The War in Iraq is Illegal

FPF-fwd. from the excellent news source ''Information Clearing House''*

Among the news you won't find on CNN is today's confirmation of what most people with common sense understand: the war in Iraq is illegal.

In England, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, described the planned invasion of Iraq as a "crime of aggression".

The interview by the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan for the BBC* has nearly totally disappeared in the mainstream's 'Memory Hole' and is by them never quoted nor broadcasted.

The fact that the war is illegal, makes everybody supporting it one way or the other - and especially people in the media [those are NOT journalists] - guilty of crimes against humanity, in other words: war criminals.

The very interesting article in the british Guardian:

Revealed: the rush to war 

Richard Norton-Taylor

02/23/05 - "The Guardian" - The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal.

The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted it set up

a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court.

And a parliamentary answer issued days before the war in the name of Lord Goldsmith - but presented by ministers as his official opinion before the crucial Commons vote - was drawn up in Downing Street, not in the attorney general's chambers.

The full picture of how the government manipulated the legal justification for war, and political pressure placed on its most senior law officer, is revealed in the Guardian today.*

It appears that Lord Goldsmith never wrote an unequivocal formal legal opinion that the invasion was lawful, as demanded by Lord Boyce, chief of defence staff at the time.

The Guardian can also disclose that in her letter of resignation in protest against the war, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, described the planned invasion of Iraq as a "crime of aggression".

She said she could not agree to military action in circumstances she described as "so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law". [end quote]


You can find the full story at Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6qeun


FOOTNOTES/LINKS TO THE ABOVE:

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan: 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC - Url.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm

''The Lancet'' and the ''Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health'' report: ''Over 100.000 killed in the illegal Iraq war'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5gys7

Bush interv. ABC: No WMD's but many killed: "It was worth it". - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6bal9

Former Secr. of State Madeleine Albright in her comment on half a million dead children in Iraq: "We think it's worth it" On CBS 60' Minutes - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8

Iraq Body Count - Url.: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

A crime against humanity is an act of persecution against a group, so heinous as to warrant punishment under international law: Please scroll - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6rphj

Latest international 'Google News' on the fake election and resistance in Iraq - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/42krg

Former PM Wim Kok - and other Dutch government's war criminals - heard in Court - Url: http://tinyurl.com/662pp - It can be done!

Fwd. by:

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://tinyurl.com/4ar5e
Editor : Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/6v8ru
The Netherlands
FPF@Chello.nl

The Dutch author this far has worked abroad 4 decades for international media as a foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. At present 'Persona non Grata' in Holland :-)

Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism ! - What Bush stands for? Graves! - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/689ko - US Senator Hollings agrees: 'We have caused more terrorism than we have gotten rid of.' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2bqza

Help the troops come home! Url.: http://www.bringemhome.org - We need them badly to fight our so called 'governments' - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

HR

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

-0-

KILLING GRASSHOPPERS AND PEOPLE ?

"They say it's a program for killing the grasshoppers, but they are killing us too! And on the labels of the Dursban chemicals they use for the spraying, it even says that the United Nations FAO and the European Union is paying for this!"

By Henk Ruyssenaars

FPF - Feb. 22nd 2005 - Years ago it already was known that spraying grasshoppers with (DOW) chemicals was killing people too, via air, soil and water, while trying to exterminate the grasshoppers plague and their swarms in the North West African countries.

But any further interest in the human victims, from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations which is supposed to control this pest, is near to nil. ''As long as the UN and EU pay; all is OK !'' - goes the 'gravy train' song. And there's too much money involved to take the health and lives of people into account apparently.

Dursban is the trade name for chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide, a product that proved to have the nerve agent effects that Rachel Carson warned about in her book 'Silent Spring'. [Url.: http://tinyurl.com/3ubnx]

It was tested on prisoners in New York in 1971 and in 1998 at a lab in Lincoln, Nebraska.

It replaced DDT when DDT was banned in 1972.

A huge seller, in June 2000, EPA limited its use and forced it off the market at the end of 2004. FAO's specialist mr. James W. Everts* - who is a Dutch 'environment officer' from the Locust Group ECLO at FAO-AGP in Rome (Italy) - has not yet answered a letter with polite questions which was sent to him two months ago. When asked again one month ago, he wrote ''he needed more time''.

