War Crimes: Goose and Gander

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his jail cell at The Hague Saturday. Since 2001, he had been on trial for genocide in Bosnia, and war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Although many have already adjudged him guilty, we will never hear the official verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

We will also never see a trial in the ICTY for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright or Wesley Clark for the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Nor will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld be prosecuted by an international tribunal for their war crimes in Iraq.

NATO's invasion of Yugoslavia was a war of aggression that violated the United Nations Charter. It was not undertaken in self-defense nor did it carry the approval of the Security Council. Between 1500 and 2000 civilians were killed and many thousands injured. When I visited Belgrade a year after the NATO bombing, I saw schools, hospitals, bridges, libraries and homes reduced to rubble. The ICTY statute prohibits the targeting of civilians. And even though it also forbids the use of poisonous weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering, NATO used depleted uranium and cluster bombs, whose devastating character is widely known. NATO also targeted a petrochemical complex, releasing carcinogens into the air that reached 10,600 times the acceptable safety level.

The American Association of Jurists and a group of Canadian lawyers and law professors filed a war crimes complaint against NATO leaders in the ICTY. Yet that tribunal conducted only a perfunctory investigation of the serious charges. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticized the ICTY for failing to thoroughly investigate.

By denouncing the International Criminal Court, Team Bush has ensured that US leaders will never be held to account for war crimes. Although virtually every Western democracy has ratified the statute under which the Court operates, the United States has thumbed its nose at this monumental international justice system.

Bush has reason to fear prosecution. He has used cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorous and napalm. And the torture of prisoners in US custody also constitutes a war crime. His war on Iraq is a war of aggression.

After the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing ... 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." Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal, labeled the crime of aggression "the greatest menace of our times."

For the first time, at Nuremberg, individuals were held criminally accountable for war crimes and waging a war of aggression. Japanese leaders were also tried for atrocities committed during World War II, in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

Yet US leaders who were responsible for some of the most heinous war crimes ever committed - the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and 66 other Japanese cities - were never brought to justice.

Only the vanquished Germans and Japanese were put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, dissenting at the Tokyo Tribunal, called this "victor's justice."

Indeed, Robert McNamara, who participated in the bombing of Japan during World War II, admitted in the film Fog of War that he and General Curtis LeMay would have been tried for war crimes if the US had lost the war. He said, "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He ... and I'd say I ... were behaving as war criminals."

It is no accident that the Iraqi Special Tribunal where Saddam Hussein is currently on trial only has jurisdiction over Iraqi citizens for acts committed prior to May 1, 2003, the day the US-UK occupation of Iraq began. The United States opposed sending Hussein to an international tribunal, and manipulated the Iraqi tribunal to prevent any US leaders from being tried for their war crimes in Iraq.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. But the leaders of the world's most powerful country continue to enjoy "victor's justice."

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Getting Away with Murder

As we walked out of Hotel Rwanda, my teenage son asked me, "So why did we go into Iraq, but not Rwanda?" This youngster was horrified that the United States not only sat on the sidelines during the genocide that killed 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, but then prevented the United Nations from acting to stop it.

What was a little genocide, after all, when the U.S. powers-that-be had no strategic interest in intervening to stop the Hutu from massacring the Tutsi in Rwanda? Bill Clinton, still smarting from the public relations disaster that followed the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia, didn't want to get involved in Rwanda.

Clinton did, however, engineer NATO's war in Kosovo five years after the Rwandan genocide. He called it a "humanitarian intervention," to prevent ethnic cleansing of the Albanians by the Serbs.

Four years later, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush started a war in Afghanistan, justified as "self defense" against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

After Bush ousted the Taliban and installed former Unocal consultant Hamid Karzai to protect U.S. interests in Afghanistan, he went after Iraq, two years ago yesterday.

Billed as necessary to save us from "weapons of mass destruction," Bush replaced Saddam Hussein with a U.S.-friendly regime, one that would welcome the 14 permanent military bases we are constructing in Iraq. When the dreaded weapons didn't materialize, Bush's rationale morphed into "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people."

All three wars - Clinton/NATO's war in Yugoslavia, and Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Canadian law professor Michael Mandel - were unlawful. None was undertaken in self-defense, or approved by the Security Council, the only two instances in which the United Nations Charter permits the use of armed force.

In his new book, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes against Humanity, Canadian law professor Michael Mandel argues that NATO's Kosovo war set the precedent for the United States' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It broke a fundamental legal and psychological barrier. When Pentagon guru Richard Perle 'thanked God' for the death of the UN," writes Mandel, "the first precedent he could cite in justification of overthrowing the Security Council's legal supremacy in matters of war and peace was Kosovo."

The 1999 war in Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia was not a "humanitarian intervention," but rather a crime against humanity, in the judgment of Mandel. He notes that "of the 385 murders in the original ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia] indictment of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, 340 were alleged to have occurred after the bombing started."

In support of his claim that NATO's bombing constituted a crime against humanity, Mandel cites its use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and the targeting of civilians. Between 500 and 1800 civilians of all nationalities were killed during the 78-day bombing campaign, which used "about 25,000 of the world's most devastating non-nuclear bombs and missiles," according to Mandel.

A year after the bombing, I visited Belgrade as a participant in an international conference on humanitarian intervention. Between meetings, we toured the surrounding area and saw the bombed out rubble of what were once apartments, schools, bridges, and a television and radio station. As I walked through the rubble, I was cautioned, much to my dismay, that the soil could contain depleted uranium.

Joining together with other Canadian law professors and lawyers and the American Association of Jurists, Mandel filed a complaint against NATO leaders with the ICTY. Although Amnesty International concurred that NATO had committed war crimes, the tribunal dismissed the complaint without serious investigation.

Mandel documents why this tribunal was created and functions in the service of United States interests. "For the first time in history," writes Mandel, we had "an international criminal tribunal established prior to the war whose criminals it was putting on trial, and therefore capable of playing a role in that war."

"The point is not that Milosevic was charged with atrocities in Kosovo, it's that Clinton wasn't too," writes Mandel.

NATO intervened militarily in Yugoslavia to assist the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in its struggle against Milosevic. A year before, the United States government had listed the KLA, which had received assistance from Osama bin Laden, as a terrorist organization. After Milosevic's forces were defeated by NATO, the KLA moved into Kosovo and began a reign of terror against non-Albanians, which Mandel calls "reverse ethnic cleansing." When I was in Belgrade, I saw documentation of the destruction of 25 of Kosovo's medieval Serbian Christian Orthodox monasteries.

Mandel points to the Security Council Resolutions passed before the NATO bombing, which "were even-handed in their condemnation of 'the use of excessive force by Serbian police forces against civilians and peaceful demonstrators in Kosovo,' and 'all acts of terrorism by the Kosovo Liberation Army.'"

The "Racak massacre," widely viewed as the event that precipitated NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, is the subject of considerable controversy. According to the Serb version, all 45 of the dead ethnic Albanians "were either KLA fighters or civilians caught in the crossfire. There was no massacre of civilians, but the KLA had plenty of time to dress their dead fighters in civilian clothes." A team of Finnish forensic investigators sent by the European Union to perform autopsies on the Racak bodies "confirmed the Serb version in most respects, though the change-of-clothes hypothesis was discounted," writes Mandel. In his opinion, Racak was a pretext to begin the bombing.

On the day before the bombing began, Clinton declared, "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key. That's what this Kosovo thing is all about." Supreme NATO Commander Wesley Clark admitted one month into the bombing campaign that it "was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing."

