War Crimes

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John Pilger on ISIS: Only When We See the War Criminals In Our Midst Will the Blood Begin to Dry | Films for Action

By John Pilger

KissingerISISIn transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”.  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.”

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.”

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.”  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.”

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.

Now Hain is demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”. Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the “restrictions” on US bombing and drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia – as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called “perpetual war” has crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants “boots on the ground” now. There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” – notably Australia’s aggressively weird Tony Abbott – as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to achieve – is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as “morally questionable” (the Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.

Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”.  Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

 

Source: John Pilger

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Saudi-Sized Cracks in the 9/11 Wall of Silence | WhoWhatWhy.com

By Russ Baker

123President Obama is apparently thinking about his presidential library. So now might be a good time to ponder whether anyone will want to visit it.

If he cared about revivifying his brief reputation as a good-guy outsider ready to shine light on the hidden recesses of our governing apparatus (remember his election-night victory speech that brought tears and rare hope to America?), Obama could certainly start at this late date by taking a stand for transparency.

Here’s how: Two Congressmen, a Democrat and a Republican, are asking Obama to declassify the congressional report on 9/11, which the Bush administration heavily redacted.

The two members of the House of Representatives have read the blacked-out portions, including 28 totally blank pages that deal largely with Saudi government ties to the alleged 9/11 hijackers.

This is apparently major connect-the-dots stuff—much more significant than what one may remember from Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 911, about Saudi royals and other Saudis studying and living in the US, who were allowed to go home without being interviewed in the aftermath of the attacks. This is about actual financial and logistical support of terrorism against the United States—by its ally, the Saudi government.

As a Hoover Institution media scholar wrote in the New York Post (normally no bastion of deep investigative inquiry):

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

Congressmen “absolutely shocked”

The two outspoken Representatives, Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) would be violating federal law if they offered any specifics about what they know, or even named any countries mentioned—but did say they were  “absolutely shocked” by revelations of foreign state involvement in the attacks. Now, they want a resolution requesting Obama declassify the entire document.

If the media were to do its job and create the kind of wall-to-wall coverage it bestows upon, say, inter-spousal murder trials, Obama might feel he had to release the full 9/11 report. He’d have to concede there is a public right to know, or at least explain in detail why he doesn’t think so. Either way, there would be major fireworks. But we’re not betting on either the president or the media doing the right thing.

Mainstream Media: out to lunch, so far

How much publicity is this enormously significant story getting? Very, very little. A search of the Nexis-Lexis database turned up just 13 articles or transcripts. One was a very short, cautious piece from the Boston Globe. One was a transcript of TV commentator Lou Dobbs on Fox News. All of the others were specialty or ideological publications or blogs—Investor’s Business Daily, the Blaze, Prairie Pundit, Right Wing News, etc. (CNN’s Piers Morgan did interview Rep. Lynch). Nothing showed up from the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, MSNBC or the broadcast networks.

That’s a remarkable oversight, given that the media did cover similar concerns expressed by former senators Bob Kerrey and Bob Graham almost two years ago. In an affidavit for a lawsuit by the families of 9/11 victims, Graham, head of the joint 2002 congressional 9/11 inquiry, said, “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.” Kerrey, who served on the non-congressional 9/11 Commission, said in his own affidavit, “Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued.”

But two House members, one a Democrat, one a Republican, explicitly calling for the President to make the full report available? That’s certainly news.

What Will Obama Do?

If President Obama does declassify the records, that would be surprising, if not outright shocking.

Although he has belatedly (and under heavy pressure from his base) begun to shift more toward at least the rhetoric of openness, Obama failed to stand up for release of still-classified documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination (a half century after that tragedy), and he has presided over myriad actions that take us further than ever from transparency. Meanwhile, the media has all but abdicated its responsibility to hold the administration’s feet to the fire on these and related matters.

At WhoWhatWhy, we understand how hard it is to get this kind of material into the hands of the American people. Our groundbreaking reporting on ties between prominent and powerful Saudis and the men said to have been on the planes attacking on September 11 (via a house in Sarasota, Florida) was almost entirely ignored by the establishment media, including many so-called “alternative” and “progressive” outlets, though it has nonetheless spread widely thanks to the Internet and social media. Even the above-mentioned New York Post only now has acknowledged our reporting on the Saudi-Sarasota connection, without mentioning our name or linking to us.