But a month later no answer to the questions has arrived. They do not seem to care very much concerning the poisened people and their complaints. - [The UN-'Gravy Train' is still in force apparently]

But now again a friend - who lives with his family in the area - phoned and complained: "They are not only killing the grasshoppers with this Dursban poison, but we get sick and die sometimes too." He told about the women
getting miscarriages, and children which are born malformed; looking like deformed thalidomide (Softenon) babies.

The babies and people are buried, but the grasshoppers - like the spraying - come back every year...

PARIS DAKAR RALLY

After living and working in the area for ten years as journalist/correspondent - one still remembers the comlaints of the people in the Sahel villages, which during the 'Rally Paris Dakar' - saw docters and para-medics with million-dollar ambulances race and fly by, while the local population many times not even could afford an Aspirin for the headaches
after the spraying.

Nobody stopped to ask why they where sick,
and what eventually the reason might be.

FIVE YEARS AGO: US BANS DURSBAN

Coming June - (2005) - it will be five years ago that the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally published a report about the dangers and the Dursban pesticide's negative effects, which have actually been known since 1972.

Dursban, the EPA concluded, is 'high risk stuff' and the EPA announced: "Decision Effectively Bans Dursban From Stores:

The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that one of the most commonly used pesticides, a compound sold as Dursban and found in dozens of home- and-garden products, may be more dangerous to people than previously thought, according to sources familiar with the decision.''

DURSBAN IS ALSO USED TO SPRAY THE AREAS WHERE THE LOCUSTS SWARM.

* UN, FAO and many other so called 'experts' have been dealing with criminal multinationals* like DOW Chemical (Napalm-Vietnam/Bophal-India etc.) and similar $billions worth of pesticides since 1972.

But the people which are victim of the global pesticide maffia still die, and the babies are still deformed. When the 'gravy train experts' had time for it during the latest conferences, they talked about the usual ''New strategies needed to secure food and safeguard ecosystems" - because it is understood that the chemicals poison the whole area: water, soil and air.

But - according to FAO [7 January 2005] - ''Despite recent improvements, the Desert Locust situation remains serious in W-Africa where vigilance and intensive control operations are still needed.'' In Northwest Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania continued intensive control operations against immature swarms during last December.

Late forming swarms from summer breeding in the Sahel reinvaded parts of southeastern Mauritania and eastern Senegal. About 880,000 ha were treated from the air and on the ground in West and Northwest Africa during December 2004, compared to 2.2 million in the previous month.

The total area treated since the beginning of the upsurge (October 2003) has now reached 12 million ha, according to FAO's latest Desert Locust bulletin.

Countries in West and Northwest Africa have made great efforts in controlling the swarms coming out from the Sahel, but only in March-April 2005 will it be possible to have clear indications on what scale breeding will occur and on what scale the Sahel will be reinvaded in summer," FAO now has warned.

The pesticide maffia finds healthy alternatives not profitable, so the sprayed people have no choice:

They have to choose between pest and cholera.

Henk Ruyssenaars

* The annual worldwide sales of pesticides for example are in the region of 30 to 40 billion US dollars. The following ten top chemical companies share over 96% of such sales:

Nr - Company - Description - Sales region

1 Monsanto USA - Multinational - India, etc.

2 Bayer - Germany - Multinational US, Asia, L. America

3 Zeneca UK - Multinational - China, Thailand

4 AgrEvo Germany - Multinational - US, China etc.

5 Dupont USA - Various countries

6 Rhône-Poulenc France - Various countries

7 DowElanco - Various countries

8 Amer. Cyanamid USA - Various countries

9 BASF German Various countries

10 Novartis Swiss Various countries

(A) Ciba-Geigy - Swiss - N. America & Europe - Multinational -

(B) Sandoz Swiss - Various countries

Companies listed under (A) and (B) have merged and are referred
to as Novartis. This is one of the largest multinational companies.

Questions? Try asking FAO-Environment Officer:
James W. Everts - Locust Group/ECLO

FAO-AGP - Rome, Italy

Footnotes/Links:

* "Decision Effectively Bans Dursban From Stores'' - Washington Post - June 1 - 2002 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/3kdwv

* Desert Locust upsurge in 2004 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5gfhe

* FAO Emergency Prevention System. The Desert Locust component. Url.: http://tinyurl.com/4h653

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://tinyurl.com/4ar5e
Editor : Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/6v8ru
The Netherlands
FPF (at) Chello.nl

The Dutch author this far has worked abroad 4 decades for international media as a foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. At present 'Persona non Grata' in Holland :-)

Former PM Wim Kok and other Dutch Govt's war criminals in Court - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/662pp - It can and must be done!