I wrote in a 2002 article that the NATO bombing was about economic hegemony, access to Caspian Sea oil, and the promotion of a global free market economy, not ethnic cleansing. Milosevic's socialist government, which had tried to stop the market reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, was in America's sights early in the 1990s.

Mandel describes "the history of the West's complicity in the 'Balkan tragedy,' which," he writes, "is a story of the rich countries of Europe and America taking advantage of the sad state of the post-Soviet economies to impose solutions (sometimes known as 'Shock Therapy') through powerful credit institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Part of the goal was to encourage the fragmentation of the old Soviet bloc to create in its place 'hub and spoke' arrangements dependent on the West." This resulted in "the West's economic strangulation of Yugoslavia."

Against this backdrop, Milosevic was elected President in 1989. The Albanians employed a campaign of non-violent opposition to Serb rule, boycotting Serb institutions and setting up parallel ones. "The turn to violence came only in 1997, and appears to have had nothing to do with Serb repression," writes Mandel, but rather with the rise of the KLA.

In the year before NATO's bombing campaign, "violence dramatically increased in Kosovo, though the 2,000 dead on both sides combined were no more numerous than in many contemporary conflicts where the U.S. chose not to intervene," in Mandel's opinion. Rwanda is a prime example.

The key to the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia can be found in a 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on post-Cold War Strategy, prepared under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. It advocated discouraging other advanced industrialized nations "from challenging our leadership" or "aspiring to a larger regional or global role." The document declares, "Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia] to preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

Bush's wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are consistent with this strategy, as are his appointments of Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq war and "preemptive war" doctrine, as head of the World Bank, and John Bolton, avowed U.N.-hater, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

After NATO conquered Yugoslavia, Halliburton's Brown and Root constructed Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the largest foreign U.S. military base built since the Vietnam War. Besides the Great Wall of China, the only other earthly thing visible from outer space is Camp Bondsteel. Brown and Root is also building the 14 permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.

Mandel's indictment of the United States' policies in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Rwanda does not ignore the complicity of the other dark forces in those conflicts. He writes, "The fact that the Americans and their allies have been the supreme criminals in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq does not mean their enemies are innocent. The fact that the Americans and the Europeans were directly and indirectly complicit in the atrocities of Rwanda, and the fact that their Tutsi clients in the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] committed them too, does not mean that the Hutu government and militias did not."

The Nuremberg Tribunal found the greatest sin to be the waging of aggressive war, or war as an instrument of national policy. Mandel characterizes the U.S. wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq as wars of aggression. "Humanitarian intervention," he notes, (which violates the U.N. Charter anyway) "is forever doomed to be an 'asymmetrical right, the right of the powerful to intervene in the affairs of the weak and not vice versa.'" United States support for Croat soldiers in their 1995 ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs from Krajina belies America's humanitarian motives four years later in Kosovo.

Michael Mandel's book is finally an indictment of international criminal law, of "victor's justice," in which only the vanquished are put on trial. "Exactly like the other elements of 'globalization,' the globalization ('universalization') of human rights is just a euphemism for the strong calling the shots."

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Giving Iraqis What Is Rightly Theirs—Sovereignty

George W. Bush pledged last week that on June 30, "our government and our coalition will transfer full sovereignty - complete and full sovereignty" to the new Iraqi government. With such bold assurances, why then the heartburn among Iraqis and Europeans?

Sovereignty has traditionally described a state that has a territory, a government, a population, and formal judicial autonomy. In the international legal arena, a sovereign state is entitled to territorial integrity, political independence, and exclusive jurisdiction and control within its territory.

Yet the Bush administration has danced around the notion of how much power the Iraqis will actually have over the 138,000 U.S. troops that inhabit their soil. And the U.S. is insisting that its troops enjoy immunity (it can't say "sovereign immunity," since it will not technically be sovereign over Iraq come June 30) from criminal or civil prosecution in Iraqi courts. This means impunity for the torture perpetrated on Iraqi prisoners.

It defies logic to assume Bush will make good on his promise to grant Iraqis full sovereignty. He went out on a limb by invading a sovereign country which posed no threat to the United States, suffering the loss of more than 800 American troops, at a cost so far of $149 billion to U.S. taxpayers. After taking such a formidable risk, Bush is unlikely to throw in the towel now and give the Iraqis complete authority to kick out his troops and control their own valuable oil resources.

Indeed, the United States plans to build the largest CIA station in the world in Baghdad and locate permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. This presence in a country with a more U.S.-friendly government will ensure greater receptivity to foreign investment and maintain U.S. hegemony over the strategically important Persian Gulf region.

As the U.S. election approaches, Bush has held fast to the June 30 date for the "transfer of sovereignty" to Iraqis. He knows that come November, Americans, who are becoming increasingly weary of troop casualties and a failing wartime economy, will demand a way out of the quagmire.

So Bush wants to have it both ways: transfer sovereignty, but keep 138,000 pairs of feet in the door, to protect U.S. "interests." The U.S. would, in the words of Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs, "do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account" about whether our troops would remain in Iraq. But bottom line, according to Grossman, is that "American commanders will have the right, and the obligation" to decide whether our GIs stay or go.

Back in April, Grossman accurately described what the Iraqis will gain on June 30 as "limited sovereignty." In the face of eyebrows raised all around, however, the Bush administration has backed away from that phrase, instead speaking of "complete and full sovereignty."

Semantics, to be sure. After marginalizing U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, engineered the selection of the new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a man with close ties to the CIA. Allawi was responsible for the sensational claim that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could be deployed in 45 minutes.

In a moment of uncommon candor, Brahimi affectionately referred to Bremer as "the dictator of Iraq." After all, said Brahimi, Bremer "has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country."

But Bush maintains, "I had no role" in selection of the new Iraqi leaders. Likewise, U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "These are not America's puppets." Coalition spokesman Dan Senor agreed. "We have not been leaning on anybody to support one president over another." Like Donald Rumsfeld, who said on CBS News in November 2002, that the U.S. conflict in Iraq has "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil," the lady Condi - and Senor/Bush - doth protest too much.

Allawi is off to a good start. He said Iraqis "don't want to continue to be under occupation." But he pledged support for the continued presence of U.S. forces "to help in defeating the enemies of Iraq." One wonders who these "enemies" might be. Al Qaeda was not operating in Iraq before Operation "Iraqi Freedom." Many Iraqis see the occupiers as the enemy.

The purported transfer of sovereignty from the occupiers to the Iraqi people on June 30 will be justified by the Bush administration as consensual. The consent defense, which contends the conquered are not subjugated because they have accepted the conquest, is used by the U.S. to rationalize its possession of Puerto Rico and its other post-colonial endeavors. This defense has been challenged by Antonio Gramsci, who wrote that the consent of the conquered cannot justify the colonial relationship because the consent is a byproduct of psychological domination.

The United States and the United Kingdom are angling for agreement on a Security Council resolution that would legitimize the new Iraqi government while protecting strategic U.S.-U.K. political, economic and military interests.

The Council's resolution is bound to include rhetoric about "full sovereignty" for Iraq, just as its resolution - also strong-armed by the U.S. - which ended the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. It recognized the sovereignty of Yugoslavia, a country that disappeared from the map shortly thereafter.

And the United States will maintain the right to locate its military bases in the territory of Iraq, just as we retained exclusive control over the 38 U.S. bases on Okinawa after returning its sovereignty to Japan in 1972.

