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Paul Merrell

Rumsfeld, architect of Iraq war, says Obama hasn't yet justified Syria attack - CNN Political Ticker - CNN.com Blogs - 0 views

  • Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who along with President George W. Bush helped send the United States military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, said in an interview Wednesday the White House has yet to justify potential strikes in Syria.
  • Rumsfeld served a secretary of defense from 2001-2006, a period that saw the U.S. begin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He said in the interview, however, that current statements from Obama and his aides haven’t met the threshold for intervention in Syria. “There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation,” he said. “When you think about what’s really important in that region – it’s Iran’s nuclear program and the relationship between Iran and Syria, the Assad regime, with respect to terrorists that go around killing innocent men, women and children, including Americans.”
  • He added that Secretary of State John Kerry, who left the U.S. Senate earlier this year for the top diplomatic post, had been “dealt a bad hand” by his predecessor Hillary Clinton and Obama, who he claimed had created a global leadership void. “This administration has been in a withdrawal mode, an apology mode,” he said, adding: “That vacuum we’ve created is being filled by people that don’t have our values or interests.”
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    Surprise. Surprise. Neocon Secretary of Defense under G.W. Bush Donald Rumsfeld says Obama hasn't made a case for U.S. military strikes on Syria. Ironically, Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense who masterminded the US invasion of Iraq based on false intelligence. 
Paul Merrell

EXCLUSIVE: HW Bush jabs at Cheney, Rumsfeld in new book | Fox News - 0 views

  • As an ex-president, George H.W. Bush has generally maintained a respectful silence regarding later administrations. But now he's speaking out, criticizing some big names, and not in ways you might expect.  As revealed in the new Jon Meacham biography, "Destiny And Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush," the 41st president has some harsh words for the actions of his son's administration.  In particular, he objects to how Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted to 9/11. He feels they were too hawkish, taking a harsh, inflexible stance that tarnished America's reputation around the world.  "I don't know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with," Bush told Meacham. "The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East ..." 
  • The elder Bush believes Cheney -- who had been his own defense secretary back when he held the White House -- acted too independently of his son. "The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department," Bush said, apparently referring to the national security team that the vice president assembled in his office.  The 41st president suggested to Meacham that Cheney may even have been pushed toward a harder line by his conservative wife and daughter, Liz and Lynne. "You know, I've concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here ... tough as nails, driving," Bush is quoted as saying.  Cheney laughs off that last claim, taking full responsibility for his actions. "We smile about it, we laugh about it," Cheney told Fox News. "Same with my daughter, with Liz. It's his view, perhaps, of what happened, but my family was not conspiring to somehow turn me into a tougher, more hardnosed individual. I got there all by myself."  Regarding the former president's "iron-ass" remark, Cheney says he takes that as a compliment. "I took it as a mark of pride," he says. "The attack on 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor, in terms of the number people killed, and the amount of damage done. I think a lot of people believed then, and still believe to this day that I was aggressive in defending, in carrying out what I thought were the right policies." 
  • Despite the criticism, Cheney says he still respects his former boss and enjoyed Meacham's book, which draws partly from audio diaries that Bush recorded during his presidency.  "The diary's fascinating, because you can see how he felt at various key moments of his life," Cheney said. "So I'm enjoying the book. I recommend it to my friends. And proud to be a part of it."  The elder Bush is even harder on Rumsfeld, saying, "I don't like what he did, and I think it hurt the President" -- his son, that is. "I've never been that close to him anyway. There's a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He's more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that. Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow ..."  Rumsfeld has declined to comment on the book. 
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  • For more on the private thoughts and the presidency of the 41st president, watch Fox News Reporting -- Destiny and Power -- The Private Diaries of George Herbert Walker Bush. The new special airs Friday Nov. 6 at 10 p.m. ET on Fox News.
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    Fox published first and all subsequent reports thus far seem to be cribbing quotes from Fox. More critical analysis will probably follow once reporters get their hands on the book. It's scheduled for publication on November 10. Bush 41 or his biographer definitely knows how to sell books. On the phrase he used to describe Lynne Cheney, "eminence grise," see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminence_grise  (note that "grise" is the French feminine singular form of "gris", https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grise ), meaning "grey." The blaming of his son's principle handlers for his son's failings as a leader makes me wonder why Bush 41 did not tell Bush43 to cool his jets when the latter first got interested in running for public office. Bush 41 had to know that Bush 43 lacked the intelligence to make wise, independent decisions. 
Paul Merrell

Exclusive: Watch Donald Rumsfeld Lie About Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in 'The Unknown Known' - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • In this exclusive clip, Morris grills Rumsfeld about his response to 9/11, in particular why he, along with the rest of the Bush administration, led America to believe that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks.“Oh, I don’t think so,” replies Rumsfeld. “It was very clear that the direct planning for 9/11 was done by Osama bin Laden’s people, al Qaeda, and in Afghanistan. I don’t think the American people were confused about that.” Then Morris provides some eye-opening evidence to the contrary.   Watch their showdown here:
Paul Merrell