Help the troops come home! Url.: http://www.bringemhome.org - We need them badly to fight our so called 'governments': Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

HR

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html
See also: http://tinyurl.com/5gfhe

MEDIA COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES

FPF-fwd. - MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

ALERT: MEDIA COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES

FPF-26-04-2002-Journalists kill: Url.: http://tinyurl.com/qpny

'' Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.'' - Jean Rostand

NUREMBERG - ARTICLE SIX - February 23, 2005

On February 13, The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an international peoples‚ initiative, declared much of the Western media guilty of deception and incitement to violence in its reporting on Iraq. The tribunal, meeting in Rome, made its pronouncement after taking testimony from independent journalists, media professors, activists, and a member of the European Parliament.

The panel of WTI judges noted that the United States and British governments had deliberately impeded the work of journalists and knowingly spread lies and disinformation. But the panel also accused the Western corporate media of filtering and suppressing the truth. The tribunal described how journalists had violated article six of the Nuremberg Tribunal which states:

"Leaders, organisers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes (crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity) are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such a plan." (''Media Held Guilty of Deception'' - Inter Press Service, February 14, 2005)

The media's complicity in war crimes continues unabated, of course. Thus, in covering the results from Iraq's January 30 election, Peter Marshall announced grandly on the BBC's Newsnight television programme:

"So, democracy has come to Iraq." (BBC2, Newsnight, February 14, 2005)

Instantly revealing the usual bias in mainstream reporting, Marshall added:

"Things could be worse... the rule by mullahs, a Shia theocracy, looks less likely now with the Shia list‚s failure to reach 50 per cent of the vote."

He meant things could be worse for Western interests, of course - the real concern. John Pilger has noted how in the media, "one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity. This leads journalists to make a distinction between people who matter and people who don't matter."

(The Progressive Interview, by David Barsamian, November 2002, http://www.progressive.org/nov02/intv1102.html)

Put crudely, the impoverished people of Iraq do not matter to the top 5% of the British population who own 45% of the nation's wealth and who run the country.

Elite journalists are very much members of this 5% club. And so they take for granted that democracy‚ for Iraqis means the freedom to make 'reasonable' choices as defined by the people who matter. To do otherwise is not to express democratic freedom of choice, it is to invite bombing and invasion.

The disregard for the people of Iraq - as clearly evidenced by long-standing Western support for Saddam Hussein, and by the genocidal sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003 - makes the sudden determination ''to bring them liberty and democracy'' very hard to swallow.

GUYS WITH TURBANS

How do we know democracy has come? Newsnight‚s Jon Leyne explained. He noted that the victorious Shia United Iraqi Alliance needed to choose a new Iraqi prime minister. There were two main candidates, "both religious Shiites, but also both acceptable to the Americans".

Acceptable, in other words, to a superpower army occupying the country and launching major military offensives against centres of population. Now that's democracy!

Leyne continued: "We call them a religious Shiite alliance... but they're very sensitive to what the Americans would feel if guys with turbans took over this country."

''Guys with turbans'' sounds like a polite version of ''towel heads''. But Leyne had a point - everyone knows that Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush I, was stating obvious truth when he said in April 2003:

"What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do?

We're surely not going to let them take over." (Quoted, Walter Gibbs, ''Scowcroft Urges Wide Role For the UN in Postwar Iraq'' - The New York Times, April 9, 2003)

Everyone knows it, but still every journalist under the sun describes the Iraqi election as „democratic‰ and ''successful'' - superb examples of what 20th century American foreign affairs advisor Reinhold Niebuhr called ''necessary illusions'' and ''emotionally potent over-simplifications''.

Leyne added that bringing the Sunnis into the political process might not stop the suicide bombers, but it could split the insurgency and drain popular support.

Nowhere in Newsnight‚s review of the election results was there mention of whether the political process might help lessen the far worse violence committed against Iraqis by the US-UK „coalition„. Last year, a report in The Lancet found that eighty-four per cent of an excess 100,000 Iraqi deaths since the invasion had been caused by the actions of "coalition" forces, with 95 per cent of those deaths due to air strikes and artillery.