It is tempting to speculate about what should happen in Iraq - what do we think would be best for the Iraqis? What form should the new Iraqi government take? Can the diverse peoples that make up Iraq create a government where power is effectively shared? Will the Sunnis and Shi'a remain unified or attack each other in the event they succeed in repelling the invaders? Should the Kurds be given their own sovereign state? What will be the fate of the oil-rich Kirkuk? Will Turkey intervene with military force in the event Kirkuk's large Turcomen population is threatened?

The people of Iraq have the right to self-determination. They have suffered an unlawful regime change that has killed thousands of them and destabilized their country. It is up to the people of Iraq - without the interference of foreigners - to determine their own form of government.

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Bush & Co. Fear Prosecution in the International Criminal Court

Overcoming Impunity with the International Criminal Court

Non-governmental organizations and individuals from sixty-six different countries have filed 499 "communications" – or complaints – with the International Criminal Court (ICC), between July 2002 and July 2003. Many of them urge the ICC to investigate the United States conduct in the war on Iraq. The primary charge is that the U.S. committed an act of aggression against Iraq. The ICC has jurisdiction to punish the crime of aggression. However, this crime remains undefined in the ICC’s statute due to disputes among the states parties about how to define it.

The United States is not a party to the ICC treaty. The Bush administration has vigorously opposed it, for fear that U.S. military officials and personnel could be subject to "politically-motivated" prosecutions for war crimes.

In an unprecedented move last year, George W. Bush removed Bill Clinton’s signature from the treaty. A few months later, Bush signed into law the American Serviceman’s Protection Act, which restricts U.S. cooperation with the ICC and prohibits military assistance to states parties to the treaty unless they sign bilateral immunity agreements with the U.S. States which sign these "Article 98" agreements – referring to the section of the ICC statute that addresses treaties between countries – pledge not to hand over U.S. nationals to the ICC. The United States has reportedly extracted these agreements from 60 countries – primarily small nations, or fragile democracies with weak economies. And the U.S. has withdrawn military aid from 35 nations that refused to be coerced into signing Article 98 agreements.

The U.S. has also demanded express immunity from ICC prosecution for American nationals. This demand delayed the passage of several peacekeeping resolutions in the Security Council. But in 2002, the Security Council capitulated when it unanimously passed Resolution 1422, which called for one year of immunity for peacekeepers from countries not party to the ICC statute, and provided that immunity could be renewed in subsequent years. The resolution was renewed in June. But this time, the U.S. was unable to achieve unanimity. France, Germany and Syria abstained from the vote.

Ninety-one countries have signed on as parties to the ICC treaty. So why has the Bush administration resisted it so vehemently? Bush’s handlers were likely prescient about how the world would react to the United States’ illegal invasion of Iraq, which was not executed with Security Council approval or in lawful self-defense. They evidently knew they and their boss might be vulnerable to prosecutions for the unlawful killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the destruction of the civilian infrastructure, and the use of weapons of mass destruction – cluster bombs and depleted uranium – by "coalition forces."

A Preemptive War is a War of Aggression

The United States has sought to ensure the ICC’s legal processes do not jeopardize its role as global superpower by subjecting U.S. leaders to prosecution. It has consistently resisted definitions and jurisdictional provisions that may challenge U.S. impunity for wars of aggression.

Many ICC parties favor a definition of aggression set out in 1974 in General Assembly Resolution 3314, passed in the wake of Vietnam: "Aggression is the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations, as set out in this definition."

Bush’s new doctrine of "preemptive war" is a license to prosecute wars of aggression. It runs directly counter to the United Nations Charter’s prohibition on the use of armed force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. A preemptive war is a war of aggression. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" falls squarely into this category.

More than 50 years ago, Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal, wrote: "No political or economic situation can justify" the crime of aggression. He added: "If certain acts in 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." An impartial international criminal tribunal is necessary to prevent "victor’s justice," where only the vanquished are subject to prosecution.

Universal Jurisdiction for International Crimes

Under the treaty, the ICC can take jurisdiction over a national of even a non-party state if he or she commits a crime in a state party’s territory. The U.S. vehemently objects to this. But it’s nothing new. Under well-established principles of international law, the core crimes prosecuted in the ICC – genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression – are crimes of universal jurisdiction.

That means that an alleged perpetrator can – and always could – be arrested anywhere. Indeed, the United States itself has asserted jurisdiction over foreign nationals in anti-terrorism, anti-narcotic trafficking, torture and war crimes cases. Even Resolution 1422 notes that states not party to the ICC statute "will continue to fulfill their responsibilities in their national jurisdiction in relation to international crimes."

However, the U.S. has not fulfilled its responsibilities to seek justice for international crimes. It has refused to extradite four terrorists – right-wing Cuban exiles trained by the CIA – who were convicted more than 20 years ago in Venezuela for blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976. The U.S. similarly refuses to extradite John Hull, an American CIA operative indicted in Costa Rica for the 1984 bombing of a press conference which killed five journalists in a Nicaraguan border town. It has also refused to extradite former military officer Emmanuel Constant for trial in Haiti. Constant, who worked closely with the CIA, is believed to be responsible for the murder of more than 5000 people under the Haitian dictatorship in the early 1990s.

The ICC statute adds a special safeguard to the venerable principle of universal jurisdiction. It promises the ICC will only prosecute when the alleged perpetrator’s native country cannot, or will not, prosecute one of its nationals. The U.S. should not then fear ICC prosecution, especially in light of the Article 98 agreements it coerced – and continues to coerce – from a multitude of countries. Unfortunately, however, these agreements contain no guarantee that an American national accused of an international crime would be tried if handed over to the U.S.

In June, Belgium indicted Bush, Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft, and Condoleezza Rice for war crimes during the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, which predated the effective date of the ICC. The indictment was issued under Belgium’s universal jurisdiction law, which gave Belgian courts the right to judge anyone accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, regardless of where the crimes were committed. Four Rwandans have been convicted in 2001 under Belgium’s law for their participation in the 1994 genocide which left more than one million dead.

The government of Belgium, fearing a backlash, decided to refer the cases against Blair, Bush and the others to London and Washington, making trials unlikely. Even so, Donald Rumsfeld threatened to move NATO out of Brussels unless Belgium changed its universal jurisdiction law. Belgium capitulated, and its Court of Cassation has asked for the dismissal of the war crimes indictments.

Belgium isn’t alone in indicting Bush and Blair for war crimes. In July, Greece’s Athens Bar Association filed a complaint in the ICC against the two for crimes against humanity and war crimes, this time in connection with their war on Iraq. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" began after July 2002, the effective date of the ICC.

The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks occurred before the ICC went into effect. Two years later, a Spanish judge charged Osama bin Laden and nine alleged Al Qaeda members with terrorism and murder under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

U.S. Undermines War Against Terrorism

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Argentine Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, has decided to begin the work of the Court by investigating possible genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity for the recruitment and use of children as soldiers and sex slaves in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Moreno-Ocampo’s selection of the Congo for his maiden investigation was made partly with an eye to the credibility of the ICC because, he says, "the Congo was a clear case."

But, John Shattuck, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, wrote in the Washington Post in September that the United States has "so far played a passive and sometimes negative role in the region." Just two days after the Security Council adopted a resolution on July 28 which imposed an embargo on "the direct or indirect supply" of arms or assistance to "armed groups and militias operating in the territory," the U.S. lifted its own embargo on weapons sales to Rwanda, which has armed its clients in eastern Congo.