Has questioning 9/11 become more acceptable? - RT Op-Edge - 2 views

  • Despite the media’s best efforts to dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories, one in two Americans doubt the government’s narrative and skepticism is slowly seeping its way into the mainstream. Twelve years on from the events of September 11, 2001, and a seemingly nightmarish deja vu has gripped the United States and its war-weary citizens. Again, the public is told that destructive weapons in faraway countries pose a critical danger, and that despite wearing the clothes of humanitarianism, a military solution that will inevitably harm civilians is the only meaningful response. The main difference today is that after an abstract decade-long ‘War on Terror’, Washington finds itself fighting in Syria on the same side as Al-Qaeda and those who are sympathetic to the alleged culprits of the 9/11 attacks.
  • Contrary to how the US media has presented them, movements that have questioned 9/11 continue to gather momentum and are often led by increasingly vocal scientists and academics that claim the account presented in the official 9/11 Commission report could not possibly be accurate.
  • The 9/11 Commission was chartered to provide a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, but even former commission vice-chairman Lee Hamilton wrote an article in the New York Times in 2008 describing how the CIA obstructed the 9/11 investigations, destroyed evidence and failed to respond to the commission’s own lawful requests for information – plus it’s also widely known that the 9/11 Commission report relies heavily on torture testimony.
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  • If the United States continually lobbies its population to intervene in unpopular new military conflicts using unsubstantiated claims and questionable evidence, there is little doubt that greater numbers of people will reexamine 9/11 and endorse more critical perspectives of it, especially as those campaigns mature and become more sophisticated. There are many who have looked at the evidence and are convinced that Washington is lying, but the real juicy question is who exactly is responsible? Kevin Ryan of the Journal of 9/11 Studies recently published a book, “Another Nineteen,” which is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the political and military command structure that spectacularly failed to act on the morning of 9/11. The task at hand for 9/11 advocacy movements is grasping both the scientific and political totality of events and bringing that scrutiny into the mainstream, which it is steadily beginning to do.
  • It’s not easy to reliably gauge public opinion figures on this issue, but in 2008, a comprehensive international poll showed that 54 percent of respondents believed that parties other than Al-Qaeda were responsible, as reported by Reuters. A new poll conducted in September 2013 by polling firm YouGov found that one in two Americans have doubts about the government’s account of 9/11. 
  • There will always be mocking and scathing criticisms of those who question 9/11, but if scientists and experts disagree over the technical fundamentals, this enough is sufficient ground for advocating a new and comprehensive investigation. As it stands, this transformative event that radically altered American foreign and domestic policy and led to the deaths of over a million people has not been sufficiently explained.
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    On August 31st, 2013, Kevin Ryan appeared on Coast to Coast (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2013/08/31) for a four hour interview that is available on request. Amazing interview! The long-time co-editor of the Journal of 9/11, Kevin Ryan, offered an evidence-based analysis of other potential suspects responsible for the September 11th attacks in 2001. A former employee of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), Ryan pointed out that the World Trade Center (WTC) was designed to withstand the impact of airliners and the steel used in the buildings was certified by UL to tolerate several hours of intense fire. The steel was tested at 2000 degrees F and a typical office fire burns at 1200 degrees F, he explained, noting that the temperatures measured at the WTC were much lower, around 500 degrees F. This presents a glaring problem since one of the towers was completely destroyed in only 56 minutes, Ryan added. The UL repeated its tests after the disaster and determined the steel columns and floor structures should not have failed, he revealed. A proponent of controlled-demolition theory, Ryan stated definitively that "the evidence really points to the buildings having been destroyed through the use of explosives." Many witnesses reported explosions and flashes of light, he said. Ryan questioned the official government story that 19 young Arab Muslims led by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed executed this unbelievable attack, observing that such a feat could not have been accomplished by these men as they had no access to plant explosives. Ryan identified former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney as "the two people who were in perfect position to coordinate the attacks of 9/11." Rumsfeld went missing for more than 30 minutes during the height of the attacks and Cheney gave a stand-down order as a plane approached the Pentagon, he reported. Ryan credited Rumsfeld and Cheney with the false conclusions that led to the Iraq
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    Be sure to catch the free on-line documentary, "September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor", where director Massimo Mazzucco presents five hours of interviews and evidence comparing the 9-11 events to Pearl Harbor. Massimo confirms the findings of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth; that this was a controlled demolition. He then goes on to name the inside players responsible, and why they did it. Lots of discussion about the 1997 Cheney-Rumsfeld white paper, "The New American Century". The documentary (3 DVD's) is at: http://goo.gl/EIie3d
Paul Merrell

