Paul S. Graham

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, U.S.A. has filed a complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales for crimes against humanity, more specifically, “their criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” perpetrated upon about 100 human beings.” Extraordinary rendition, if you didn’t know, is code for the U.S. government’s program of kidnapping, torture and murder of alleged terrorists in secret prisons.

While these are undoubtedly the least of their crimes, because they were committed in countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute that established the ICC there are legal grounds for the ICC to prosecute Bush and his cronies, even though the U.S. is not a signatory.

There is a long distance between filing a complaint and seeing Bush in an orange jumpsuit, but with Boyle as the author, it has a solid legal foundation. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare, and played a key role in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I doubt that the ICC prosecutor will act on the complaint in the absence of international public pressure. With the exception of Pravda, the mainstream media has ignored the story so far. Given Boyle’s international stature, this is scandalous (though not surprising.)

While the corporate media has blacked out the story, Boyle’s complaint got a big boost the other day when he appeared on the Alex Jones Show, a nationally syndicated US radio program with millions of listeners via broadcast and the Internet.

http://www.youtube.com/p/0B485AD4F2793ACF&hl=en_US&fs=1

Jones’s brand of libertarian populism and his penchant for histrionics probably would not not sit too well with staid Canadian lefties, but if you fall into that category, step outside your comfort zone for a bit and spend some time with his website and his show. The man is a fierce defender of democratic rights and freedoms who has done much to inform and mobilize against America’s descent into tyranny.

So, it’s up to the alternative media to get out the word and fan Boyle’s spark into a raging fire. If there was ever an opportunity to hold Bush and his cronies accountable for their heinous crimes, this is it.

Boyle has asked supporters of the complaint to write or fax the ICC Prosecutor. This is where you can contact Professor Boyle:

Francis A. Boyle
Professor of International Law
Law Building
504 East Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, Illinois 61820
Phone: 217-333-7954 – Fax: 217-244-1478
Email: fboyle@illinois.edu

And here is how to contact the ICC.

What are you waiting for?

Thousands of gun-toting troops will not help the Haitian people. The Canada Haiti Action Network has launched a petition campaign to change the “relief” effort in Haiti from military to humanitarian.

You can sign the petition here. Pass it on!

I cringe when I hear folks like Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon use the word “solidarity” in the same breath as “Haiti.” I’m all for solidarity with the Haitian people, but when it is expressed by the likes of Cannon, I gag.

The Haitian disaster relief program is a thinly disguised military operation to secure the country for corporate interests. Sure, some people are getting food and medical attention, but not nearly enough, given the resources and capabilities of the United States and Canada.

Cynthia McKinney, the U.S. Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, captures the hypocrisy in an article published today at Global Research, when she writes:

President Obama’s response to the tragedy in Haiti has been robust in military deployment and puny in what the Haitians need most:  food; first responders and their specialized equipment; doctors and medical facilities and equipment; and engineers, heavy equipment, and heavy movers.  Sadly, President Obama is dispatching Presidents Bush and Clinton, and thousands of Marines and U.S. soldiers.  By contrast, Cuba has over 400 doctors on the ground and is sending in more; Cubans, Argentinians, Icelanders, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and many others are already on the ground working–saving lives and treating the injured.

Obama’s and Harper’s emphasis on a military response makes sense when you review the history of Canada and the U.S. in the region and factor in Haiti’s undeveloped petroleum reserves.

Haiti has been under a military occupation — ostensibly a U.N. program to stabilize the country — since 2004 when the U.S. Marines (with Canadian complicity) kidnapped President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and spirited him out of the country. The lead-up to the coup included years of economic destabilization brought on by IMF-imposed “structural adjustments” and covert CIA support for Aristide’s opponents (who yearned for the good old days when the Tonton Macoutes would keep the masses in line).

Aristide remains popular among the poor majority in Haiti for the reforms he tried to implement. Who knows what could happen in the wake of an earthquake that not only killed hundreds of thousands but also totally destroyed state and international infrastructure and control? The resulting instability offers an opening for Aristide supporters that must cause unease in Washington, Ottawa and corporate boardrooms that benefit from keeping the Haitians down.

Haiti is popularly understood to be the poorest country the Americas, and one of the poorest in the world. More sophisticated measurements can be found here. The fact is, 80 per cent of the population is dirt poor, living on less than $1,000 a year and often, literally, eating dirt. (If you want to see Haitians eating dirt, watch Inside a Failed State – Haiti, a recent film by Journeyman Pictures.)

Haitians are poor, in large measure, because wages are low and labour standards are nonexistent. According to Canada-Haiti Action, the Canadian firm Gildan, with nearly 8000 employees in the textile sector, is the biggest employer in Haiti, after the Haitian government. The Montreal-based company has been accused of relying on sweatshop labour.