Moreno-Ocampo, who has described the genocide in Congo as the "most important case since the Second World War," plans to investigate businesses in 29 countries, including the United States, suspected of financing ethnic violence in Congo.

Ironically the Chief Prosecutor, an attorney with extensive experience investigating atrocities and prosecuting officials in Argentina, says that the United States’ refusal to work with the ICC will undermine the International Criminal Court’s role in the U.S. efforts to fight terrorism.

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Oil: Weapon of Mass Destruction

When Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil services company, he told the Cato Institute: “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States.” He admitted: “Occasionally, we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go...we go where the business is.” After Cheney became vice president, he made hegemony over the world’s oil supply a priority for U.S. foreign policy. The blueprint for this strategy was developed in the 1992 draft Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on post-Cold War Strategy, at the direction of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, when he was Undersecretary of Defense under Cheney in George H.W. Bush’s cabinet.

This 1992 draft, which was strategically leaked to The New York Times, advocated continued U.S. leadership in NATO by discouraging the advanced industrialized nations “from challenging our leadership.” It said: “We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” The overall objective in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, according to the draft, “is to remain the predominant outside power in the region to preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.” The bombing of Afghanistan, and the impending Iraq war, both serve that goal.

The incessant drumbeat from Washington is that Americans must be protected from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Notwithstanding CIA Director George Tenet’s unambiguous declaration that Hussein does not pose an imminent threat to the United States, media commentators postulate unremittingly how many and what types of weapons Hussein must have. George W. Bush has manipulated and cajoled Congress and the Security Council into jumping on his WMD bandwagon. Yet, Bush’s war on Iraq is merely the next step in a concerted strategy to secure control over valuable oil deposits in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Bush’s agenda to reincarnate NATO, inspired by the Wolfowitz document, is key to this oil strategy. NATO was created as a defensive alliance during the Cold War to protect Western Europe from a perceived threat from the Soviet Union. After World War II, the countries of Western Europe were unable to defend themselves. Now they have the resources to provide for their own security, yet NATO has expanded eastward, added several former Soviet bloc countries to its ranks, and redefined its strategic purpose. Bush’s abandonment of containment in favor of preemption is a brazen manifestation of the Wolfowitz theology embodied in the 1992 draft. Indeed, Wolfowitz has been systematically bribing NATO countries to assist with Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, justified as a response to the September 11 attacks, was part of the U.S. oil strategy. Afghanistan never attacked the U.S. and most of the hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia, a strategic U.S. oil partner. Yet, U.S. and U.K. warplanes ousted the Taliban and secured Afghanistan for the construction of an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan, south through Afghanistan, to the Arabian Sea. The Bush administration had been uncritical of the Taliban’s human rights record when Unocal oil company was negotiating for the pipeline rights before September 11. After assuming control of Afghanistan, Bush conveniently installed Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal official, as interim president of Afghanistan.

Bush likewise seeks to install a U.S.-friendly replacement for Hussein after conquering Iraq. Although couched as a battle against weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. allied with Iraq when it used chemical weapons on the Kurds; indeed, the U.S. furnished Iraq with its WMD technology, according to an Associated Press report. The U.S. played Iraq off against Iran for years, to ensure access to Middle East oil. Bush’s war with Iraq, and ultimate occupation of that country, will clinch that control. With the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis at stake, oil may prove to be the most terrible weapon of mass destruction.

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Milosevic Defense Will Put NATO on Trial

The most significant international war crimes trial since Hitler’s henchmen were tried at Nuremberg is scheduled to begin on February 12. Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will appear in the dock at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague to answer charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

But Milosevic, often referred to in Western circles as the “Butcher of the Balkans,” maintains it is really the leaders of NATO who should be tried for their crimes against the people of Yugoslavia. In 1999, thousands of Yugoslavs were killed or wounded by NATO’s bombs, allegedly to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Albanians in Kosovo.

As The New York Times said on February 9: “When Mr. Milosevic sneers at the tribunal here as ‘victor’s justice,’ he is not entirely wrong.” Former President William Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and U.S. military leaders orchestrated the use of laser-guided and cluster bombs and depleted uranium that devastated the people and the land of Yugoslavia. They will never face charges at The Hague.

Milosevic contends he acted in defense of the Serbs against Muslim extremists. He claims he was fighting the same type of terrorism the United States is now battling in Afghanistan and elsewhere. At that time, the United States gave active support to the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim terrorist group financed by the Third World Relief Agency, through which Osama bin Laden and others funneled $350 million. Milosevic insists that his pleas to Clinton to get bin Laden out of Kosovo were ignored; instead, Clinton allied with the Albanian Muslims against the Serbs.

A centerpiece of Milosevic’s defense is that he maintained friendly relations with U.S. and British leaders after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. He was even called a peacemaker when the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in 1995, ending the war in Bosnia. He reportedly plans to call Western leaders such as Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana to testify. It is unlikely they will appear, however, since the tribunal has no subpoena power.

Milosevic has also challenged the legitimacy of the tribunal itself. Because he refuses to recognize it as an independent and impartial court, he has refused to appoint counsel to represent him. Against his will, the judges have appointed three “amici curiae” or friends of the court to help Milosevic with his defense. But these lawyers have filed motions with no supporting documentation, and they sat mute when Milosevic’s microphone was cut off in mid-speech as he tried to address the court. Milosevic has been denied the right to confidential consultation with his unofficial counsel.

The charges against Milosevic stem from incidents in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. They were initially filed in three separate indictments, but Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte successfully convinced the Appeals Chamber to consolidate all three for trial. In December, the Trial Chamber had joined the Bosnia and Croatia indictments, which deal with events that occurred from 1991-1995. But the Trial Chamber had refused to consolidate the Kosovo indictment with the other two.

The events alleged in the Kosovo indictment occurred in 1999, more than three years after the Bosnia and Croatia incidents. Under the tribunal’s statute, two or more crimes may be joined together in one indictment if the underlying events formed the same transaction, which was part of a common scheme, strategy or plan.

In a lengthy opinion, the Trial Chamber rejected the prosecutor’s argument that Milosevic participated in a joint criminal enterprise, a plan to create a Greater Serbia. The Trial Chamber considered the nexus “too nebulous” to constitute a common scheme, strategy or plan. Finally, the Trial Chamber was concerned about prejudice to the fair trial rights of the accused if the Kosovo indictment was joined with the others.

Scheduled to begin the trial on the Kosovo indictment in February, the prosecutor became very concerned about the lack of witnesses to testify about Milosevic’s alleged involvement in the Kosovo atrocities. As a result, she appealed the Trial Chamber’s joinder decision to the Appeals Chamber. Without giving reasons, the Appeals Chamber saved the prosecution’s case from imminent collapse by ordering the Kosovo indictment consolidated with the others in one trial. The Appeals Chamber stated that the acts alleged in all three indictments formed the same transaction.

Ironically, some contend that Milosevic himself effectively argued for joinder when he told the tribunal that the NATO countries formed a joint criminal enterprise with the Albanian Muslim terrorists and the narco-mafia, against the Serbs and other non-Muslim Albanians.

In spite of overwhelming public opinion against Milosevic in the West, the prosecutor faces some significant proof problems in this trial. Under the doctrine of “command responsibility,” she must prove Milosevic knew or had reason to know his subordinates were about to commit the criminal acts, and he failed to prevent them.

This case could set an important precedent if it establishes that a commander is responsible for atrocities that occur far away. Christopher Black, the Canadian lawyer who heads the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, told me: “It would be easier to pin command responsibility on President Nixon for the My Lai massacre or President Bush for the mass murder of prisoners by US forces at Mazar e-Sharif.”

