[This
is an important article by Christof Lehmann, James Henry Fetzer, Alex Mezyaev
and our own Chris Black, on the abuses of International Justice. For
those who might doubt that jurisprudence is key to geopolitics and the spread
of global privatization, a glance at the Sunday (Aug. 19) NYTs Op/Ed by Russian
ex-pat Misha Friedman, "For Russians, Corruption is Just a Way of
Life," might be enlightening.
As usual, in its halting, fact-enfeebled,
propagandistic cover for Western global criminality, The US Newspaper-of-Record
sheds more light on its own client-supported corruption than on any malfeasance
on the part of its age-old antagonists, the Soviet Union and Russia: the only
examples of Russian corruption cited by the Times' Quisling editorialist are
both concerned with the Russian judiciary: the case of imprisoned
oligarch Mikhail Kodorkovsky, once Russia's richest business man now locked
down for fraud and tax evasion, and the talentless agit-porn troupe, Pussy
Riot, putatively convicted for hooliganism and inciting religious hatred but
unarguably serving as agents of a foreign power trying to subvert the Russian
government. As with Democracy, the power of Waste Capital is likewise
toxic to Justice.--mc]
The
US/UN/NATO Race for Global Full Spectrum Dominance. (2/4)
by
Christopher
Black, James Henry Fetzer,
Alex
Mezyaev & Christof Lehmann
The Dismantling of
International Law and a Return to Global Barbarism.
In recent
decades, an unprecedented deterioration, one might say, a “collapse” of
international law has occurred. This deterioration has been driven by the US
and NATO, and their refusal to abide by the long-established legal principles
of international jurisprudence in all its aspects: peaceful coexistence, human
rights, military conventions and others, which were established over hundreds
of years.
Many of these
principles and laws were implemented after events of unspeakable human
suffering. Unless this regression into global barbarism is opposed by all
necessary popular, political, diplomatic, economic, legal, and, if necessary,
military means; humanity will descend into a state of global barbarism and
unimaginable atrocities. The most serious deteriorations over the past two
decades have been:
The deterioration of
the principles enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia and of National
Sovereignty.
The treaty of
Westphalia xxii
was signed by the
European powers in 1648, after a religious and political power struggle between
European empires resulted in a war that lasted over thirty years. The treaty
defines the sovereignty of nation-states and the principle of non-interference
in the internal affairs of sovereign nations by outside forces. The treaty of
Westphalia was one of the international legal covenants used as guidelines for
the drafting of the Charter of the United Nations, and it is considered by many
as the most important principle of international law with respect to the
regulation of bi-lateral and multilateral diplomatic and political relations.
The principle of
non-interference in domestic affairs and the principle of national sovereignty
enshrined in the UN Charter are increasingly being challenged by those who
argue, as do the Americans, that the “international community”, aka the
Americans, has a “responsibility to protect” civilians in cases where their
sovereign governments are not able to do so, or when the sovereign government
is committing severe violations of other principles, like Human Rights. A
resolution implementing this “responsibility to protect” was adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly in 2009, in violation of the UN Charter (xxiii).
This false
responsibility was first called “humanitarian intervention”, but the term, it
seems, could only be used in propaganda when a crisis was already in full
swing. The slogan “responsibility to protect” was coined to create strategic
flexibility so “intervention” could be ordered even before the US had succeeded
in creating a major crisis. The ”responsibility to protect” (R2P) also had
the advantage of claiming moral authority while, of course, never addressing
just how this “responsibility” fell to the USA or why it is applied only
against its enemies and never its vassals and allies.
Although the
guiding arguments for the primacy of Human Rights and the “R2P” may seem
convincing at first glance, a closer analysis reveals that the erosion of
national sovereignty brought about by “R2P” opens a Pandora’s box of serious
problems.
The first
instance of R2P, which was then still known as “humanitarian intervention”,
being used to override national sovereignty was the NATO intervention in
Yugoslavia during the reign of Clinton Administration Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright.