While Haitians are poor, the country is resource rich. For example, Majescor Resources Inc., a Canadian mining company, last year partnered with SIMACT, a group of Canadian financiers and Haitian-American developers, to explore for gold and copper in Haiti.

But I doubt that Obama is dispatching the Marines to safeguard the interests of Canadian T-shirt manufacturers and mining companies. More compelling are reports of sizable, undeveloped petroleum reserves. There is credible evidence that Haiti’s oil patch makes Venezuela’s look tiny by comparison. Read Ezili Danto’s superb discussion of this, entitled Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the UN/US occupation, published last October, on OpenSalon.com.

There is a lot to know about Haiti that you won’t find in the mainstream media. Here are some alternative sources I highly recommend:

• Global Research: Crisis and Despair in Haiti
• Coalition Against the Arms Trade: A Very Canadian Coup d’état in Haiti
• Canada-Haiti Action (has recommendations for where to send your financial expressions of solidarity)

Canadians are responding generously and we need to redouble our efforts. However, our governments (Liberal and Conservative) continue to mislead us about the nature of their involvement with Haiti, prior to and following the quake. We can’t let them get away with this.

Haiti earthquake – U.S. aid mission under scrutiny

(Al Jazeera English, Jan. 19, 2009) Thousands of US troops have arrived on the island, trying to offer security and distribute what humanitarian aid there is.

And the UN Security Council is expected to approve the deployment of 3,500 extra UN troops.

But critics say before more security forces arrive, it is medical equipment, nurses and doctors that need to be allowed access to the country if aid efforts can really begin to reach those most in need.

Sebastian Walker reports from Port-au-Prince.

Opponents of profiling are missing the point. Profiling makes a lot of sense. The main problem  is that we are profiling the wrong kinds of people.

Instead of watching out for people who actually have a track record for mass destruction and terrorism, we are directing our efforts against folks who might be pissed off at us because we have bombed them, strip-mined their economies and plundered their futures.

(The fact that almost all people detained at our borders, coincidentally, are brown or black, leads some to conclude our government is racist because it is engaged in “racial profiling.” While this may be true, that is the subject of another post.)

We have, in the words Stephen Harper, used a “long gun registry approach” that criminalizes everyone when we should limit our efforts to catching “the bad guys.”

So, in the interests of air safety and national security, as well as more convenient air travel, here are my suggestions for Canada’s border watch and no-fly lists.

1. Anyone who has ever used or authorized the use of weapons of mass destruction. While it might seem unfair to single them out, this would include Barack Obama, George Bush (father and son), Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Collectively, these fellas have slaughtered millions.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Any current or former head of state who told the his military to kill people would qualify for the list. This would crimp Stephen Harper’s travel schedule, or course, but it would also ensure that Jean Chretien and Paul Martin would have to stay home. I’d let Kim Campbell, John Turner and Joe Clark on the plane, but only because they weren’t in office long enough to do much damage.

2. Anyone who has implemented the decisions of their political masters to engage in the above mentioned mass destruction. This would include cabinet ministers, military commanders at all levels, heads of government departments, and so forth.

3. Anyone who has used, or attempted to use a weapon equivalent in destructive power to that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underpants (UFAU), which, if you have been following the story, have been deemed by US Justice officials to be a weapon of mass destruction. This means that any military grunt of either gender who has participated in combat loses their opportunity to get on a Canadian plane, or visit Canada. (I guess we should let our grunts come home, soon, today even.)

4. Anyone who benefits from the development, production and sale of weapons of mass destruction (once again, these weapons are defined as being UFAU equivalent.) Now, I’m not arguing that we should outlaw war industries (that’s a subject for another post). I’m just saying that we shouldn’t let these bastards or their products cross international borders.

5. Academics, politicians, religious leaders, editorial writers, journalists, PR flacks, bloggers and anyone else who whores, pimps, shills and otherwise facilitates the climate of fear that promotes our bogus war on terrorism, invasions of other countries and erosion of human rights at home or abroad. You know who you are. Cut up your Aeroplan cards and get into another line of work.

Now, if my modest proposal for air safety and national security were to catch on, it would most certainly have a deleterious impact on the air travel industry, at least in the short term. Many folks who travel by air and cross borders are either war mongers or cannon fodder. However, this is a price I think most folks would be willing to pay for a safer, more secure world.

Under the pretext of fighting al-Qaida, Obama is planning to transform Yemen into another Afghanistan. U.S. Special forces are reportedly in the country, as are British commandos. Expect the “war on terrorism” rhetoric to escalate as America moves more resources into the country to “stabilize” it. A planned international meeting on Yemen hosted by Britain has received the blessing of the UN, offering a political fig leaf that was unavailable to the imperialists until after they had occupied Afghanistan.