Del Ponte hopes to call Milosevic’s close associates to testify against him, but many who are facing criminal indictments will likely refuse to incriminate themselves. The prosecutor may offer them immunity in exchange for their testimony, but it is uncertain whether they would ever agree to testify even in the face of contempt charges. Reportedly, much of the evidence against Milosevic comes from Western intelligence sources, who may be unwilling to compromise their security by revealing the evidence in court.

If convicted, Milosevic faces life in prison, as the tribunal’s statute does not allow for the death penalty. He could serve his sentence in Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Spain, Italy or Austria, all of which have agreements with the Hague tribunal to incarcerate convicted prisoners.

There is speculation the prosecutor will ask for a postponement on Feb. 12 to secure witnesses for the Kosovo portion, which will comprise the first part of the trial. Whenever the trial ultimately begins, it will likely span two or three years. The tribunal - and the court of public opinion - will hear allegations not just about Milosevic’s atrocities, but those of NATO as well.

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Bombing of Afghanistan is Illegal and Must be Stopped

In a patently illegal use of armed force, United States and British bombs are falling on the people of Afghanistan. There are already reports of thousands of dead and wounded civilians from the same kind of American “smart bombs” used in Vietnam and Yugoslavia, with the promise of myriad casualties from unexploded cluster bombs. Yet while the media bombards us with details about the tragic but few deaths from Anthrax, we are shielded from photographs of the dead and injured in Afghanistan.

Jan Ziegler, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned on October 15, “The bombing has to stop right now. There is a humanitarian emergency.” Relief agencies left Afghanistan in the wake of the bombing. The arrival of winter is imminent, when up to 7.5 million Afghans internally displaced by the bombing will be beyond the reach of humanitarian aid. Routing chief suspect Osama bin Laden from his cave with bombs is like finding a needle in a haystack, while mass starvation is inevitable.

The media has created a tidal wave of support in the United States for attacking the country that harbors bin Laden. In a recent Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll, 45 percent of Americans said they were willing to “torture known terrorists if they knew details about future terrorist attacks in the United States,” notwithstanding the United States’ ratification and implementation of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the fact that the prohibition against torture is considered to be jus cogens, a preemptory or inviolable norm of international law.

Yet in spite of nearly universal global condemnation of the September 11 attacks, the bombardment of Afghanistan does not sit well in the Arab world, which is faced with pictures of wounded Afghan children and Israeli tanks rolling into Palestinian villages. Akhbar el Yom, one of the biggest newspapers in Egypt, featured a photograph of an Afghan child orphaned by the bombs. It sported the caption, “Is this baby a Taliban fighter?” And the recent killings of rebel Northern Alliance supporters by misguided American bombs, has backfired and helped build support for the Taliban. European countries are also beginning to question the wisdom of the sustained bombing campaign, which is killing civilians and failing to accomplish its goal.

Although the horror of the mass tragedy inflicted on September 11 is indisputable, the bombings of Afghanistan by the United States and the United Kingdom are illegal. This bombardment violates both international law and United States law, set forth in the United Nations Charter, a treaty ratified by the U.S. and therefore part of the supreme law of the land under the U.S. Constitution.

The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense.

The Security Council, made up of representatives from 15 countries from each region of the world, is the only body that can authorize the use of force. Only the Security Council can decide what action can be taken to maintain or restore international peace and security.

The Security Council has a series of options under the U.N. Charter: (1) it can suggest that the United States sue Afghanistan in the International Court of Justice (World Court), for harboring Osama bin Laden and others, if the evidence supports their involvement in these attacks, and seek their immediate arrests; (2) it can order interruption of economic relations, rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio communications and the severance of diplomatic relations; (3) it can establish an international tribunal to try those suspected of perpetrating the September 11th attack; (4) it can establish a U.N. force to make arrests, prevent attacks or counter aggression; and (5) as a last resort, it can authorize the application of armed force with the Military Staff Committee.

The United States has gone to the Security Council twice since the September 11 attack. The Security Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorize the use of force. Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemn the September 11 attacks, and order the freezing of assets; the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information; and urging the ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism (which the U.S. has not ratified).

Although the United States has reported its bombing to the Security Council as required by article 51 of the U.N. Charter, the Security Council has not authorized and could not authorize the use of unilateral military force by the United States and the United Kingdom, or NATO, which is not a U.N. body.

The bombing of Afghanistan is not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter because: 1) the attacks in New York and Washington D.C. were criminal attacks, not “armed attacks” by another state, and 2) there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the U.S. after September 11, or the U.S. would not have waited three weeks before initiating its bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” (Caroline Case, 29 BFSP 1137-8; 30 BFSP 19-6 (1837)). This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.

Even if the U.S. was authorized on September 11 to use military force under article 51, that license ended once the Security Council became “seized” of the matter, which indeed it did on September 12, by passing Resolution 1368, and reaffirming in Resolution 1373 on September 28 that it “remains seized” of the matter. By bombing Afghanistan, the United States and the United Kingdom are committing acts of aggression, which is prohibited by the U.N. Charter.

The universal desire is to feel safe and secure. The only path to safety and security is through international law, not vengeance and retaliation. George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress must take the following steps:

1. immediately stop the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, remove all ground forces, and refrain from illegally bombing or invading any other country;


2. contribute money and people power to the U.N. peacekeeping forces;


3. refuse to further eviscerate the U.S. Bill of Rights, in the name of national security. (The Uniting and Strengthening America By Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot Act), rushed through Congress in the wake of September 11, vastly expands the government’s ability to place wiretaps, invade e-mails, and hold immigrants in indefinite detention);


4. not repeat the actions of the U.S. government when it interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, and targeted suspected communists during the McCarthy era;


5. refuse to allow the racial profiling, and INS and FBI intimidation, of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians; and


6. submit this matter to appropriate international bodies, including the United Nations and the World Court.

Since no state has executed an armed attack against the United States, this is a criminal matter that can be prosecuted in a number of possible venues. First, the United States could bring criminal prosecutions in its domestic courts for crimes against humanity and for violations for international conventions under the principle of universal jurisdiction, as Israel did when it prosecuted Adolph Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.

Second, the Security Council could establish a special criminal tribunal for the September 11 attacks, as it did in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Montreal Sabotage Convention, which criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service, is directly on point and should be used here. It was invoked during the resolution of the dispute between the United States, the United Kingdom and Libya over the handling of the Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing cases. Both the United States and Afghanistan are parties to that convention.

The International Criminal Court would not be an available forum, because 1) it has not yet come into force, as it needs the ratification of 60 states and 43 have ratified thus far; 2) its jurisdiction is limited to crimes occurring after it comes into force; and 3) the United States refuses to ratify the ICC statute, because it is afraid its leaders may become defendants in war crimes prosecutions.

Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, “it is now the responsibility of the world community to transform the coalition against terrorism into a coalition for a peaceful world order.” He advocates leadership by the Security Council to take concrete steps such as accelerated nuclear and chemical disarmament, and urges United States ratification of the verification protocol of the convention banning biological weapons, as well as the treaty to prohibit all nuclear testing. Gorbachev also opposes the use of the battle against terrorism “to establish control over countries or regions,” which, he maintains, would not only discredit the coalition; it would prevent its potential for building a peaceful world.