No matter. The significance is that others have come forward to ask tough questions about the daunting reach and self-protective reflexes of our government’s ever-expanding “secret sector.” With a related meta-issue—NSA surveillance—odd bedfellows like “leftie” Glenn Greenwald and “rightie” Larry Klayman (with a Bush appointed judge ruling in his favor) are going at the surveillance state simultaneously, mightily aided by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

Whatever one thinks of the 9/11 story—and one needn’t buy the more extreme theories to be open to examining new, documented facts—there’s clearly more to that trauma than we have been allowed to know; and we suspect there are many more establishment figures with a hunger for the truth. And once more “respectable” Washington insiders like House (and Senate) members start saying shocking things—well, that’s a man-bites-dog story few news organizations can turn down.

As for the executive branch, representatives of the State Department, Department of Justice and FBI have repeatedly denied knowing anything about the Saudi angle. If those documents are ever declassified, the denials themselves—and those issuing those denials—should also be news.

Source: WhoWhatWhy.com

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DOJ pursues immunity for Bush and six others for Iraq war crimes | The Examiner

By David Phillips

George W. Bush Speaks At Naturalization Ceremony At Bush Presidential CenterThe Department of Justice has filed a Grant of Immunity for war crimes against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld. The filing for the immunity of war crimes was made with the United States District Court, Northern District of California San Francisco Division.

The filing is for procedural immunity in a case alleging that they planned and waged the Iraq War in violation of international law.

The Plaintiff in this case is Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan. She filed a complaint in March 2013 in a San Francisco federal court alleging that the planning and waging of the war constituted a “crime of aggression” against Iraq, a legal theory that was used by the Nuremberg Tribunal to convict Nazi war criminals after World War II.

In her lawsuit, Saleh alleges that:

  • Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz began planning the Iraq War in 1998 through their involvement with the “Project for the New American Century,” a Washington DC non-profit that advocated for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
  • Once they came to power, Saleh alleges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz convinced other Bush officials to invade Iraq by using 9/11 as an excuse to mislead and scare the American public into supporting a war.
  • Finally, she claims that the United States failed to obtain United Nations approval prior to the invasion, rendering the invasion illegal and an act of impermissible aggression.

“The DOJ claims that in planning and waging the Iraq War, ex-President Bush and key members of his Administration were acting within the legitimate scope of their employment and are thus immune from suit,” chief counsel Inder Comar of Comar Law said.

The “Westfall Act certification,” submitted pursuant to the Westfall Act of 1988, permits the Attorney General, at his or her discretion, to substitute the United States as the defendant and essentially grant absolute immunity to government employees for actions taken within the scope of their employment.

“The good news is that while we were disappointed with the certification, we were prepared for it,” Comar stated. “We do not see how a Westfall Act certification is appropriate given that Ms. Saleh alleges that the conduct at issue began prior to these defendants even entering into office. I think the Nuremberg prosecutors, particularly American Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, would be surprised to learn that planning a war of aggression at a private non-profit, misleading a fearful public, and foregoing proper legal authorization somehow constitute lawful employment duties for the American president and his or her cabinet.”

The case is Saleh v. Bush (N.D. Cal. Mar. 13, 2013, No. C 13 1124 JST).

Source: The Examiner

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Top Mafia Figure, Tony Gambino Implicates Vatican and Bush in Prior Knowledge and Complicity in 911 Mass Murder |

By Greg Szymanski
VaticanArmsTony Gambino of the infamous Gambino New York crime family said besides Mob Bosses, the outfits that benefit most from organized crime are the corrupt Vatican and U.S. government.

The grandson of Lucky Luciano, Gambino made a guest appearance Tuesday on Greg Szymanski’s radio show, The Investigative Journal on Liberty Radio at www.libertyradiolive.com The entire interview can be heard at www.arcticbeacon.com as well as Liberty Radio.

The high-level former mobster talked openly for an hour, indicting top Vatican and U.S. government officials with complicity in high crimes, treason and assassinations as they worked together “like a tight-knit happy family” with the Gambino and other Mafia families.