CIA Torture Report Poised for Release -- At Least Some of It - 0 views

  • Portions of the Senate's long-awaited report on Bush-era interrogation practices are poised to be released, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. On Thursday night, Feinstein said the CIA and the Obama administration have agreed that portions of her committee's exhaustive, 6,000-page report should be shared with the public. News of the agreement follows an intense struggle between the CIA and lawmakers that will likely shape how history views one of the most controversial periods in the post-9/11 era, when the CIA used tactics that President Obama and others have condemned as torture in an attempt to elicit information about terrorism.
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    Don't count on any part being made public that is embarrassing to elected officials or their political appointees other than Donald Rumsfeld, whose approval of the torture by the Defense Department is in a doc he signed that has already been made public. But Rumsfeld had no jurisdiction over the CIA. Containment of the damage will undoubtedly be the guiding light.
Paul Merrell

Israel deploys a new weapons system in Gaza - Intellihub.com - 0 views

  • Reports, including photographic evidence reveal that Israel is using an energy weapon to attack targets in Gaza. The destructive beam, thought to be a high energy laser, is emitted from a plane identified as a Boeing KC707 “Re’em,” originally configured for Electronic Warfare. Those observing the attacks cite a beam from a 4 engine jet hitting a target which immediately turns “white hot.” After these attacks, the target area is then hit with either bombs or artillery to destroy evidence of the use of an American designed and built energy weapon illegally given to Israel. BACKGROUND The weapon used is identified as part of the YAL 1 system, a COIL laser (chemical, oxygen/iodine laser), originally intended as an aircraft mounted system to shoot down ICBMs. Boeing approached the Department of Defense in 2002 and by 2004 had mounted its first system on a 747/400 previously flown by Air India. Boeing had convinced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that this system, mounted on as many as 7 aircraft, could fly 24 hours a day around Iran and defend “the free world” against nuclear tipped ICBMs that Rumsfeld believed Iran was planning to use. Please note that it was Rumsfeld that told television audiences that Afghanistan was “peppered” with underground cities serviced by rail links that supported division sized Al Qaeda units that, after ten years, no one was able to locate.
  • Boeing tested the system in 2007. The Department of Defense claimed the system could shoot down low earth orbit satellites and that in tests conducted in 2010, destroyed multiple test missiles. There is no reliable confirmation of this other than a press release from then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. CANCELLATION AND MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE The Center for Strategic Studies, in an interview with then Defense Secretary Gates published the following: “I don’t know anybody at the Department of Defense who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire.” So, right now the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there’s nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept.”
  • After $5 billion was spent, the functioning prototype only capable of being fired directly at nearby targets, a system very capable of acquisition and destruction of ground targets with no air defense protection only, was said to have been flown to a scrap yard. The plane itself is still there, at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, with other failed dreams and nightmares. However, the weapons system disappeared, only to reappear in Israel as a “missile defense” project, an adjunct to the “Iron Dome” system. Israel’s Rafael Defense had been trying to develop laser weapons on its own to intercept rockets being fired from Gaza. It was never able to neither deploy a laser powerful enough nor develop a radar system able to be effective.
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  • “Friends of Israel,” within the US defense community were convinced by Israel that the system could be finished and deployed to protect Israel against a purported “missile onslaught” from Tehran. In truth, there was no such intention. Instead, as in the film “Real Genius,” the laser system was always intended to be deployed against ground targets, for terrorism and assassinations. The “delivery system,” a Boeing airliner configured for AWAC, electronic warfare or refueling, could easily be modified to “clone” commercial air traffic and attack targets thousands of miles away or as close as Gaza, Lebanon, Syria or Iraq with total impunity.
  • McLeod and Rogers, in The Law of War, examine the history of prohibition of incendiary weapons. Israel’s use of white phosphorous, intended as a “smoke market” as a corrosive anti-personnel weapon against civilian populations in Lebanon and Gaza skirts initial language, as cited below, in the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, but falls well short of evading later prohibition on the use of chemical agents. “The first treaty to deal with weapons was the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868. Here states were concerned about the development of explosive or incendiary bullets for use against the wagon trains of enemy forces. It was felt that these bullets might be used against enemy personnel15 and cause unnecessary injury. The Contracting Parties agreed ‘mutually to renounce, in case of war among themselves, the employment by their military or naval troops of any projectile of a weight below 400 grammes, which is either explosive or charged with fulminating or inflammable substances’.
  • The declaration does not seem to have affected the practice of states in using tracer for range finding, even mixed with normal ammunition, nor the use of small explosive projectiles for anti-aircraft and anti-material uses. It did not prevent states from using four pound, thermite-based incendiary bombs during the Second World War. These, obviously, were more than 400 grammes in weight. Furthermore it could be argued that they were not ‘projectiles’, a term that certainly would not include illuminating flares or smoke canisters.” The use of energy weapons for assassinations and terrorism had, prior to only a few short days ago, been subject of speculative fiction only. No one had imagined that a failed American weapons system would be pirated for deployment in acts of terrorism by a rogue state. A greater question arises, if this “failed system” costing many billions has been shipped off “in the dark of night” without public knowledge or official authorization for use in a criminal manner, what other systems may have been similarly pirated? There is conclusive evidence that W54/Davy Crocket nuclear weapons made their way to Israel after 1991 after an accident at Dimona is reputed to have made that facility useless for weapons development.
  • Similarly, when the Ukraine retired its “fleet” of SS21 tactical nuclear missiles, Israel took possession of the warheads, servicing their deuterium booster gas all these years to keep them ready for deployment. Intercepted communications between the Kiev junta and Israel now indicate that Israel is ready to “repatriate” some of these nuclear weapons to the Ukraine for use against pro-Russian separatists. Ukrainian leaders have spoken of the intent to deploy and use these nuclear weapons publicly on several recent occasions. From USA Today: “KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine may have to arm itself with nuclear weapons if the United States and other world powers refuse to enforce a security pact that obligates them to reverse the Moscow-backed takeover of Crimea, a member of the Ukraine parliament told USA TODAY. ‘We gave up nuclear weapons because of this agreement,’ said Rizanenko, a member of the Udar Party headed by Vitali Klitschko, a candidate for president. ‘Now there’s a strong sentiment in Ukraine that we made a big mistake.’”
  • With the recent bombing of a UN refugee facility in Gaza, with the use of chemical and now energy weapons, with Israel’s planned sale of nuclear warheads to Ukraine, there is little more that could be done to establish Israel, not only as a rogue state, but as a “clear and present danger” to not only regional but global security as well. As Jim W. Dean of Veterans Today recently stated, “Their fingerprints are at every crime scene.”
Gary Edwards