It is now a well-established
and well-documented fact that the internal conflict in Yugoslavia was
instigated by an alliance of Slovenian and Croatian separatists with ties to
WWII German National Socialism, and had covert support from the German
government and the German Intelligence Service, the BND (xxiv)
and the Vatican.
The BND provided the first weapons, previously-owned Bulgarian AK 47 assault
rifles, to the Slovenian and Croatian separatists.
As the conflict
escalated and the country was broken up along ethnic and religious lines, the
USA and other Western powers became increasingly involved, and this resulted in
NATO’s “intervention”, in fact, its outright aggression against the Yugoslav
Federal Republic, perpetrated without United Nations Security Council approval
and in complete violation of the Charters of the UN and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. NATO member
states collaborated with a wide variety of terrorist organizations, including
al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s mujahedin.(xxv)
The USA financed,
trained and armed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/UCK), which was heavily
supported by al Qaeda brigades and was financed, to a large extent, by heroin
trafficking from Afghanistan into Europe and North America. (xxvi)
(xxvii)
The war on and
the dismemberment of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, according to the late
French Brigadier General Pierre-Marie Gallois, had been planned and prepared by
the European powers in unofficial meetings on a farm in Germany from 1976; more
than a decade prior to the first public demands for secession from Yugoslavia
by Slovenian and Croatian separatists. Brigadier-General Gallois was the French
representative to these meetings and disclosed many of the details in a
stunning interview. (xxviii)
(xxix)
According to
General Gallois, one of the principle motivating factors for the covert and,
subsequently, overt war on Yugoslavia was that Yugoslavia was the sole Russian
ally in the Balkans and the last functioning socialist state in Europe. Other
motivating factors were that Germany wanted to re-establish the geo-political
influence in the region it had lost after the two World Wars of the 20th
Century. Yet another factor was the need to define a post-Cold War role for
NATO. In fact, as the late French Brigadier General pointed out, the war on
Yugoslavia provided the model for the war on Iraq and subsequent
wars.(ibid.)(xxx)
The sole
correlation between Human Rights and the NATO intervention into
Yugoslavia/Serbia, as well as its ongoing military occupation of Kosovo, is
that humanitarian crises were cynically fabricated with the intention of
creating a pretext for a “humanitarian intervention”, which meant, in fact, a
military assault justified by the “R2P”, the euphonic responsibility to
protect.
The United
States, by preempting the function of the United Nations with an arrogant claim
to this invented responsibility, degraded the principles of the Treaty of
Westphalia and the UN Charter, both of which guarantee the sovereignty of
nations and the concomitant right of peoples to self-determination.
It is nothing
less than Western colonialism justified once more by the “white man’s
burden”. In a recent article, Dr.
Henry Kissinger discussed whether nations like Syria and other Arab States
would even qualify for the protection against interference into their internal
affairs set forth in the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia. (xxxi)
Kissinger argues
that almost all Arab States, with the possible exceptions of Iran,
Turkey and Egypt, are nations whose borders had been more or less arbitrarily
drawn by former colonial powers, and that it was, therefore, questionable
whether they could rightfully be treated as nation states and be protected by
the provisions of the Treaty of Westphalia. Iran, Turkey and Egypt, on the other hand, as Kissinger
argues, have a long history as nations.
One of the
authors of this artice, Dr. Lehmann has written an article in response to Dr.
Kissinger, arguing that Kissinger´s interpretation is representative of the
condescending, ethnocentric, colonialist attitude of Western nations toward
countries the world over. It is also symptomatic of the social constructionism
that guides Western foreign policy. While Kissinger questions the national
sovereignty of almost all middle eastern States on the grounds that their
borders were arbitrarily drawn by former colonial powers, he does not mention
Israel, whose borders also were arbitrarily drawn by the same former colonial
powers. (xxxii)
Neither does he
mention the fact that the United States, itself, is also an artificial creation
born from the extermination of the native peoples, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase
from France, and the acquisition of Florida from Spain, the War of 1812 against
Canada, the war of conquest against Mexico in 1846, the war secession
between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America,
known as the American Civil War of 1861-1865, and the expansion into
non-contiguous territories like Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
The most recent
example of the successful erosion of national sovereignty to set up a pretext
for the Responsibility to Protect is NATO´s abuse of UNSC Resolution 1973 on
Libya (2011). (xxxiii)
As the UN Charter
requires that resolutions have the concurrant approval of all permanent members
of the Security Council, it can be argued that Resolution 1973 was not adopted.
