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November 29, 2001
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 23, 2001
Phyllis
Pollack
Long
Live The Clash
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
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Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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November 29,
2001
We Are the War Criminals Now
'Everything
we have believed in since the Second World War goes by the board
as we pursue our own exclusive war'
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan.
The US Air Force bombs Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance,
and our heroic Afghan allies--who slaughtered 50,000 people in
Kabul between 1992 and 1996--move into the city and execute up
to 300 Taliban fighters. The report is a footnote on the television
satellite channels, a "nib" in journalistic parlance.
Perfectly normal, it seems. The Afghans have a "tradition"
of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a
war crime is committed.
Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison
"revolt", in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their
Alliance jailers. US Special Forces--and, it has emerged, British
troops--helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure
enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were "executed"
trying to escape. It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained
with war crimes. Within days, The Independent's Justin Huggler
has found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.
The Americans have even less excuse for
this massacre. For the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld,
stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that US
air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop "if the Northern
Alliance requested it". Leaving aside the revelation that
the thugs and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting
as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the thugs and
murderers of the Taliban, Mr Rumsfeld's incriminating remark
places Washington in the witness box of any war-crimes trial
over Kunduz. The US were acting in full military co-operation
with the Northern Alliance militia.
Most television journalists, to their
shame, have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful
crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the
American troops, most have done little more than mention the
war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What
on earth has gone wrong with our moral compass since 11 September?
Perhaps I can suggest an answer. After
both the First and Second World Wars, we--the "West"--grew
a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes. The very
first Anglo-French-Russian attempt to formulate such laws was
provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks
in 1915; The Entente said it would hold personally responsible
"all members of the (Turkish) Ottoman government and those
of their agents who are implicated in such massacres". After
the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 1945, article
6 (C) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN Convention
on genocide referred to "crimes against humanity".
Each new post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the
creation of evermore human rights groups to lobby the world on
liberal, humanistic Western values.
Over the past 50 years, we sat on our
moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese and the Soviets, the
Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We pronounced on
the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs.
We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at
Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing --in
nauseous detail--the secret courts and death squads and torture
and extra judicial executions carried out by rogue states and
pathological dictators. Quite right too.
Yet suddenly, after 11 September, we
went mad. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their
inhabitants--blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for
our slaughter--and now we have allowed our gruesome militia allies
to execute their prisoners. President George Bush has signed
into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate
anyone believed to be a "terrorist murderer" in the
eyes of America's awesomely inefficient intelligence services.
And make no mistake about it, we are talking here about legally
sanctioned American government death squads. They have been created,
of course, so that Osama bin Laden and his men should they be
caught rather than killed, will have no public defence; just
a pseudo trial and a firing squad.
It's quite clear what has happened. When
people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist
or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners
or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death
squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the
European Union, the United Nations and the "civilised"
world. We are the masters of human rights, the Liberals, the
great and good who can preach to the impoverished masses. But
when our people are murdered--when our glittering buildings are
destroyed then we tear up every piece of human rights legislation,
send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses
and set out to murder our enemies.
Winston Churchill took the Bush view
of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred the straightforward execution
of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact that Hitler's monsters
were responsible for at least 50 million deaths--10,000 times
greater than the victims of 11 September--the Nazi murderers
were given a trial at Nuremberg because US President Truman made
a remarkable decision. "Undiscriminating executions or punishments,"
he said, "without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived
at, would not fit easily on the American conscience or be remembered
by our children with pride."
No one should be surprised that Mr Bush--a
small-time Texas Governor-Executioner--should fail to understand
the morality of a statesman in the Whitehouse. What is so shocking
is that the Blairs, Schröders, Chiracs and all the television
boys should have remained so gutlessly silent in the face of
the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation sanctified
since 11 September.
There are ghostly shadows around to remind
us of the consequences of state murder. In France, a general
goes on trial after admitting to torture and murder in the 1954-62
Algerian war, because he referred to his deeds as "justifiable
acts of duty performed without pleasure or remorse". And
in Brussels, a judge will decide if the Israeli Prime Minister,
Arial Sharon, can be prosecuted for his "personal responsibility"
for the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Chatila.
Yes, I know the Taliban were a cruel
bunch of bastards. They committed most of their massacres outside
Mazar-i-Sharif in the late 1990s. They executed women in the
Kabul football stadium. And yes, lets remember that 11 September
was a crime against humanity.
But I have a problem with all this. George
Bush says that "you are either for us or against us"
in the war for civilisation against evil. Well, I'm sure not
for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the
brutal, cynical, lying "war of civilisation" that he
has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost
as many lives as the World Trade Centre mass murder.
At this moment, I can't help remembering
my dad. He was old enough to have fought in the First World War.
In the third Battle of Arras. And as great age overwhelmed him
near the end of the century, he raged against the waste and murder
of the 1914-1918 war. When he died in 1992, I inherited the campaign
medal of which he was once so proud, proof that he had survived
a war he had come to hate and loathe and despise. On the back,
it says: "The Great War for Civilisation." Maybe I
should send it to George Bush.
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