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Recent Stories
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
Gilad
Atzmon
Strategic Blunders by American Generals
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
26, 2003
Reaping What Has Been Sown
Prisoners,
Torture and Hypocrisy
By DAVID LINDORFF
When
I was a journalist working in China back in the early 1990s, I was furious
when two administrations in the U.S.--both the first Bush Administration
and the Clinton Administration--condoned executions of American death
row prisoners from foreign countries who had been arrested and tried
without their home countries' embassies being notified. The current
Bush Administration has taken the same cavalier approach to international
law also, which clearly requires that an embassy be notified when one
of its nationals is arrested in a country, and further, that that embassy
be permitted to have access to the detained individual and to provide
a lawyer.
I
was furious because America's willful and repeated violation of this
basic international agreement was a direct threat to my personal health
and safety. I was going out into the Chinese countryside as a journalist--often
without the benefit or a journalist's visa, which can take weeks to
obtain and which often is denied--and was at risk of being arrested
by Chinese security forces. In fact, I was brought in and interrogated
by the Public Security Bureau during one such journalistic venture to
a relatively remote area of Anhui Province, and I can report that the
experience was harrowing.
How
could I hope to have the protection and help of my embassy in China
if my own country was thumbing its nose at international law?
Now
we see the same thing happening during the war on Iraq, where the implications
are even more serious as--predictably--.American soldiers begin to be
captured by Iraqi forces.
The
Bush administration is loudly decrying their use by Iraq as propaganda
on Arab television, where they have been shown being questioned about
what they were doing in Iraq. It's good domestic PR. After all, their
treatment, while so far thankfully not brutal, is in violation of the
Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. But nobody outside the U.S.
is going to take the American protests seriously.
The
sad truth is that the U.S. is in no position to make a complaint, for
America too has been in gross violation of that convention. Iraqi soldiers
taken prisoner during this war have been marched before American television
cameras, they have been blindfolded and terrorized by U.S. soldiers
taking them into custody, and their faces have been displayed on American
television--all clear violations of international law.
But
the U.S. is doing even worse with regard to other POWs it has captured
in Afghanistan. Along with most international legal scholars, I would
argue that anyone fighting U.S. forces in that country were soldiers
in a war, and that once captured, they should have been held in accordance
with the Geneva Convention. They have not been so treated, however.
Certain
of those captured have been either turned over to other countries' security
forces--for example those of Egypt or Pakistan--where they reportedly
have been subjected to torture, or they have been held at a U.S. base
in Afghanistan, and also subjected to conditions that can only be described
as torture, or in some cases--well over 600--they have been transported,
bound and hooded, to a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where
they are caged in individual pens and held in a legal limbo--not prisoners
and not prisoners of war.
Arguably
the non-Afghan members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan might be termed "unlawful
combatants" by the U.S., and denied POW status, though this is
making a rather fine distinction. Al Qaeda fighters, while they might
have originally been in Afghanistan as terrorist trainees, seem to have
been acting as a legitimate ally of the government of Afghanistan at
the time of their capture, fighting alongside government forces. But
even granting that distinction, the U.S. also has taken captured Afghan
Taliban fighters, who clearly were the official army of the government
of Afghanistan, off to Guantanamo, denying them too, any POW status.
The
whole world sees this treatment of captured Afghan fighters as the most
outrageous violation of international law and the Geneva Convention,
yet the U.S., even knowing it was about to become involved in a war
in the Middle East, went ahead with this outlaw behavior.
All
it has done in the process is open the door to similar abuse of captured
Americans. After all, if the U.S. is seen as fighting an illegal war
of aggression, might not Iraq decide that any soldiers it catches are
not POWs at all, but rather "unlawful combatants"?
One
has to wonder at the hubris of Bush Administration policy-makers, who
seem to think that they can trample over any international rules and
agreements they want, without suffering any consequences.
The
same might be said of the charge that Fedayeen irregulars are violating
international law by dressing up in civilian clothes and attacking American
and British troops in Iraq by deceit. While this guerrilla war tactic
is clearly a violation of the international rules of war, which are
designed to minimize civilian casualties, we know that U.S. special
forces, such as the Delta Force troops, have also been dressing as local
civilians in the Afghanistan conflict (they were shown doing this in
the American media), and it strains belief to think that they are not
doing the same thing now in Iraq.
The
Bush Administration is counting on the jingoistic American media to
ignore its own blatant violations of international law in the Afghanistan
and Iraq wars, while it loudly condemns Iraq's violations as evidence
of the evil of the enemy. So far their hopes have been largely rewarded
domestically. But the rest of the world is seeing this two-faced policy
on POWs for what it is.
So
we have the pathetic picture of President Bush, with a straight face,
condemning first Iraq for violating the Geneva Convention on POW treatment
and then Russia for "violating U.N. sanctions" against Iraq!
This from a Commander-in-Chief who has condoned and continues to condone
the most egregious violations of prisoner of war rules, and who has
violated the most basic part of the U.N. charter by initiating an unprovoked
war of aggression against a member state without the sanction of the
Security Council.
An
old adage about war has long been: the winner makes the rules. But an
older adage should be on the mind of both this chickenhawk administration
and the minds of the soldiers who are being asked to put their lives
on the line for its ill-conceived aggressive policies: as you sow, so
shall your reap.
David
Lindorff is the author of Killing Time, an investigation into
the death penalty case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Find
out more about Lindorff on his website.
Today's Features
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gilad
Atzmon
Strategic Blunders by American Generals
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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