Russia and China abstained. An abstention is not a concurrent vote. It may have
been that Russia and China expected that their abstentions would be enough to
keep the resolution from passing.
Legally they were correct.
But regardless of whether Russia and China were taking a calculated
risk, or whether Russia, which was then being led by President Dmitry Medvedev,
was trying to appease the USA/NATO, thereby leaving China to take the blowback
from the USA and NATO and isolate the GCC member states, along with Israel,
only a future historical analyses will determine.
What is certain,
however, is that both the political leaderships of Russia and China must have
been aware that even though a UNSC resolution is arguably invalid unless all
Security Council members vote in favor of it, it is a long-established
political practice that only a veto is sufficient to block an intervention.
Since the first Russian (then the USSR) abstention on UNSC Resolution 4 (1946)
on Spain, an abstention has not been considered enough to prevent the adoption
of a resolution even though this practice is not legal under the UN Charter.
The claim that the
USA, France and the UK violated the UN Charter was further substantiated when
the USA and its allies exceeded the terms of their own resolution and conducted
a war of aggression against Libya. A repetition of this violation, directed
against Syria, has so far effectively been checked by Russia and China vetoing
Security Council resolutions on sanctions and a no-fly zone against Syria.
The Deterioration of
the Geneva Convention.
The Geneva Convention
(xxxiv)
is made up of
four treaties and an additional three protocols that establish standards of
international law for the humanitarian treatment of participants in and victims
of war. It was updated to its current version in 1949, following two World Wars
of unspeakable violence, and so it is, like the Treaty of Westphalia, a
reaction to the incomprehensible acts of violence and untold human suffering
that have affected vast populations. The Geneva Convention defines the wartime
rights of both civilian and military prisoners, affords protection to the
wounded, and establishes sanctuary for civilians in war zones. It also
specifies the rights and protections that are afforded to non-combatants. Since
the onset of the US-led “War on Terror” in 2001, the Geneva Convention has been
systematically undermined by the USA and other NATO countries.
The systematic erosion
of the Geneva Convention includes:
• The illegitimate
use of the term “unlawful combatants” (xxxv)
and the indefinite
imprisonment of prisoners of war in places like Guantanamo without regard for
the norms of the Geneva Conventions.
• The use of the term
“enhanced interrogation techniques” (xxxvi)
in an attempt to
legitimize unspeakable acts of torture, including water-boarding, sensory
deprivation, religious chicanery, hours in painful forced positions while
subjecting prisoners to white noise, blindfolding, extreme temperatures, as
well as sheer physical brutality and even death.
• The use of the term
“Extraordinary Rendition” (xxxvii)
to mean the
kidnapping and disappearance of both combatants and non-combatants. As in
Operation Condor, conducted against leftists and progressives by the USA and
its vassals in South America in the 70s and 80s, people simply disappear.
Extraordinary rendition is a term used to cover up the fact that people are
delivered to third countries where they are tortured or subjected to
“enhanced interrogation techniques” or simply murdered. Extraordinary Rendition
is also covered by provisions of the Nuremberg Principles.
• Summary
executions of prisoners of war on the battlefield and the turning over of
combatants and non-combatants alike to “irregular” allied forces, in full
knowledge that the prisoners of war will be massacred, as has happened on
several occasions in Afghanistan.
• The delivery of
prisoners of war to criminal courts, that is, US military tribunals, to be
prosecuted for “terrorism”.
And it does not
stop there. A list of violations of the Geneva Conventions would fill volumes.