DEMOCRATS  AGAINST  U. N.  AGENDA  21 - OK, So what is Agenda 21? And why should I care? Part 1 - 0 views

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    "UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, and all human beings in the world.   INVENTORY AND CONTROL. Have you wondered where these terms 'sustainability' and 'smart growth' and 'high density urban mixed use development' came from?  Doesn't it seem like about 10 years ago you'd never heard of them and now everything seems to include these concepts?  Is that just a coincidence?  That every town and county and state and nation in the world would be changing their land use/planning codes and government policies to align themselves with...what? First, before I get going, I want to say that yes, I know it's a small world and it takes a village and we're all one planet etc.  I also know that we have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and that as cumbersome as that can be sometimes (Donald Rumsfeld said that the Chinese have it easy; they don't have to ask their people if they agree.  And Bush Junior said that it would be great to have a dictator as long as he was the dictator), we have a three branch government and the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and self-determination.  This is one of the reasons why people want to come to the US, right?  We don't have Tiananmen Square here, generally speaking (yes, I remember Kent State--not the same, and yes, an outrage.) So I'm not against making certain issues a priority, such as mindful energy use, alternative energy sponsorship, recycling/reuse, and sensitivity to all living creatures. But then you have UN Agenda 21.  What is it?  See our videos and radio shows at the bottom of this page (or search YouTube for Rosa Koire) or buy BEHIND THE GREEN MASK: U.N. Agenda 21 by Rosa Koire click here"
Gary Edwards

The Real Reason for the Iraq War | VICE United Kingdom - 1 views

  • Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil. But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
  • Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas. I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
  • I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil". That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.) The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
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  • General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired Garner, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
  • But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields. How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
  • There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million bbd of Iraqi oil and thereby knock the price of oil back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
  • Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
  • This week, VICE readers can download, for free, Greg Palast's investigation of the war in Iraq in the BBC film, Bush Family Fortunes, at www.GregPalast.com – as well as the illustrated poster of "The Secret History of War over Oil in Iraq" from Palast's international bestseller, Armed Madhouse, also at www.GregPalast.com
  • Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements". And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward. Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits. And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels. The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel. As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
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    The Sherman Act forbids conspiracies in restraint of trade and is at its zenith in price-fixing cases. This looks to be the mother of all price-fixing cases, to say the least.   
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    Wow, Marbux has it right.  This report from the legendary Greg Palast of the BBC News Network is a stunning reversal of what everyone believed to be the truth.  To wit, the militarist and global strategist - resource control hungry neocon contingent of the Repubican party was always thought to be behind the Iraqi war.  For control of cheap, plentiful oil and, the protection / destruction of Israel's enemies.   Funny, but it turns out America was fighting for higher oil prices and limited supplies.  Just as in the first Gulf War, Americans were fighting to protect Saudi and big oil profits. excerpt: Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields - and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil - he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil - END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control
Paul Merrell

