Articles
George Bush, Jr., September 11th and the Rule of Law -Part 1
By "dave ''who can do? ratmandu!'' ratcliffe"
May 27, 2003, 9:19am

George Bush, Jr., September 11th and the Rule of Law
from the book: "The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence
- Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear?" by Francis Boyle, (Clarity Press, April 2002) with an additional References section.

The hyperlinked version of this can be found at:
Nuclear Deterrence

With all the stories being presented in commercial media by body snatcher/twilight zone types as so-called reality, it is deeply refreshing AND ESSENTIAL to study and remember how the world that has been defined by the Rule of Law, especially since World War II, has been affected by the United States government since September 11th.

Some key points in the following:

- The case presented against bin Laden & Al Qaeda would not stand up in court of law and is acknowledged as such by the so-called Powell/Blair white paper.

- 9/11 was not an act of war, which international law and practice define as a military attack by one nation state upon another nation state.

- The Bush Jr. administration simply ignored the 12 or so multilateral conventions already on the books that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism, many of which could have been used and relied upon to handle this matter in a lawful, effective, and peaceful manner.

- The Bush Jr. war against Afghanistan in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the UN Charter of 1945 constitutes a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace. This provides yet another glaring example of precisely why the Pentagon and Bush Jr. have so vigorously opposed the establishment of an International Criminal Court.

- An act of war has a technical legal meaning: basically, a military attack by one nation state against another nation state. While this is what happened on December 7, 1941, it is not what happened on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, immediately after September 11th, the Bush Jr administration went to the United Nations Security Council in order to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force against Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. They failed. Indeed, the Security Council resolution that was adopted, instead of calling this an "armed attack" by one state against another state, denominated these events "terrorist attacks." And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed
attack by one state against another state, which is an act of war, and a terrorist attack, which is not. Again, terrorists are dealt with as criminals. Terrorists are not treated like nation states. Terrorists are dealt with by means of international and domestic law enforcement.
Terrorists are not given the dignity of special status under international law and practice.

- The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence is an effective tool and a "must read" for the burgeoning anti-nuclear and peace movements, church groups, and lawyers defending anti-nuclear resisters. It should also prove instructive for the diplomatic community, and for civilian and military personnel who frame and carry out America's nuclear policies, who more than any must weigh the possibility of being summoned one day before an international war crimes tribunal.


David Ratcliffe
ratitor and publisher
rat haus reality press
http://www.ratical.org/rhrPress.html


____________________________________________________________

The following is reproduced with permission of the publisher, Clarity Press and can be found in the book, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence - Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear? by Francis A. Boyle (April, 2002). See
Boyle for the Table of Contents listing and book reviews. The author's biography and a summary of the book are included in the References section.


SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
George Bush, Jr., September 11th and the Rule of Law
by Francis A. Boyle
1 February 2002
from The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence - Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear?
Clarity Press, April 2002


Contents

* Machiavelli Redux * The Prostitution of NATO
* International Legal Nihilism * Bush Jr.'s Crusade
* 11 September 2001 * The U.S./UN Ambassador of Death
o The Facts * Nazi "Self-defense" Resurfaces
o The Powell/Blair White Paper * Retaliation Is Not Self-Defense
o The Cover-Ups * Choosing Violent Resolutions for
o The Bin Laden Video International Disputes
* Framing a Response to September 11th * Humanitarian Catastrophe
o Terrorism and the Law * Why War?
o The U.S. Policy Preference: * It's Still the Oil, Stupid!
o The U.S. Policy * How Empires Rule at Home
Not Terrorism -- War o Bush Jr.'s Constitutional
o The UN Security Council Coup D'Êtat
Disagrees: Terrorism, not War o Ashcroft's Police State
o Bush Sr. v. Bush Jr. o Bush's Kangaroo Courts
* No Declaration of War from Congress o The Bush Jr. Withdrawal
o The Infamy of Korematsu from the ABM Treaty
o Instead, A Blank Check * Conclusion/Prologue
to Use Military Force * Notes
o Bush Sr. v. Bush Jr. Redux
* "Ending States"
* Honest Nuclear War-Mongering * References