The results of this systematic violation of international law are outrages like
those reported at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
The renown social
psychologist Phillip G. Zimbardo, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus at Stanford
University (xxxviii),
worked as a
Defense expert for some of the soldiers who charged with committing atrocities
at Abu Ghraib. Zimbardo stated that the appalling acts of torture at that
former Baghdad central prison were not the result of “a few bad apples among
the troops”, as was claimed by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
but that they were the products of a carefully orchestrated situation, where
high level military and political cadres had to know that the invariable
outcomes would be torture and other abuse. (xxxix)
The obvious
danger of these systematic violations of international law is that they create
precedents and escalate the spiral of violence and abuse, rather than defuse a
conflict.
The irony is that
this systematic violation of international law is being carried out by those
nations who wage wars while claiming to be in the vanguard of the rule of law,
human rights, freedom, democracy and justice.
The Hague Conventions.
The Hague Conventions
(xl)
consist of two
treaties and regulate, among other things, the legality of war, declarations of
war and surrender, the use of legal and illegal weapons, military conduct,
command structures and command responsibility for the prevention and punishment
of crimes committed by subordinates.
Article one of
the first Chapter of the Hague Convention of 1909 states that the laws, rights
and duties of war not only apply to armies, but also to militia and volunteer
corps, and require those forces to fulfill the following conditions:
To be commanded
by a person who is responsible for his subordinates, to have a fixed
distinctive emblem visible at a distance, to carry arms openly, and to conduct
their operations in accordance to the customs of war. In countries where
militia or volunteer corps constitute the army, or part of it, they are
included under the denomination “army”. They also include inhabitants of a
territory which has not been occupied, who spontaneously take up arms to resist
the invading troops without having had time to organize themselves in
accordance with article one if they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs
of war.
The coining of
the term “unlawful-combatant” is designed to try to evade the provisions of the
Hague Convention, which clearly specifies that a population has the right to
armed resistance against an aggressor’s military forces.
The use of mercenary
forces, like the use of 20,000 mercenaries of the Al-Qaeda-associated Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group in the attempted subversion of Syria (xli),
erodes the
concept of command responsibility. It provides the USA/NATO with a loophole
through which they can get away with the most serious acts of terrorism,
massacres and military barbarism, all while NATO´s military leadership, as well
as members of the Ministries of Defense of NATO-member governments, enjoy
“plausible deniability” of their command decisions. Or so they think, because
it is clear in international law that the fact that US officers have real
command responsibility, that is, effective command and control over these
mercenaries, means they would be convicted for war crimes were they ever to be
brought before an international tribunal.
While the USA
reserves the right to exempt its citizens, including military personnel, from
being subjected to the authority of the International Criminal Court in The
Hague, it demands the prosecution of citizens of other nations, those in
opposition to US/NATO hegemony, for this illegal use of Private Military
forces. This is a systematic
circumvention of the Hague Conventions as PMCs (Private Military Contractors)
are forbidden by the International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use,
Financing and Training of Mercenaries after 4 December 1989. (xlii)
The use of PMC
mercenaries has increased greatly since the wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and
Iraq, and their use is growing under the rubric of “private security
contractors”, as if they were construction workers hired to carry out
military tasks. These mercenaries do not obey the rules or customs of war.
On the other
hand, members of the militia who legally resist US/NATO occupation are often
being turned over to police authorities of the government that has been
installed with the help of the USA/NATO, and can be sentenced to long prison
terms or execution because the protection afforded under The Hague Conventions
is being circumvented.
The Use of CIA
Personnel for Military Operations.
The USA is
increasingly making use of unmanned aerial vehicles for both observation and
kinetic military actions. None of the CIA´s “Gameboy Killers” in Langley,
Virginia, is operating within a legal military command structure. Whether a drone attack targets
resistance fighters, so-called terrorists, or the “Gameboy Killers” at Langley
blow away the bride and groom of a wedding party in Pakistan or Somalia, all of
these drone attacks are abrogations of the Hague Conventions.
Chapter two of
the Hague Conventions states that prisoners of war are in the custody of the
hostile government and not in the hands of the individuals or units that
captured them.
Both the use of
private military contractors and the use of allied- or state-sponsored
mercenary forces, including al Qaeda brigades, are breaches of The Hague
Conventions.