Obama, Biden are war criminals under UN Charter: Analyst - 0 views

  • Most Americans, their minds focused at the moment on the tragic slaughter of 20 young children aged 5 and 6, along with five teachers and a school principal in Connecticut by a heavily-armed psychotic 21-year-old, are blissfully unaware that their previous president, George W. Bush, along with five key members of his administration, were recently convicted in absentia of war crimes at a tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They are unaware because the US corporate media have ignored the story, just as that same corporate media have failed to note that the crimes of which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five White House lawyers, were convicted all could apply equally well to current President Barack Obama and his administration. Bush, Cheney, White House counsel (and later Attorney General) Alberto Gonzalez and others were found guilty earlier this month of war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to the executive orders that launched the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as of authorizing and failing to punish torture and other war crimes by US forces, including the military and the CIA.
  • But as international law expert Francis Boyle, a professor of law at the University of Illinois, notes, under the Geneva Convention, failing to take action to prosecute those guilty of war crimes such as the “Crime against Peace” (invading a country that does not pose an imminent threat to the attacker), and torture, are war crimes in and of themselves. Speaking last week at a Summit Conference on Human Rights held at the University of the Sacred Heart in the US island colony of Puerto Rico, Boyle said US authorities, including President Obama, are engaged in an “ongoing criminal conspiracy under international law” both to cover up and protect criminals like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and to continue the commission of war crimes by the US government.
  • Obama, when initially campaigning in 2008 for the presidency, vowed that he wanted to restore the respect for the law and the Constitution, once elected President, he and his attorney general Eric Holder quickly made it clear that they were “looking forward, not backward,” and that there would be no prosecutions or indictments for war crimes of any Bush administration people.   The thing is, at that moment, both President Obama and AG Holder became war criminals themselves under the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles, which declare that covering up war crimes by prior government and military leaders, and failure to prosecute such war crimes, are in themselves war crimes.
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  • But as Boyle noted in his address in San Juan, P.R., Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, and the various secretaries of defense and state, the head of the CIA and the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff, as well as other Obama administration personnel, are also guilty of perpetrating ongoing war crimes themselves. Boyle accuses the Obama administration of continuing to conduct a “bogus” war on “international terrorism” including the ever escalating campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and other jurisdictions. He termed the president’s program of “targeted killings,” in which President Obama himself draws up the “kill list,” to be simply a case of “pure murder” under both traditional British common law and international law, and says these attacks constitute a “Crime against Humanity under Article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.”
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    While the charge that Obama and other administration officials committed crimes under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court might seem odd because the U.S. never acceded to that treaty or to the jurisdiction of the ICC, the statute applies to those who commit war crimes within the jurisdictions of nations that have acceded to the treaty and to their superiors who either knew of should have known that such crimes would be committed and did not act to prevent them.  Pakistan  and Yemen have acceded to the treaty. The Rome treaty requires the arrest of those classified as war criminals under that treaty if they set foot in any nation that has acceded to the treaty. So just as Bush administration figures have done, Obama and crew will need to restrict where they travel after he leaves office.
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    The linked article should have mentioned that it was a mock tribunal, without legal authority or powers.
Gary Edwards

Guest Post: The Linchpin Lie: How Global Collapse Will Be Sold To The Masses | Zero Hedge - 0 views

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    Stunning guest post at Zero Hedge that attempts to explain it all - Why things happen and who is behind the curtain pulling the strings.  And what are they trying to do?  Excellent piece exposing the Globalists and how they work.  The question of why war and debt is so important to the Globalist one world - new world order viewpoint is also explained. excerpt: "In our modern world there exist certain institutions of power.  Not government committees, alphabet agencies, corporate lobbies, or even standard military organizations; no, these are the mere "middle-men" of power.  The errand boys.  The well paid hitmen of the global mafia.  They are not the strategists or the decision makers.  Instead, I speak of institutions which introduce the newest paradigms.  Who write the propaganda.  Who issue the orders from on high.  I speak of the hubs of elitism which have initiated nearly every policy mechanism of our government for the past several decades.  I am talking about the Council On Foreign Relations, the Tavistock Institute, the Heritage Foundation (a socialist organization posing as conservative), the Bilderberg Group, as well as the corporate foils that they use to enact globalization, such as Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Carlyle Group, etc. Many of these organizations and corporations operate a revolving door within the U.S. government.  Monsanto has champions, like Donald Rumsfeld who was on the board of directors of its Searle Pharmaceuticals branch, who later went on to help the company force numerous dangerous products including Aspartame through the FDA.  Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have a veritable merry-go-round of corrupt banking agents which are appointed to important White House and Treasury positions on a regular basis REGARDLESS of which party happens to be in office.  Most prominent politicians are all members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which has openly admitted on multiple occasions that thei
Paul Merrell

