[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Fake faith and epic crimes

[Bill Totten]

The Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War
Crimes Foundation are building a case for the former British prime
minister's prosecution

by John Pilger

New Statesman (April 02 2009)


These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the
verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure
is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to
that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion
as "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war
crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole". International law would be mere farce, said the chief US
chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson,
"if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves".

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have
long had "universal jurisdiction" statutes, which allow their national
courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has
changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against
"ourselves", or "our" allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by
France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, client and executioner of the west, and sought his extradition
from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for
trial, he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British
prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. The
then home secretary, Jack Straw, let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January, the George Washington
University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W
Bush with that of Pinochet. "Outside [the United States] there is no
longer the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime", he said. "So
if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as
'former president George Bush' [but] as a current war criminal". For
this reason, Bush's first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who
demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture
techniques for use in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels.
Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26
January, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said: "We
have clear evidence that Mr Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but
nevertheless he ordered torture".

The Spanish high court is currently investi­gating a former Israeli
defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in
the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who
was largely responsible for bombing 600,000 peasants to death in
Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and
Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of
American power, President Barack Obama's national security adviser,
James Jones, said: "I take my daily orders from Dr Kissinger".

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal
Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of
petitions relating to Blair's wars. Spain's celebrated judge Baltasar
Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian
military junta, has called for George W Bush, Blair and the former
Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the
invasion of Iraq - "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in
recent human history - a devastating attack on the rule of law" that had
left the UN "in tatters". He said: "There is enough of an argument in
650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay".

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The
Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a
political court set up by the west. However, an international agenda is
forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the
letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose
wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as
in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South
Africa - the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

Today, the unreported "good news" is that a worldwide movement is
challenging the once-sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can
destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at a
remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and
immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R L
Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: "Men have before hired
bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation
sat under shelter ... I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of
genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off
these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me,
in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete."

Blair, too, is safe - but for how long? He and his collaborators face a
new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that
are amassing "an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges",
according to the international law authority Richard Falk. He cites the
World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence
from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush
and others. At present, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly
established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for the
former prime minister's prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and
the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, a former judge of
the New Zealand Supreme Court, E W Thomas, wrote: "My predisposition was
to believe that Mr Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After
considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion
is that Mr Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled cabinet, the British
Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible
to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own
self-deception. His deception was deliberate."

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East envoy for the Quartet (the
US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in
the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the
US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the
bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an
Israeli "peace prize" worth $1 million. He, too, is careful where he
travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media.
Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series
of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but
slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long exposed a remarkable
loathing for a former prime minister - a sentiment now shared by those
in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his "project" and
crimes is an embarrassment, and preferably forgotten.

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer's former leading Blair fan,
declared that "this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply
buried". He demanded, "Did Blair never ask what was going on?" This is
an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: "Did the
Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?" In 2001, Rawnsley alerted
his readers to Saddam Hussein's "contribution to international
terrorism" and his "frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass
destruction". Both assertions were false and echoed official
Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was
launched, Rawnsley described it as a "point of principle" for Blair who,
he later wrote, was "fated to be right". He lamented, "Yes, too many
people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty
and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short."

In the subsequent six years, at least a million people have been killed.
According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans.
Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

F­ar from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe
media harbour - in Australia, the original Murdochracy. His interviewers
exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the "mystical" Blair in
the Guardian of more than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind
Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his
infamous grovelling to the Nazis: "I spend my nights taking out anything
which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things
which are intended to soothe them".

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson
Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an
interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue
described Blair as "a man who brought religion into power and is now
bringing power to religion". She asked him: "What would the perception
be that faith would bring towards a greater stability ... [sic]?"

A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about
"values". Doogue said to him that "it was the bifurcation about right
and wrong, that's what I thought the British found really hard [sic]",
to which Blair replied that "in relation to Iraq I tried every other
option [to invasion] there was". It was his classic lie, and it passed
unchallenged.

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary
of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied
Blair on what she described as his "James Bond-ish Gulfstream" where she
was privy to his "bionic energy levels". She wrote: "I ask him the
childlike question: does he want to save the world?" Blair replied,
well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which
was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. "That is
war, I'm afraid", said Blair, "and war is horrible". No counter came
that Gaza was not a war, but a massacre by any measure. As for the
Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair's task "to prepare them for
statehood". The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough
gravitas; her man "has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the
world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated". The evidence
she offered for this absurdity was that "women from both sides of
politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him".

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of
the 21st century, shares a "prayer breakfast" with President Obama, the
yes-we-can man now launching more war.

"We pray", said Blair, "that in acting we do God's work and follow God's
will".

To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair's "faith" represent a
contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation of the basic
teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime
and now wish the rest of us to forget their part - or who, like Alastair
Campbell, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of
some - might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes
Foundation: "Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to
incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths,
four million refugees, countless maimings and traumas".

These are indeed extraordinary times.

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/war-crimes-blair-pilger-iraq


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