In Syria we are,
as of this writing, witnessing the wide spread torture and summary executions
of captured Syrian military personnel. Western intelligence personnel have been
captured after firing sniper rifles into peaceful demonstrations to enrage the
demonstrators against the Syrian government and police. None of them was
operating within The Hague Conventions and violations of many international
laws and conventions have been committed by the assassins of peaceful
demonstrators.
Extrajudicial
Executions and Assassinations.
The corruption
of US civilian and military legal systems and the violations of the US
Constitution have resulted in the extraordinary situation that the American
president not only has abolished the ancient right to habeas corpus, but he now
claims the right of a tyrant, the right to effect extrajudicial assassinations,
that is, to murder both US citizens and citizens of any other nation, anywhere
in the world, whom he claims are a “threat”.
In fact, President
Barack Obama takes pride in personally making life and death decisions by
determining whether one or another individual shall be targeted for
assassination. Death has become his plaything, like an American Caligula.
Notwithstanding
the audacity and arrogance of signing this practice into “law”, no executive
order, and no approval by a corrupted congress can establish any basis in
international law for this practice.
Each and every assassination is, in fact, nothing less than premeditated
murder.
These
extrajudicial executions and assassinations are a stark warning of what “human
rights”, “civil liberties”, “freedom”, “democracy” and “justice”, have come to
mean in the United States of America and to NATO in practice, as opposed to how
they are preached.
Plausible Deniability
for Acts of Barbarism.
It would be
possible to write volumes about the problems that arise. The shortest way of
describing what the US is doing by systematically circumventing international
law is to sum it up as follows:
• The systematic
circumvention of international law.
• The systematic
circumvention of legal responsibility for illegal acts of war.
• The systematic
circumvention of human rights, civil liberties and the systematic
implementation of torture, the institutionalization of terrorism and massacres
of civilian, military, combatants and non-combatants.
• A return to
barbarism in war and to wars of aggression, that is, crimes against
peace, unrestrained in their ferocity and cruelty.
All that, and
more, under the pretext of freedom, democracy, the responsibility to protect,
human rights or a war on terrorism. No act of terrorism is, in fact, shied away
from, such as the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, the murders of
Muammar Ghadafi, Presidents Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Juvénal
Habyrimana, and countless others.
The Establishment of
Illegal International Courts and Politicized Trials.
– A Pseudo-Legalistic
Political Witch-Hunt and Victors Justice.
Whereas the
systematic erosion of international law is one path to a return to barbarism,
the establishment of pseudo-legal international courts that are being used by
NATO and its allies for a pseudo-legalistic political witch-hunt and the
implementation of victors’ justice against those who have become the victims to
NATO ”interventions” is an equally dangerous route toward barbarism. In deed,
it may be even be more dangerous than the outright violation of international
laws and conventions because here the illegal aggression is disguised as legitimate
justice.
The ICTY, ICTR,
SCSL, SCL, and similar Special Courts and Tribunals are just such
quasi-Judicial Institutions. Modern international law does not provide any
legal basis for the creation of the above-mentioned institutions. Their utility
is to provide ”legal” sanction to the already unlawfully achieved results of
covert or overt illegal wars, aggressions, or interventions.
While these
quasi-judicial tribunals are unlawful in the first place, their methodology for
achieving ”desired results” is even more so, since new rules and regulations
are written on an ad hoc basis to secure convictions, as was the case at the
ICTY and ICTR and others.
The results of such
”International Criminal Justice” are:
* The conviction of
mainly Serbs through rigged show trials and the demonstrative acquittal of real
perpetrators who belonged to the NATO-allied, al Qaeda-associated Kosovo
Liberation Army, also known as KLA /UCK, at the ICTY;
* The conviction
of Hutus through the same rigged show trials at the ICTR, which acts to protect
the criminals of the RPF, and its western allies, the very people who provoked
and prosecuted the war in Rwanda;
* The conviction of
Khmer Rouge members, while the leaders and military officers of the USA are
granted complete impunity for the devastating carpet-bombing of Cambodia that
destroyed the irrigation systems and led to a collapse of the society;
* And so on at the
other tribunals.