The case for Syria may be worse than Iraq - 0 views

  • The Iraq War is casting a long shadow over a potential  Syria conflict, as even President Obama had to acknowledge. “[We're] not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about,” Obama told PBS NewsHour Wednesday night. But for all the fears of repeating Bush’s mistakes, Obama is taking the country to war in Syria from an arguably weaker position than Bush did with Iraq 10 years ago. On public opinion alone, they are worlds apart (and this is a democracy, after all, so such things should matter). “Do you think that the United States should or should not take military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq?” a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll asked two days before the bombing began in 2003. A clear majority, 65 percent, said yes, while just 30 percent said no.
  • Compare that to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out this morning that found that 50 percent of Americans oppose military intervention in Syria, compared with 42 percent who support it. When asked if the U.S. should prioritize removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power, just 16 percent of respondents said yes. Now even Republicans are turning against a potential attack, Nate Cohn noted. Syria is a historical anomaly here as Americans have generally supported military intervention in recent years, from the humanitarian missions of the 1990s to the Bush wars of the 2000s, to the Libya campaign in 2011.
  • Fortunately, there seems to be little appetite in the White House for anything near the scale of Iraq  – “just muscular enough not to get mocked,” as an unnamed administration official said — so the actual consequences will never be as bad. But while it’s infuriating that someone like Donald Rumsfeld is criticizing the White House for failing to justify a potential attack on Syria — it puts him in ”the Chutzpah Hall of Fame,” as Steve Benen wrote — it’s even more infuriating that Rumsfeld may be right.
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    If you follow the link to the Wall St. Journal/MCNBC poll results, you'll see that while the Syrian intervention got a bump in the polls from the publicity blitzkrieg waged by the Administration, the public is still more opposed than in favor of the action. Other poll results are even more troubling for the Administration, with a very muscular disapproval of Obama's handling of the Syria situation and even a drop in his favorability rating.  But the hearing today before the House Foreign Affairs Committee was a real fiasco, even though it's not over yet as of this writing. Kerry, Hagel, and Gen. Dempsey are having a much rougher ride than they did in the Senate committee. Their justifications for the Syrian strike are strictly looney-tunes. Example, Kerry's faux-impassioned argument that the planned military strike is not war, reminiscent of the Administration arguments when Obama launched his regime-change mission against Libya. Not war because no casualties on our side anticipated. As though in both Libya and Syria, no act of war were involved. Dempsey, to his credit, said as he has said before that it would be an act of war.  I turned off the TV because of boredom. But my sense is that if this stopped, it will be stopped in the House. 
Paul Merrell

NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander to retire in March, agency tells UPI - UPI.com - 0 views

  • (UPI) -- U.S. National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander, who has steadfastly defended NSA mass surveillance, plans to retire in five months, the agency said.Alexander, who will be 62 then, is expected to leave the main producer and manager of U.S. signals intelligence in March, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said Wednesday in a statement to United Press International.Alexander, appointed to the NSA spot in 2005 by George W. Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "served well beyond a normal rotation, having been 'extended' three times," Vines told UPI.
  • The four-star general is a career Army intelligence officer who is also chief of the Defense Department's Central Security Service and commander of the military's Cyber Command.After the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of mass NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, Alexander became the public face of Washington's secret collection of personal communications records in the name of national security.He has consistently defended the controversial practice, saying it has helped prevent dozens of "potential terrorist events" since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.Alexander's departure "has nothing to do with media leaks," Vines' statement to UPI said.
  • "The decision for his retirement was made prior" to the leaks, in an agreement made with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in March, she said.Snowden started leaking information to the press in May, with the first reports published in June."The process for selecting his successor is ongoing," Vines told UPI.
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  • Alexander's departure and potential successor are widely expected to prompt congressional debate over whether the huge NSA infrastructure built during Alexander's tenure will remain or be restricted.Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has drafted legislation to eliminate the NSA's ability to systematically obtain Americans' calling records.Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., co-author of the Patriot Act, whose secret interpretation is used to justify the mass metadata collection, is drafting a bill to cut back on domestic surveillance programs.
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    So the Obama Administration is looking for a new professional liar to head the NSA. 
Paul Merrell

Spanish Judge enforces torture probe against Bush and Cheney - 0 views

  • On Tuesday, Judge Pablo Ruz at the Spanish National Court defied pressure to scrap a probe into alleged torture in the United States prison camp in Guantanamo Bay which targets former U.S. president George W. Bush. In a written decision, Judge Ruz refused to scrap the case despite a recent reform to restrict such human rights probes in Spain. In 2009, the Spanish courts agreed to probe charges brought by four ex-Guantanamo prisoners who say they were tortured during their detention in the camp between 2002 and 2005. Cited in the charges include Bush, US former vice president Dick Cheney and ex-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
  • A new law in Spain says courts can only probe atrocities committed abroad if the suspects are Spanish but Ruz said in Tuesday’s judgement that Spain had an “obligation” under international treaties to investigate alleged atrocities even if the suspects were not Spanish.
Paul Merrell