On September 29, the day originally set for anti-globalization protests, thousands marched in the streets demanding peace. Students on campuses across the country are mobilizing to oppose the bombing. Our anti-terrorism coalition must be true to its name, and aim its energy not at the innocent people of Afghanistan, but at building global peace.

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Hoist on Our Own Petard

The tragedy of September 11 was unimaginable. Or was it? The hatred that fueled 19 people to blow themselves up and take thousands with them has its genesis in a history of the United States government's exploitation of people in oil-rich nations around the world.

President George W. Bush accuses the terrorists of targeting our freedom and democracy. But it was not the Statue of Liberty that was destroyed. It was the World Trade Center - symbol of the U.S.-led global economic system, and the Pentagon - heart of the United States military, that took the hits.

Those who committed these heinous crimes were attacking American foreign policy, not the American people. The 5500+ civilians who died were likely considered "collateral damage" by the hijackers and their co-conspirators

During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews are exhorted to take steps to rectify the harm we have caused others. Last week, I told a World War II veteran of my worry that bombing Afghanistan would likely kill many innocent people. "American lives are more important than Afghan lives," he retorted. Aghast, I later realized that this typifies the way our government has acted for years toward people in Third World countries.

Exactly one year before the Shah of Iran was toppled by a coalition led by people acting in the name of the Ayatollah Khomeini, I visited that country as an international legal observer on behalf of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. I interviewed dozens of people, from the Ayatollah Shariat Madari (the leading ayatollah in Khomeini's exiled absence) to poets, communists, political prisoners and myriad others. Although downtown Tehran sported a U.S. corporation on every corner, the people were drowning in poverty and misery. I returned to the United States and was scoffed at when I predicted a revolution in Iran.

In 1953, the CIA had overthrown the democratically-elected nationalist, secular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq (whose government had nationalized the British oil company) and installed the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, ushering in 25 years of a brutal and repressive reign of terror. Iran became the largest customer for U.S. arms and U.S.-based oil companies replaced the British.

When Iranians began to rise up against the Shah, the U.S. told him it supported him "without reservation" and encouraged him to use force to maintain his power, even trying to engineer a military coup to save him. In 1979, a broad-based united front consisting of nationalists as well as militant Muslims, coalesced around Khomeini, overthrew the Shah and inaugurated a theocracy based on religious fascism. Because of Washington's long-standing support for the Shah, Khomeini's government became a model for fundamentalist anti-U.S. Islamic regimes.

The United States was eager to counter the now anti-American Iranian government and prevent it from controlling the Persian Gulf, the largest oil source in the world. But the U.S. heartily supported Saddam Hussein during his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds.

To keep both Iran and Iraq off balance, the United States quietly encouraged Iraq to invade Iran in 1980, with the promise of financing from Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. opposed any Security Council action to condemn the invasion. Removing Iraq from its list of terrorist nations, the U.S. allowed the transfer of arms to Iraq, while simultaneously permitting Israel to arm Iran.

The United States supplied Saddam Hussein with the technology to develop chemical and biological weapons, according to a 1996 Associated Press report. Even after Iraq used its chemical weapons in 1984, the U.S. restored diplomatic relations with Iraq, sent the U.S. navy into the Persian Gulf, and accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airplane, killing 290 people. Then-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush's comment on the accident: "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

Still playing both ends against the middle, the U.S. itself directly supplied arms covertly to Iran in 1985. Thinking the United States was still his ally, Saddam informed the U.S. ambassador to Iraq that he was about to invade Kuwait in 1991. He received no protest from the U.S. ambassador. But the United States, not wanting Iraq to dominate the western shore of the Persian Gulf, reacted by re-invading Kuwait.

The U.S. didn't really wish to destroy Iraq; it still wanted Iraq as a counterweight to Iran. But the United States underestimated Saddam's ability to maintain his position of control over the Kurds and the Shiites - both politically and through the use of terror.

In the last decade, the United States has dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Iraq, killing many civilians, using napalm, cluster bombs and depleted uranium, in what the Los Angeles Times described as a "massacre" and a "massive slaughter." As a result of the bombing and devastating economic sanctions, between 4000 and 5000 Iraqi children still die every month. When asked on CBS television in 1996 for her reaction to these deaths, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "we think the price is worth it."

Evidently, the perpetrators of the September 11 attack thought the price of 5500 innocent lives was worth it. Suspicion has focused on Osama bin Laden, who despises the United States for the Gulf War, its support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and the location of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, home to the holiest Muslim shrines.

Bush is aiming the largest concentration of American firepower since World War II at Afghanistan, which harbors bin Laden. The President has made it clear that all countries that support terrorists are on our hit list. But even though none of the hijackers came from Afghanistan, and many hailed from Saudi Arabia, the U.S. maintains friendly relations with the Saudis, the largest suppliers of the world's oil.

Oil has been the principal motivation for much of United States foreign policy. Since 1996, the U.S. overlooked the Taliban's terror in hopes the U.S. could build an oil pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan, to transport up to two hundred billion barrels of oil and gas through Central Asia.

After the Taliban took over Kabul, a U.S. State Department spokesman saw "nothing objectionable" about the Taliban's brand of Islam. Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA in terror tactics to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the United States funneled more than $2 billion in guns and money to the fundamentalist mujaheddin in Afghanistan, the largest covert action program since World War II.

Likewise, the United States gave considerable assistance to the Kosovo Liberation Army - a Muslim terrorist group financed by the Third World Relief Agency, through which bin Laden and others funneled $350 million - and its twin, the National Liberation Army in Macedonia.

Although U.S.-led NATO ostensibly bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 to stop ethnic cleansing, the bombing was actually part of a strategy of containment, to keep the region safe for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline through Albania and Macedonia. Cooperation of the Albanians with the pipeline project was likely contingent on the U.S. helping them wrest control of Kosovo from the Serbs.

Jerrold Post, a psychological profiler at the CIA for 21 years, said recently the "real dilemma" is the "roiling hatred within the Arab world directed at the United States. . . America doesn't have the vaguest idea how much hatred." He maintains that terrorists exploit "feelings of despair over economic conditions … and [over] totalitarian regimes."

The Book of Exodus speaks of God "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation." Our innocent civilians have been hoist on the cruel petard of a long history of brutal and opportunistic U.S. foreign policy, where yesterday's freedom fighters are considered today's terrorists. "Collateral damage" is unacceptable regardless of whose lives are lost. The only way to truly eradicate terrorism is to understand the conditions that created it and obliterate them.

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U.S. Boycott of the World Race Conference Signals Denial of Racism at Home

The United States government's walkout at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in South Africa belies our commitment to eradicating racism in this country. Although framed as opposition to resolutions condemning Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, the Bush Administration is really worried about international attention focusing on inequality here in the United States.

When the U.S. delegation left the conference, the South African government stated, "It will be unfortunate if a perception were to develop that the U.S.A.'s withdrawal from the conference is merely a red herring demonstrating an unwillingness to confront the real issues posed by racism in the U.S.A. and globally."

Our country is a party to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. That treaty requires us to condemn racial discrimination and to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy to eliminate racial discrimination. It also mandates that we guarantee to everyone without distinction as to race, color, or national or ethnic origin, the rights to public health, medical care, social security, social services and the right to education and training.

Yet 139 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, vast disparities with respect to race pervade every aspect of American life. Non-English-speaking minorities are discriminated against in the educational system and widespread segregation still exists in public elementary and secondary schools. Extensive job discrimination endures in both the public and private labor markets. There are discrepancies in the incomes of white and minority high school graduates.

