Peace And Justice Organizations Call For Freedom For Julian Assange

Imprisoned Wikileaks founder, journalist and free speech champion Julian Assange today faces life imprisonment for telling the truth about U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the U.S. torture base in Guantanamo Bay.

Assange faces charges under the 1917 U.S. Espionage Act. Prosecution under that WWI anti-democratic law placed thousands of antiwar activists in prison for exercising their free speech right to protest WWI.

Ironically, the Dec 19, 2021 New York Times front-page two-part series entitled, Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes, follows in Assange’s footsteps in reporting U.S. war crimes, yet The Times staff writers remain free.

Some 100 Times reporters evaluated Pentagon confidential document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

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Drone Warfare: The World Needs To End US Impunity

A report by The New York Times (NYT) earlier this month revealed that at least 1,400 innocent civilians were killed in numerous airstrikes, mostly drones strikes, carried out by the US forces since 2014 in Afghanistan and some countries in West Asia. The civilian toll of the US drone strikes has already been widely reported, with several other sources such as Airwars citing a larger number of civilian casualties. The NYT report also revealed the extent of the failure of the international community to ensure accountability and justice for the victims of these war crimes.

The impunity enjoyed by the US is a key factor in such atrocities continuing to take place.

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Samuel Moyn’s Unprincipled Attack On Human Rights Giant Michael Ratner

Samuel Moyn’s vicious and unprincipled attack on Michael Ratner, one of the finest human rights attorneys of our time, was published in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) on September 1. Moyn singles out Ratner as a whipping boy to support his own bizarre theory that punishing war crimes prolongs war by making it more palatable. He disingenuously claims that enforcing the Geneva Conventions and opposing illegal wars are mutually exclusive. As Dexter Filkins noted in the New Yorker, Moyn’s “logic would favor incinerating entire cities, Tokyo style, if the resulting spectacles of agony lead more people to oppose American power.”

Moyn takes Ratner—the long-time president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who died in 2016—to task for filing Rasul v. Bush to give people indefinitely detained at Guantánamo the constitutional right to habeas corpus to challenge their detention.

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Jail Killer Drone Operators Instead Of Drone Whistleblowers

For decades the U.S. has been murdering innocent civilians, including U.S. citizens, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali and who knows where else.   Not one person in the military has been held accountable for these criminal acts. Instead, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale is sitting in prison with a 45 month sentence.

 The August 29, 2021 deaths of ten innocent civilians, including seven children, in a family compound in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan by a hellfire missile fired from a U.S. military drone has brought the U.S. assassination program into massive public view.   The photos of the blood-stained walls and the mangled white Toyota in the family compound in densely populated Kabul have gotten incredible attention compared to the 15 years of drone strikes in isolated areas in which hundreds of people attending funerals and wedding parties were killed.

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War Crimes Court ‘Monitoring Developments’ In West Bank

The International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor says she is keeping a close eye on developments in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as Israeli forces and Palestinians engage in deadly clashes and retaliatory strikes.
In a tweet on Wednesday, the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said she was concerned by developments in the region.

“I note with great concern the escalation of violence in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in and around Gaza, and the possible commission of crimes under the Rome Statute,” the prosecutor tweeted.

“My office will continue to monitor developments on the ground and will factor any matter that falls within its jurisdiction.”

Bensouda said she echoed calls from the international community to de-escalate the situation, urging “calm” and “restraint.”

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Ramsey Clark, Presente

We salute Ramsey Clark, who died April 9, 2021, an outspoken defender of all forms of popular resistance to oppression, a leader always willing to challenge the crimes of U.S. militarism and global arrogance. He remained optimistic that the power of people could determine history. His courageous voice will be missed.

Ramsey Clark will be remembered by people and struggles around the world as a prominent  individual who used his name, reputation and legal skills to defend people’s movements and leaders who the corporate media had thoroughly demonized.

Clark’s early belief in the U.S. role turned, through harsh experience and observation of what he considered U.S. war crimes, to a determination to challenge U.S. policy and defend the victims of U.S. aggressions regardless of personal cost.

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Palestinian Groups Call On ICC To Take Swift Action

Palestinian organisations have urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to move swiftly in holding Israel to account for its actions in the Occupied Territories after a landmark decision on Friday.