There’s no question that Yemen suffers from a lack of stability. But the conflict in the country is not the result of a “growing al-Qaida threat.” Yemenis have not gotten along with each other for a long time. President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s dictator since 1978, has, for decades, been combating a rebellion from the secessionist south and an al-Houthi Zaydi Shi’ite rebellion in the north.

Estimates of al-Qaida strength vary between 100 – 300, but whatever their numbers, they are small and politically insignificant. After they were conveniently linked to the crotch bomber’s flubbed attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day, their presence offered the Americans their opening. In a recent post at Global Research, Tom Burghardt draws together enough threads to argue convincingly that the “intelligence failure” that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the flight with high explosives stitched into his undies was no accident.

Voila! The US had it’s “smoking crotch” and the stage was set for more blatant intervention in Yemen.

For the Americans, it’s all about real estate, and, as in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.”

Just prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Americans were negotiating with the Taliban government for the rights to construct the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline to move Caspian Sea natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan and then to India, by-passing Russia.

In the case of Yemen, it’s all about oil reserves and oil transportation.

According to F. William Engdahl, in a recent Global Research article, Yemen sits on a oil patch that contains “enough undeveloped oil to fill the oil demand of the entire world for the next fifty years.” Moreover, the “Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean” which, if blocked, “could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa.”

Maps: U.S. Energy Information Administration

In 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an estimated 3.3 million per day barrels flowed through this waterway toward Europe, the United States, and Asia. The majority of traffic, around 2.1 million barrels per day, flows northbound through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex.

So, don’t be taken in by all the public hand wringing about “intelligence failures” and the “al-Qaida threat.” Follow da money.

http://www.youtube.com/p/C69158F7232E0D51&hl=en_GB&fs=1

I don’t normally recommend a book before I have finished reading it, but I will this time. Sandy Tolan’s award winning book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East, is a delight. It is the true story of the intimate relationship that developed between two families — one Palestinian and one Israeli — and the house that both lived in, one before and the other after the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians and founding of the state of Israel.

The Lemon Tree, which grew out of a radio documentary Tolan produced in 1998, succeeds on many levels in illuminating our understanding of the political and human dimensions of the decades-long conflict between Palestinians and Jews.

Part of the reason I’m willing to endorse this book before finishing it is that I had the pleasure of hearing and videographing the author when he spoke in Winnipeg last week. He came to Winnipeg to participate in Restorative Justice Week by telling the story of The Lemon Tree in the context of restorative justice.

Rather than report on what I learned about the stony path to peace and justice in the Middle East, I invite you to watch the video and form your own conclusions, one of which, I hope, will be to buy, beg or borrow the book.

http://www.youtube.com/p/1327FA937832145C&hl=en_GB&fs=1

Malalai Joya visited Winnipeg on November 16 and 17 as part of her 2009 cross-country tour to convince Canadians to press for the withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan.

This feisty woman packed the house at the University of Winnipeg and spoke with passion about the oppression of her people under the combined weight of the Taliban, Hamid Karzai’s warlord drugocracy, and the NATO occupation.

Her message was one not heard in this country. Loosely paraphrased, it is: “Go home! You are making our lives harder!” It is a lesson we must all take to heart.

Malalai Joya was hosted locally by Peace Alliance Winnipeg, with support from the following organizations:

• The Uniter (Mouseland Press Speaker Series)
• Public Service Alliance of Canada (Prairie Region)
• University of Manitoba Students Union
• Project Peacemakers
• Global College Student Advisory Council
• Institute for Womens and Gender Studies, University of Winnipeg
• Winnipeg Labour Council
• Global Justice Committee CUPE Manitoba
• Grassroots Women Manitoba

I shot some video for those who couldn’t make it. It features her speech at Convocation Hall at the University of Winnipeg. The total running time is just under 1 hour 16 minutes.

Useful links

• Malalai Joya’s web site
• Peace Alliance Winnipeg
• Canadian Peace Alliance

November 17, 2009: Afghan MP Malalai Joya is in Winnipeg as a part of her Canadian tour to convince Canadians they must withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.

Afghans, says Joya, must decide what happens in Afghanistan. Foreign intervention must end.

She has a message for the families of Canadian soldiers. She understands their suffering and extends her condolences. Like them, she knows what it is like to lose loved ones in war. But condolences are not enough. She calls upon Canadians to force the Canadian government to end it’s military intervention.

For more information about Malalai Joya’s tour, visit the Canadian Peace Alliance.

Please take some time to remind your member of Parliament that most Canadians want our troops home. If you don’t know who your MP is or how do get in contact, visit the House of Commons MP page.