Racial profiling from the initial police stop to the charging process and trial through the sentencing procedure has been widely documented. Mandatory sentences of life imprisonment are imposed disproportionately on minority defendants. Non-whites are much more likely than whites to be charged with and sentenced to death for substantially similar crimes.

Police brutality against minorities came out of the closet with the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and the execution of Amadou Diallo and the sodomizing of Abner Louima in New York. The Rampart Scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department proves that the problem encompasses more than just a few bad apples.

Environmental racism has resulted in the location of toxic waste dumps in communities of color. Hate crimes against racial minorities persist. Immigrants, also frequent victims of hate crimes, are often abused by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The United States boycotted prior United Nations conferences on racism in 1978 and 1983, also ostensibly because of resolutions equating Zionism with racism. Siding with Israel isn't based on the U.S. government's great love for the Jews, or concern for them as an oppressed people. It is Israel's strategic location in the Middle East, near the oil-rich Persian Gulf, that motivates the U.S. to support Israel, while disregarding repression in other global hotspots. The United States ignored the genocide in Rwanda, Turkey's scorched earth campaign against the Kurds, and the ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina reigon by the Croatian army in 1995.

U.S.-led NATO bombed the people of Yugoslavia for 78 days and then moved in to occupy Kosovo and Macedonia, not to stop ethnic cleansing, but to maintain American hegemony over European markets and transport routes for Caspian Sea oil. The United States will not, however, defy Israel by asking the United Nations to send observers or peacekeepers into the West Bank and Gaza, to stop the horrific bloodshed there.

Adjoa Aiyetoro, an attorney with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Washington, said of the U.S. decision to pull out of the conference: "We definitely believe it is a smoke screen . . . the United States is showing one more time [that] all this talk about freedom and liberty is a lie." She added, "They need to stop hiding behind and supporting Israel when the United States isn't even supporting its own people."

The other issue that terrified the Bush Administration about the 2001 conference was a demand that the U.S. pay reparations to African-Americans for the damage done to them by slavery. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D.-Mich.) reported that other delegates from the Congressional Black Caucus alleged the U.S. was using the Middle East issue as a smoke screen to avoid discussion of reparations.

Bush had decided not to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to South Africa for the conference, replacing him instead with a "mid-level" delegation, which staged the walkout. The Reverend Jesse Jackson aptly characterized this mid-level delegation as a "high-level insult."

The United States government was insulted when it was kicked off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights earlier this year. The self-anointed global human rights policeman should attend to the inequality and injustice at home. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the delegates in South Africa, "Your anger can be valuable if you channel this into a worldwide racism struggle where all of your agendas converge." By its high-level boycott of the conference, the United States government is pursuing its own agenda of denial of the institutional racism that persists in this country.

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Balkans Pacification and Protecting an Oil Pipeline

George W. Bush's recent announcement that the United States is committed to stay in the Balkans comes as no surprise. Despite his rhetoric about helping the people there, it's really about the transportation of massive oil resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans, and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.

Although NATO ostensibly bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in the spring of 1999 to stop ethnic cleansing, the bombing was actually part of a strategy of containment, to keep the region safe for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline that will run from the Black Sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic at Vlore, and pass through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. The pipeline is slated to carry 750,000 barrels a day, worth about $600 million a month at current prices.

Cooperation of the Albanians with the pipeline project was likely contingent on the United States helping them wrest control of Kosovo from the Serbs. The United States seeks to contain Macedonia as well, supporting both sides in the conflagration there. Military Professional Resources International, a mercenary company on contract to the Pentagon, has trained both the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Macedonian army. MPRI also supplied and trained the Croatian army in 1994 and 1995 before the Croatians cleansed more than 100,000 Serbs from the Krajina region.

The bombing was not aimed at ethnic cleansing. It was part of U.S.-run NATO's eastward expansion as a counterweight to Russia, which wants the Caspian oil pipeline to run through its territory. NATO, created during the Cold War to protect Western Europe from the Soviets, should have disbanded after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

But a 1992 draft of the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance advocated continued U.S. leadership in NATO by "discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role." Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said, if we decide to expand NATO, "we should not fear that Russia will object; we will do it because it is in our interest."

Although Bush has tried to downplay the tension between the United States and Russia by warming up to Putin and looking "into his soul," this is nothing more than posturing to reassure the countries of Europe that they shouldn't fear Russia's reaction were they to support Bush's missile defense plan.

The United States has invested too much in the Balkans to pull out. After the NATO bombing campaign, the United States spent $36.6 million to build Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo, the scene of Bush's recent tightly controlled four-hour visit. The largest American foreign military base constructed since Vietnam, Bondsteel was built by the Brown & Root Division of Halliburton, the world's biggest oil services corporation, which was run by Richard Cheney before he was tapped for vice president.

America's commitment to remain in the Balkans can be measured "in years," according to a recent characterization of the White House's position by The New York Times.

NATO's bombs, never sanctioned by the United Nations, were not "humanitarian intervention." Even the Marine Corps Gazette concluded after the bombing that the "resulting deaths of thousands of Serbian soldiers, civilians, and Kosovar Albanians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more can hardly be viewed as a victory for humanitarianism."

It is the purview of the United Nations, not the United States, to authorize humanitarian intervention. If the United States really wanted to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Yugoslavia, it would encourage the International Monetary Fund to forgive $14 billion in loans from prior regimes, finance reparations to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by its bombs, and remove the U.S. troops from the region.

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The Deportation of Slobodan Milosevic

The deportation of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was a direct result of blackmail by the United States. Desperate to rebuild its economy, the Serbian government capitulated to U.S. threats: deliver Milosevic to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, or the U.S. would see to it that Yugoslavia didn't get the foreign aid it critically needs.

Ten years of punishing sanctions against the people of Yugoslavia coupled with U.S.-led NATO's 78-day bombing campaign have left the country's economy in shambles. Damage to the Yugoslav economy is estimated at $4 billion. One million people live below the poverty level, half the population is unemployed, and Yugoslavia has an annual inflation rate of 150 percent and a foreign debt of $12 billion.

The U.S. destroyed the economy of Yugoslavia, killed or wounded thousands of its people - including civilians - and then promised megabucks to the Serbs if they would cough up Milosevic. Usually the ransom is paid to end the kidnapping. This time it was ponied up as a reward for the kidnap. And the payoff? $1.28 billion in aid from the July 29 donors conference, orchestrated by the United States.

Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic arranged the deportation by circumventing the recently elected President of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica. According to Sara Flounders, National Co-Director of the International Action Center, "Milosevic was sold to the U.S. by their man in Belgrade. Imagine a governor of a state in the U.S. overriding the federal government and constitution to surrender a U.S. citizen to another country."

Kostunica, adamantly committed to due process, insisted that Yugoslavia's judicial procedures be followed before Milosevic was delivered to the ICTY in The Hague. The deportation, which Kostunica said could not be characterized as legal and constitutional, violated Yugoslavia's constitution, parliament, Constitutional Court, and decisions of President Kostunica. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark denounced the deportation as "an enormous tragedy for Yugoslavia, the Serbian people and the rule of law."

While the leaders of the Western world cheer the "extradition" of Milosevic - a misnomer because he wasn't sent to another country, but to an international tribunal - the fragile democracy in Yugoslavia has been dealt a severe blow. Ramsey Clark thinks the real purpose of the deportation, sanctions, bombing and demonization of the Serbs "is to reduce all of the former Yugoslavia to the status of a U.S./NATO colony."