Judges ruled that it is within the court’s remit hear war crimes allegations made against Israel in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

In a preliminary investigation opened six years ago, chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda focused on 2014’s Israeli aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip, which left 2,257 Palestinians dead, along with 74 Israeli soldiers.

In December 2019, Ms Bensouda said there was “a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.”

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ICC Clears Way For War Crimes Probe Of Israeli Actions

Jerusalem – The International Criminal Court said Friday that its jurisdiction extends to territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, potentially clearing the way for its chief prosecutor to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions.

The decision was welcomed by the Palestinians and decried by Israel’s prime minister, who vowed to fight “this perversion of justice.” The U.S., Israel’s closest ally, said it opposed the decision.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said in 2019 that there was a “reasonable basis” to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip as well as Israeli settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

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Iraq Insists On Blackwater Case Transfer To International Courts

Baghdad – Iraqi legislators intend to transfer to international courts and the UN the case of four former Blackwater contractors convicted of killing innocent Iraqi civilians and recently pardoned by US President Donald Trump for further consideration, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s security and defense committee told Sputnik.

The parliament’s foreign relations committee earlier demanded the government to review or suspend deals concluded with the US security companies over Trump’s decision to pardon four ex-Blackwater contractors convicted in connection with the death of 14 Iraqi civilians, including two children, in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007.

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ICC Drops Inquiry Into British War Crimes In Iraq

The International Criminal Court (ICC) decided, on December 9, to abandon its inquiry into war crimes committed by British forces during the Iraq war, despite its investigation having concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe war crimes were in fact committed.

Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, announced in a public statement that she had decided to close the preliminary examination and not pursue an investigation into war crimes committed by the British Armed Forces in Iraq. The Chief Prosecutor also confirmed in her statement that despite closing the case, the report had found “…that there is a reasonable basis to believe that members of the British armed forces committed the war crimes of willful killing, torture, inhuman/cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and/or other forms of sexual violence.”

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The Nation’s New Crime Boss

The current president has done nothing to correct this underlying criminality. Indeed, he has exacerbated it by his personal corruption, his fostering of the inhumane treatment of migrants at the country’s southern border, his explicit support of racist, white nationalism and, arguably, his criminal mismanagement of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The incoming president, however, is deeply enmeshed in the vicious turpitude of Empire, a condition to which he has either actively contributed or passively countenanced during his thirty-six years in the Senate and his eight years as vice president.

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War Crimes Report Means Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan

The much-anticipated report on potential war crimes by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in Afghanistan has been released, recommending 19 current or former soldiers be investigated for up to 39 murders.

Not combat kills. Not accidental kills. Not non-combatants killed by disputable decisions made in the heat of battle. Not civilians killed due to recklessness or carelessness on the part of Australian forces. Murders. Of non-combatants who died for no other reason than happening to live in a region the US power alliance has seen geostrategic value in keeping militarily occupied for 19 years.

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On Contact: Yugoslavia/USA Déjà Vu

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses what happened three decades ago in Yugoslavia when the country broke into brutal warring factions, and the parallels in the US today, with Croatian author and journalist, Slavenka Drakulić.

Drakulić’s book ‘They Would Never Hurt a Fly’ is about the war criminals from the former Yugoslavia who were put on trial in the Hague. She explores not only the motivations of these killers and their sense of themselves, but also how such crimes were allowed to be perpetrated in her country.

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The Belmarsh Tribunal

On November 13, 1966 – at the height of the resistance war in Vietnam – Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre convened a people’s tribunal to hold the US government accountable for its escalating war crimes.

“The tribunal has no clear historical precedent”, Russell said. It represented no state power; it had no capacity to sentence the accused. “I believe that these apparent limitations are, in fact, virtues. We are free to conduct a solemn and historic investigation”, said Russell, “presented to the conscience of mankind.”

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Canada Has A War Crimes Problem

Two new reports on Canadian weapons exports reveal that Canadian-based corporate entities (and, by extension, government agencies that support and encourage their exports) are complicit in the commission of war crimes in Yemen, Turkey, Libya, Syria and Iraq.

These findings build on previously raised concerns that the Canadian military was complicit in war crimes during the occupation of Afghanistan (including when current Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan operated there as a soldier). 

Earlier this month, the United Nations criticized Canada, among other nations, for continuing to export weapons to all parties that fuel the commission of war crimes in Yemen. 

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