(http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html)

Newsnight also failed to mention the prospects for alleviating the ''coalition's'' criminal mismanagement of its already illegal occupation. A 2004 post-war nutritional assessment carried out by UNICEF in Baghdad found that acute child malnutrition or wasting had nearly doubled from four per cent in 2003, to almost eight per cent.

UNICEF also report that the under-5 infant mortality for 2003 was 110,000 in occupied Iraq, 292,000 in occupied Afghanistan, as compared to 1,000 in the invading and occupying country Australia (countries that have populations of 25, 24 and 20 million, respectively).

(Cited, Gideon Polya, ''Non-reportage of US-linked infant mass mortality' - December 23, 2004, http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2004/12/816196.shtml)

As if reporting this catastrophe from some far-distant galaxy, the New York Times describes Iraq as „a country with high unemployment, mediocre public services and some of the highest crime rates in the world''. (Adriana Lins de Albuquerque, Micahel O'Hanlon and Amy Unikwiicz, ''The State of Iraq: An Update'' - The New York Times, February 21, 2005)

WHAT FUTURE HISTORIANS WILL SAY

In the autumn of 1999 US Vice President Dick Cheney - then CEO of Halliburton - said:

"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand... So where is this oil going to come from?... The Middle East with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies."

(Quoted, Ray McGovern, ''We Need the Oil, Right? So What's the Problem?'' - Truthout, http://uruknet.info/?s1=2&p=9699&s2=16)

Reviewing these comments, Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, notes that it will be entirely obvious to future historians that oil was a key factor in the decision to invade Iraq:

„They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a world oil supply with terminal illness, and the fact that (as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it) Iraq ''swims on a sea of oil. It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn.'' (Ibid)

But for now a very different version prevails as the 'common sense' view. To select at random, the Daily Telegraph notes:
„The success of the election does not absolve Britain and the United States from their duty as guardians of democracy. That role has historically been the destiny of the English-speaking peoples.'' (Leader, ''The people of Iraq speak'' - The Daily Telegraph, February 14, 2005)

At a stroke Britain and the United States are transformed from illegal invaders on utterly false pretexts, the killers of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, into ''guardians of democracy''.

Alas, one group of people rejects the Telegraph's view: the Iraqis themselves. A recent US-run poll of Baghdadis showed that one per cent agreed that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq. Five per cent thought the goal was to help Iraqis.

The majority assumed the US wants to control Iraq's resources and to use its new bases there to control the region. Demonstrating insight far beyond the capacity of most Western journalists, Baghdadis felt that the US did want ''democracy'', but not one that would allow Iraqis to run their lives "without US pressure and influence."

(Quoted, Noam Chomsky, ''Imperial Presidency'' - Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20041217.htm)

All of this will indeed one day be obvious. But not now, for we live in a time when the conforming influence of concentrated political and economic power has devastated the media‚s capacity for honest and rational thought.

As long as journalists continue to submit to this oppression of the human spirit, they will continue to be complicit in the gravest imaginable crimes against humanity.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to Peter Marshall - Email: peter.marshall@bbc.co.uk

Jon Leyne - Email: jon.leyne@bbc.co.uk

Newsnight editor, Peter Barron - Email: peter.barron@bbc.co.uk

Please also send all emails to us at Media Lens - Email: editor@medialens.org
This is a free service. However, financial support is vital. Currently only one of us is able to work full-time on this project. Please consider giving less to the corporate media and donating more to Media Lens: http://www.medialens.org/donate.html
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FOOTNOTES/LINKS TO THE ABOVE:

Annan: 'The war in Iraq is illegal' -BBC - Url.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm

''The Lancet'' and the ''Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health'' report: ''Over 100.000 killed in the illegal Iraq war'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5gys7

Bush interv. ABC: No WMD's but many killed: "It was worth it" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6bal9

Former Secr. of State Madeleine Albright in her comment on half a million dead children in Iraq: "We think it's worth it" On CBS 60' Minutes - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8

Iraq Body Count - Url.: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

A crime against humanity is an act of persecution against a group, so heinous as to warrant punishment under international law: Please scroll - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6rphj

Latest international 'Google News' on the fake election and the violence in Iraq - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/42krg

Former PM Kok - and other Dutch Government's war criminals - heard in Court - Url: http://tinyurl.com/662pp - It can be done!

Fwd. by:

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://tinyurl.com/4ar5e
Editor : Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/6v8ru
The Netherlands
FPF@Chello.nl