Kostunica has decried the partiality of the ICTY for its hypocrisy in indicting Serbs, but refusing to indict NATO leaders for war crimes committed in the course of the 1999 bombing. NATO bombs killed 1500-2000 civilians and injured thousands more. When I was in Yugoslavia last year, I saw schools, hospitals, bridges, libraries and homes reduced to rubble. The ICTY statute prohibits the targeting of civilians. And even though it also forbids the use of poisonous weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering, NATO used depleted uranium and cluster bombs whose devastating character is widely known. NATO also targeted a petrochemical complex, releasing carcinogens into the air that reached 10,600 times the acceptable safety level.

Yet the ICTY conducted only a perfunctory investigation of charges of NATO war crimes. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticized the ICTY for failing to thoroughly investigate these serious charges. Kostunica's allegation of the ICTY's bias is not surprising. NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea stated in May 1999, "Of course NATO supports the ICTY - NATO created it."

The prosecutors of the Vietnam War - Lyndon Baines Johnson, Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara - were never tried for war crimes for causing the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese people. It was McNamara who defined most of the Vietnamese countryside, populated by peasants, as a free-fire zone. He wrote in a letter to LBJ in 1967: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one." McNamara admitted his complicity in a 1995 memoir.

Indeed, the hypocrisy of the United States government is no more evident than in its refusal to ratify the statute for the International Criminal Court, out of fear that U.S. leaders might become defendants in war crimes prosecutions. Yet, our government was baffled when the United States -- the world's human rights policeman -- was voted off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Most of the Serbs I have spoken with are outraged by Milosevic's alleged atrocities, and they feel he should be tried and punished for crimes he committed. But there is a widespread perception in Yugoslavia that Serbs are being collectively targeted for what their leaders have done. Many feel that Milosevic and other indicted Yugoslav leaders should be tried first in Yugoslavia for crimes committed against the Yugoslav people.

A fundamental principle of international law is complementarity: the international tribunals complement - they don't supplant - the courts of nation states. Most of the former Latin American military leaders charged with human rights abuses that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s are facing justice in their respective countries. The Yugoslavians should be able to judge their own leaders before the they are judged by the international community.

Count 1 of the Indictment against Slobodan Milosevic charges him with "Deportation, a crime against humanity . . ." He must be accountable for what he has done. But the U.S.-engineered deportation of Milosevic is a crime against the people of Yugoslavia.

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Pacification for a Pipeline: Explaining the U.S. Military Presence in the Balkans

Despite President George W. Bush’s rhetoric about withdrawing our forces from the Balkans, we can expect a strong continuing U.S. presence there. Why? It’s all about the transportation of massive oil resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans, and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.

Although NATO ostensibly bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing, the bombing was actually part of a strategy of containment, to keep the region safe for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline that will transport Caspian oil through Macedonia and Albania. The pipeline is slated to carry 750,000 barrels a day, worth about $600 million a month at current prices.

Cooperation of the Albanians with the pipeline project was likely contingent on the U.S. helping them wrest control of Kosovo from the Serbs. The U.S. seeks to contain Macedonia as well, supporting both sides in the conflagration there. Military Professional Resources International, a mercenary company on contract to the Pentagon, has trained both the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Macedonian army. MPRI also supplied and trained the Croatian army in 1994 and 1995 before the Croatians cleansed more than 100,000 Serbs from the Krajina region.

The bombing was not aimed at ethnic cleansing. It was part of U.S.-run NATO’s eastward expansion as a counterweight to Russia, which wants the Caspian oil pipeline to run through its territory. NATO, created during the Cold War to protect Western Europe from the Soviets, should have disbanded after the breakup of the USSR.

But a 1992 draft of the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance advocated continued U.S. leadership in NATO by “discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role.” Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said, if we decide to expand NATO, “we should not fear that Russia will object; we will do it because it is in our interest.”

Bush is walking a delicate tightrope. He calls for Europe to do the grunt work in the Balkans, but also wants to prevent the European Union from becoming more powerful than U.S.-led NATO. A U.S. Army officer stationed in Bosnia, speaking anonymously to the Los Angeles Times, observed wryly, “The only thing the Europeans need us Americans for is the leadership.”

The U.S. has invested too much in the region to pull out. After the NATO bombing campaign, the U.S. spent $36.6 million to build Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo. The largest American foreign military base constructed since Vietnam, Bondsteel was built by the Brown & Root Division of Halliburton, the world’s biggest oil services corporation, which was run by Richard Cheney before he was tapped for Vice-President.

NATO’s bombs, never sanctioned by the United Nations, were not “humanitarian intervention.” The alleged mass graves were never found by the FBI, and the 10,000-11,000 bodies NATO touted turned out to number about 2000-3000, mostly in KLA strongholds. Even the Marine Corps Gazette concluded after the bombing that the “resulting deaths of thousands of Serbian soldiers, civilians, and Kosovar Albanians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more can hardly be viewed as a victory for humanitarianism.”

It is the purview of the United Nations, not the United States, to authorize humanitarian intervention. If the U.S. really wanted to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Yugoslavia, it would encourage the International Monetary Fund to forgive $14 billion in loans from prior regimes, finance reparations to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by its bombs, and remove the U.S. troops from the region.

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The Crime of Aggression: What Is It and Why Doesn't the U.S. Want the International Criminal Court to Punish It?

From February 26 through March 8, the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court met in an attempt to forge agreement on defining and punishing the crime of aggression. The Rome Statute for the ICC, written in 1998, will take effect after ratification by 60 states. It specifies the Court will hear charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. But the drafters, unable to agree on a definition and scheme for punishing aggression, left that to an amendment process which allows statutory changes to become operative seven years after the Statute takes effect.

The United States has sought to ensure the ICC's legal processes do not jeopardize its role as global superpower by subjecting U.S. leaders to prosecution. It has consistently resisted definitions and jurisdictional provisions that may challenge U.S. impunity for wars of aggression.

Following the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing . . . 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." Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal, labeled the crime of aggression "the greatest menace of our times."

At Nuremberg, for the first time, individuals were held criminally accountable for waging a war of aggression. The Nuremberg Charter proclaims the principle that "individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by individual states." The fact that a defendant acted under orders from a superior did not absolve him of responsibility, although it was considered in mitigation of punishment.

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was also established following World War II, to try Japanese military and political leaders accused of committing atrocities. United States leaders who were responsible for at least two of the most heinous war crimes in the history of the world – the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – as well as unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific and the "Great Turkey Shoot," were never brought before these two tribunals.

Only the vanquished Germans and Japanese were held accountable for their war crimes and crimes of aggression. In the words of Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, dissenting at the Tokyo Tribunal, that was "victor's justice."

The United States and its "victorious" allies are once again escaping responsibility for war crimes, this time for those committed against the people of Yugoslavia. For although several war criminals have been brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, it has refused to indict NATO leaders, in spite of criticism from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Walter Rockler, another Nuremberg prosecutor, has said the United States initiated a war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He wrote in the Chicago Tribune: "The notion that humanitarian violations can be redressed with random destruction and killing by advanced technological means is inherently suspect . . . This is mere pretext for our arrogant assertion of dominance and power in defiance of international law."

More than 50 years before, in his report to the State Department, Justice Jackson wrote: "No political or economic situation can justify" the crime of aggression. He also said: "If certain acts in 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." An impartial international criminal tribunal is necessary to prevent "victor's justice."

The major points of contention at the recent ICC PrepCom Working Group on Aggression centered around the d