Reuters Investigates - UNACCOUNTABLE: The Pentagon's bad bookkeeping - 0 views

  • MILES OF AISLES: At the Defense Logistics Agency's giant storage facility outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, lack of reliable information on what's there makes it hard to throw out excess inventory. REUTERS/TIM SHAFFER
  • Part 2: For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars
  • At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found. And plugging isn’t confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.
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  • Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies. And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”
  • The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s. Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS’s Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every “plug” - thousands a month. “If the amounts didn’t balance, Treasury would hit it back to you,” he says.
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    Nothing new here. Remember when Donald Rumsfeld announced the day before 9-11 that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1rT4bszWg It was the same way in Viet Nam. During my entire 27 months there, we could not be issued socks. We had to write home to ask family or friends to buy socks and send them to us. They could buy them at military surplus stores in the U.S., regulation Army field socks with cushion soles, but we couldn't get them from the Army. "An army travels on its feet," but no socks. Socks were not the only supply chain failures, of course. If you can't manage to get socks to your soldiers because they've been declared surplus, maybe you'd have problems accounting for expenditures too, ya' think? 
Gary Edwards

Our Economic Future: From Best to Worst Case - Casey Research - 0 views

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    This article was sent to me marked URGENT: MUST READ.  Usually that's a hint to delete.  This time however the message was true.  Nicely written article presenting in a historical context three possible futures for the world.   And, a basic plan for anyone trying to guess which future will land on our heads.  Excellent read.  Well written too. excerpt: There is a great deal of uncertainty among investors about what the future of the U.S. economy may look like - so I decided to take a stab at what's likely to happen over the next 20 years. That's enough time for a child to grow up and mature, and it's long enough for major trends to develop and make themselves felt. I'll confine myself to areas that are, as the benighted Rumsfeld might have observed, "known unknowns." I don't want to deal with possibilities of the deus ex machina sort. So we'll rule out natural events like a super-volcano eruption, an asteroid strike, a new ice age, global warming, and the like. Although all these things absolutely will occur sometime in the future, the timing is very uncertain - at least from the perspective of one human lifespan. It's pointless dealing with geological time and astronomical probability here. And, more important, there's absolutely nothing we can do about such things. So let's limit ourselves to the possibilities presented by human action. They're plenty weird and scary, and unpredictable enough.............
Paul Merrell

Petraeus Spared Ray McGovern's Question | Consortiumnews - 0 views

  • New York City police arrested ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern to prevent him from attending a public event where he planned to pose a pointed question to retired Gen. David Petraeus, another sign of how much U.S. neocons love democracy, writes Robert Parry.
  • Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who was arrested by New York City police on Thursday night to prevent him from attending a speech by retired Gen. and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, told me the day before that he was planning to ask a question during the Q-and-A. McGovern, who writes regularly for Consortiumnews.com, compared his goal in New York to his famous questioning of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Atlanta in 2006 when McGovern pressed Rumsfeld on false statements he had made about Iraq’s WMD and ties to al-Qaeda.
  • But the 75-year-old McGovern was blocked from entering the event at the 92nd Street Y, was roughly put under arrest, and was held overnight in jail. He described his ordeal in an interview with RT, saying “I was warned as soon as I got to the ticket-taker, ‘Ray, you’re not welcome here.’” McGovern, who was suffering from a shoulder injury, said he was caused sharp pain by being forcefully handcuffed. “If you’ve seen the footage, you can see me screaming in pain as they try to pin my left wrist around behind my back,” McGovern told RT.
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  • He was hauled off to a local precinct and charged with resisting arrest, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. He said he spent the night on a stainless steel cot.
Paul Merrell

Pentagon Still Plans to Blow Through Its Allowance - 0 views

  • a few years ago, Congress gave the Pentagon strict limits on its annual allowance, but the Department has struggled to stay within that budget. In advance of the Pentagon’s annual budget request, which usually is submitted during the spring, a senior defense official, Alan Estevez, confirmed that the Department plans on blowing through the budget caps next year. “We’re going to propose a budget next January and it’s going to be above sequestration levels.” Shocker!
  • When Estevez refers to “above sequestration levels,” he means above the legal spending limits that Congress has placed on the federal discretionary budget via legislation called the Budget Control Act (BCA). However, the Pentagon continues to propose funding levels that exceed the authorized amounts. Earlier this year, when the Pentagon first submitted its budget for Fiscal Year 2015, military planners proposed spending $115 billion more than is allowed by the spending caps over the next five years.
  • Now, Estevez is confirming that the Pentagon will indeed follow through on its pledge to blow through its allowance. “We’re obviously planning a budget above sequestration, similar to what we put forward in [Fiscal Year] ’15,” says Estevez. This coming year, in Fiscal Year 2016, the Pentagon will propose spending more than $60 billion above the amount authorized by Congress. CBO Assessment
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  • While the Pentagon admits that it wants to spend $115 billion more than is allowed, an independent government watchdog says that, in reality, the Pentagon wants to spend even more than that. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which objectively analyzes the federal government’s long-term spending plans, the Pentagon actually would spend $182 billion more than is allowed over the five-year period from FY 2015 through FY 2019. That’s because CBO has a more realistic way of evaluating Pentagon spending plans.
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    Remember September 10, 2001? That's the day that Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon couldn't account for $2.3 trillion in spending. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU The accountability situation hasn't changed. Ignoring the sequestration limits simply compounds the DoD's impunity for the law. 
Paul Merrell