These tribunals
all are part of a system of show trials designed to demonize the former regimes
of the countries concerned, to justify aggression, both direct and indirect, by
the US et alia, against the countries concerned and to cover up the real role
of the West in those wars.
The very creation
of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is, in fact, another step towards the
deterioration of international law because the UN Security Council,
notwithstanding the signatory status of any given State to the ICC, which
includes non-signatory States, can refer a case to the ICC Statute.
This creates the
potential for situations where an State not signatory to the treaty may force
another non-signatory State to be bound by the treaty neither of the two has
signed. This state of affairs is an explosion of the most basic nature of
international law.
Indeed, the USA
refuses to be bound by the Rome Statute in any way and has stated that if any
of its officers are ever arrested and charged by The ICC, it will use force to
obtain their release. This is nothing short of gangsterism.
The results of such
justice will invariably be highly politicized show trials and victors’ justice,
and that is indeed precisely what has occurred at the ICC from its inception.
Part 1/4
Part 3/4 & 4/4
coming soon.
NOTES:
xxii
Treaty of Westphalia.
Peace Treaty between the Holy Roman Emperor and the
King of France and
their respective Allies. The Avalon Project.
xxiii
UNGA Resolution 63/308
the responsibility to protect.
xxiv
Newhouse John (1992),
The Diplomatic Round, The New Yorker, 24 August
1992, pp. 63 – 65.
xxv
International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia , Thursday 3
May 2012, pp. 28424 –
28506.
xxvi
Chossudovsky Michel,
German Intelligence and CIA supported Al Qaeda
sponsored Terrorists
in Yugoslavia. Globalreasearch.
xxvii
Chossudovsky Michel,
Kosovo ”Freedom Fighters” financed by Organized
Crime. Globalresearch.
xxviii
Interview with French
Brigadier General, ret. Pierre Marie Gallois. (I)
xxix
Interview with French
Brigadier General, ret. Pierre Marie Gallois. (II)
xxx
Ibid. 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgUNO3SZBP4
2)
xxxi
Kissinger Henry (2012)
Syrian Intervention risks upsetting the Global
Order. The 4th Media.
http://www.4thmedia.org/2012/06/06/henry-kissinger-syrian-intervention-risks-upsetting-global-order/
xxxii
Lehmann Christof
(2012), A Response to Henry Kissinger on Syria and the
Global Order. The 4th
Media
(http://www.4thmedia.org/2012/06/10/a-response-to-henry-kissinger-on-syria-and-the-global-order/%20)
xxxiii
UNSC Resolution 1973
(2011) Libya.
xxxiv
Geneva Conventions,
ICRC.
xxxv
Värek René (2005) The
Status and Protection of Unlawful Combatants,
Juridica
International,pp. 191-198.
xxxvi
Ruth Blakeley (2011):
Dirty Hands Clean Conscience ? The CIA Inspector
General´s
Investigation of ”Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in the
Wat on Terror and the
Torture Debate, Journal of Human Rights, 10:4,
544-561
xxxvii
Kweskin, Qureshi &
Twu, The International Legal landscape Of
Extraordinary
Rendition, University of North Carolina School of Law.
xxxviii
Philip G. Zimbardo
Ph.D at Stanford University. http://www.zimbardo.com/
xxxix
Mbugua Martin ,
Zimbardo blames Military Brass for Abu Ghraib Torture.
University of
Dalaware.
xl
The Laws of War, The
Avalon Project. Yale University.
xli
Lehmann Christof
(2012) Attack on Syria likely before March ? nsnbc.
xlii
The International
Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and
Training of
Mercenaries, 4 December 1989. ICRC.
xliii
Ibid. Lehmann Christof
(2012), NATO`s 25th Summit in Chicago in
Preparation of Global
Full Spectrum Dominance, Interventionism, Possible
Preparations for A
Regional War Directed against Russia and China, and
Developments in Global
Security, nsnbc.
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