With America’s fascination of the Mafia, Gambino’s statements should shake the halls of St. Peter’s Basilica, as well as Capitol Hill, since he talked about his first hand knowledge of George Bush, the Pope and other high level Jesuits complicity and knowledge of 9/11.

“When you grow up in “The Family” like I did, you learn right off the bat that protection comes from everywhere, including the CIA, FBI and blessings from the Vatican who are at the top of the ladder when it comes to benefiting from Mafia street crime,” said Gambino, who became a “Made Man” at the age of five, a Mafia term used for their top street captains.

“The Vatican officials, federal judges, top politicians all used to get regular pay-offs from the Gambino Family and, in fact, the Vatican and U.S. government make more money off the illegal drug trade then we did.

“That is why I am talking after just getting out of jail after 20 years. I am talking because people need to know the U.S. government and the Vatican are more dangerous and corrupt then the Mafia ever was.

“For example, I know for a fact the Cardinal in Palermo runs the Sicilian mob and former Cardinal Spellman of New York was considered the Vatican’s American Godfather since he pulled the strings and had his hands deep into organized crime.

“I know for a fact Bush, the Pope and other top Vatican and U.S. government leaders had prior knowledge and help organize 9/11. They did it for many obvious reason, one being instigating the war in Iraq. But they also did it to get their hands on all the gold that was hidden below in the Twin Towers.

“My grandfather’s construction company built the Twin Towers and after it was completed, I know they went in and put in big underground vaults to house an enormous amount of gold which is now in Bush’s and Vatican hands in order to fund the war.”

Besides implicating the Vatican and Bush in 9/11, Gambino set the record straight about the JFK assassination, saying he was in Dallas when Kennedy was shot and the fatal bullet came from a shooter located in an underground storm drain.

“I was there when he was shot and I know for a fact Rosselli was in the storm drain doing the shooting and Frank Sturgiss was also part of the hit team,” said Gambino. “The same group of guys we have talked about in the Vatican and U.S. government gave the orders and asked the Mafia families for help in taking down Kennedy.”

Growing up on the streets of New York in one of the top crime families, Gambino recalls getting his first lesson of Mafia life at the age of 13.

“My grandfather was Lucky Luciano so I had it made,” said Gambino, now 63 and living on the East Coast with a probation stipulation that he can’t associate or talk with any organized crime figures. “Lucky had all the politicians and even the Vatican heads in his pocket. He was making $55 to $100 million a week and when Vegas opened the money really started to roll in.

“He got Frank Sinatra and many others like Marylin Monroe, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Clint Eastwood, Sammy Davis started in Hollywood. He then would take a percentage of their earnings and this went on for their entire careers.

“Remember, the horse’s head being cut-off in Godfather I and then put in the Hollywood producer’s bed? That really happened and it had to do with forcing a Hollywood producer to star Sinatra in one of his movies.”

Gambino also had inside information about how union boss Jimmy Hoffa was really killed, saying his time ran out when a huge Mafia debt wasn’t repaid.

“Hoffa was working behind the scenes with crack head and truck hi-jacker, John Gotti,” recalls Gambino. “That’s all Gotti was good at and when they brought in a $5 million drug truckload, Hoffa got deeper in debt to the other Mafia bosses.

“He never gave his courtesy calls to the bosses for repayment and finally his time ran out so he was killed. They picked him up, put him in a body bag alive and then dumped his body in one of the concrete abutments at the George Washington Bridge while the concrete was being poured. All they did was pay the concrete man $150,000 and the whole thing has been covered up. But that is where Hoffa’s body is today and I know that for a fact.”

Although Gambino knows he’s crossing a sensitive line for going public about the inner-workings of the Mafia and its complicity with the Vatican and U.S. government, he added that it’s important for Americans to finally understand how things “really work on the streets” and how Church, State and big business are working together to destroy America.

And if there remains any doubters that the Vatican and Jesuit Order have had its dirty hands in organized crime in order to destroy the moral and financial fabric of the U.S., Gambino’s confessions should lay that to rest.

Source: 911justicehalifax