save two casualties of a gang shooting.

Louis Olander, 22, was in the right place at the wrong time when a violent dispute over turf broke out.

Gus speak:
And we’re trusting the future of mankind to the Yanks?

‘In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things.  

 

The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws.  

 

Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade.  

 

The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity.  

 

If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.’ 

 

The Turks Haven't Learned The British Way Of Denying Past Atrocities

‘The Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has called for Tony Blair to be tried for war crimes, in his acceptance speech to the Nobel committee.  

 

The 5,000-word speech excoriates the US government over Guantánamo Bay and its attempts to destabilise Nicaragua in the 1980s.  

 

But he saves his most savage comments for the UK, described as "pathetic and supine" and a "bleating little lamb" tagging along behind the US in its support for the Iraq war.  

 

"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," he said.  

 

"The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public ... a formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.  

 

"We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people, and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'."’ 

 

Pinter Demands War Crimes Trial For Blair

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a top war crimes suspect, has been arrested in Serbia, the office of Serbian President Boris Tadic says. 

Tadic's office said in a statement that Karadzic was arrested "in an action by the Serbian security services''. 

Karadzic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for genocide during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and had been hiding since 1998. 

Serbia has been under heavy pressure from the European Union to turn over suspects to the international tribunal. 

War Crimes Suspect Arrest 

Yes, well, at this rate, I don’t expect we’ll see any action against bushit, rumsfeld, “aussie tony” & our infamous missing rodent this side of 2020 …. who’ll remember I wonder?

A Spanish court has initiated criminal proceedings against six former officials of the Bush administration. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith may face charges in Spain for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay.

If arrest warrants are issued, Spain and any of the other 24 countries that are parties to European extradition conventions could arrest these six men when they travel abroad.

Does Spain have the authority to prosecute Americans for crimes that didn't take place on Spanish soil?

The answer is yes. It's called "universal jurisdiction." Universal jurisdiction is a well-established theory that countries, including the United States, have used for many years to investigate and prosecute foreign nationals for crimes that shock the conscience of the global community. It provides a critical legal tool to hold accountable those who commit crimes against the law of nations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Without universal jurisdiction, many of the most notorious criminals would go free.

Countries that have used this as a basis to prosecute the most serious of crimes should be commended for their courage. They help to create a just world in which we all seek to live.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/06/EDSG16SH3N.DTL