ICC cites evidence of international forces abusing Afghanistan detainees | Reuters - 0 views

  • U.N. prosecutors said on Thursday they had evidence suggesting international forces in Afghanistan had caused serious harm to detainees by subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse.The court has been investigating alleged crimes committed since 2003 by all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan, but in previous reports on the status of its inquiry it has been far more circumspect about alleged crimes and the harm caused.In its latest report on the many preliminary examinations it has open, the court's Office of the Prosecutor said U.S. investigations of alleged crimes by its soldiers had not yielded convictions or risen high up the chain of command.The determination marks a significant escalation of the court's long-running investigation and could prove controversial in the U.S., which is not a member of the court and has in the past opposed it vociferously. "The infliction of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques' ... would have caused serious physical and psychological injury," prosecutors wrote.
  • They also noted that there was evidence of violations committed by Taliban and forces that supported the Afghan government, adding that neither appeared to be seriously investigating allegations against its own side. Up to 37,000 civilian casualties had been attributed to anti-government forces since 2007, and pro-government forces appeared to have meted out "gruesome" treatment to some 5,000 detainees, prosecutors said.They were still trying to determine the gravity and scale of any violations committed by international and U.S. forces, they said. All NATO members contributed to the International Security Assistance Force mission to Afghanistan that ran from 2001 until last year. Forces from the U.S. and other countries remain in the country on a NATO training exercise.
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    The ICC has jurisdiction because Afghanistan is a member of the Rome Statute that governs the ICC. It will be interesting to see if the ICC has the guts to prosecute high U.S. officials. (By law, the ICC is required to go for the highest ranking members of government who had responsibility. 'Twould be justice to see Bush 43, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in the dock. 
Paul Merrell

Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion -study | Reuters - 0 views

  • (Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war's death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.
  • The report, the work of about 30 academics and experts, was published in advance of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.It was also an update of a 2011 report the Watson Institute produced ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that assessed the cost in dollars and lives from the resulting wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion in the update.
  • The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.The interest on expenses for the Iraq war could amount to about $4 trillion during that period, the report said.The report also examined the burden on U.S. veterans and their families, showing a deep social cost as well as an increase in spending on veterans. The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.
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  • The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women's rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.
  • "Action needed to be taken," said Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think-tank.Bucci, who was unconnected to the Watson study, agreed with its observation that the forecasts for the cost and duration of the war proved to be a tiny fraction of the real costs."If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in," Bucci said. "Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought it would be short."
Paul Merrell

Bush Administration Convicted of War Crimes - Dr. Francis Boyle #N3 | Next News Network (N3) - 0 views

  • Former U.S. President George W. Bush recently dedicated his Presidential Library in Dallas. The ceremony included speeches by President Obama, ex-President Bush, and every other living ex-president. But none of the speeches so much as mentioned to Iraq war — the undertaking that dominated George W. Bush’s presidency, and will define his historic legacy. This omission might be due, at least in part, to the fact that Mr. Bush is now a convicted war criminal who dares not travel abroad out of fear of being arrested. In February 2011, Bush was forced to cancel a scheduled appearance in Geneva, Switzerland after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint charging him with violating international treaties against torture. His trouble increased dramatically a year ago when Bush — along with former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and several other top Bush administration officials — were convicted of war crimes in absentia by a special war crimes tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
  • The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission was convened and conducted according to internationally recognized procedures and rules of evidence, and the week-long hearing ended with the five-member panel unanimously delivering guilty verdicts. What is the significance of that tribunal? Is its verdict legally binding? Are there troublesome aspects to the idea that a foreign tribunal can sit in judgment of a U.S. President — whatever we may think of his actions? We will discuss these vitally important questions with Dr. Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He served as a prosecutor at the tribunal.
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    I did not bookmark the news about this tribunal's decision last year because I mistakenly assumed that it was a mock trial, that it had no legal force.  But in this interview with renowned international law professor Francis Boyle, who served as co-prosecutor, I learned that the trial was legally constituted, and that international law requires other nations to either extradite Bush and his top officials or independently try them for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Note that Boyle gives Obama no points either, calling for his impeachment and prosecution. So we might look forward to a similar prosecution of Obama and his top officials after he leaves office. 
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