George W. Bush was never elected President by the People of the
United States of America. Instead, he was anointed for that Office
by five Justices of the United States Supreme Court who themselves
had been appointed by Republican Presidents. Bush Jr.'s
installation was an act of judicial usurpation of the American
Constitution that was unprecedented in the history of the American
Republic. Had it occurred in a developing country, such a
subversion of democratic process would have been greeted with
knowing derision throughout the West. What happened in America
could only be likened to a judicial coup d'état inflicted upon the
American People, Constitution, and Republic. There should now be
no doubt that the United States Supreme Court is governed by raw,
naked, brutal, power politics. Justice has nothing at all to do
with it. This Supreme Court's constitutional sophistry proved a
harbinger of the new administration's disrespect for the Rule of
Law, whether domestic or international.



Machiavelli Redux

When Bush Jr. came to power in January of 2001, he proceeded to
implement foreign affairs and defense policies that were every bit
as radical, extreme and excessive as the Reagan/Bush
administrations had starting in January of 1981. To be sure, Bush
Jr. had no popular mandate to do anything. Indeed, a majority of
the American electorate had voted for his corporate-cloned
opponent.

Upon his installation, Bush Jr.'s "compassionate conservatism"
quickly revealed itself to be nothing more than reactionary
Machiavellianism -- as if there had been any real doubt about this
during the presidential election campaign. Even the appointees to
the Bush Jr. administration were pretty much the same as the
original Reagan/Bush foreign affairs and defense "experts," many
of whom were called back into service and given promotions for
policies ten to twenty years ago that many might argue had been
crimes under international law.[1] It was déjà vû all over again,
as Yogi Berra aptly put it.



International Legal Nihilism

In quick succession the world saw the Bush Jr. administration
repudiate the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the International
Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), an
international convention to regulate the trade in small arms, a
verification Protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention, an
international convention to regulate and reduce smoking, the World
Conference Against Racism, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems
Treaty, inter alia. To date the Bush Jr. Administration has not
found an international convention that it likes. The only
exception to this rule was its shameless exploitation of the 11
September 2001 tragedy in order to get the U.S. House of
Representatives to give Bush Jr. "fast-track" trade negotiation
authority so as to present the American People and Congress with
yet another non-amendable fait accompli on behalf of American
multinationals, corporations, banks, insurance companies, the
high-tech and biotech industries, etc. The epitome of
"globalization," American-style.

More ominously, once into office the Bush Jr. administration
adopted an incredibly belligerent posture towards the Peoples'
Republic of China (PRC), publicly identifying the PRC as America's
foremost competitor/opponent into the 21st Century. Their
needlessly pugnacious approach towards the downing of a U.S. spy
plane in China with the death of a Chinese pilot only exacerbated
already tense U.S./Chinese relations. Then the Bush Jr.
administration decided to sell high-tech weapons to Taiwan in
violation of the 17 August 1982 Joint Communiqué of the USA and
PRC that had been negotiated and concluded earlier by the
Reagan/Bush administration. Finally came Bush Jr.'s breathtaking
statement that the United States would defend Taiwan in the event
of an attack by the PRC irrespective of Article I, Section 8,
Clause 11 of the United States Constitution expressly reserving to
Congress alone the right to declare war. President Jimmy Carter
had long ago terminated the U.S.-Taiwan self-defense treaty.[2]

For twelve years the Constitution and the Rule of Law -- whether
domestic or international -- never deterred the Reagan/Bush
administrations from pursuing their internationally lawless and
criminal policies around the world. The same was true for the
Clinton administration as well (such as invading Haiti; bombing
Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Serbia). The Bush Jr. administration
has behaved no differently from its lineal Machiavellian
predecessors. Their bellicose handling of the 11 September 2001
tragedy was no exception to this general rule.

Indeed, the Bush Jr. administration proceeded to start its bombing
campaign on the defenseless people of Afghanistan on Sunday,
October 7 -- not allowing the Sabbath to get in their way either,
despite the fact that during the presidential election campaign
Bush Jr. proudly stated that his favorite philosopher was Jesus
Christ. Yet, as Machiavelli taught, the Prince must appear to be
"all religion,"[3] especially when he goes to war.



11 September 2001

The Bush Jr. administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be
justified on either the facts, a paucity of which have been
offered, or the law, either domestic or international. Rather, it
is an illegal armed aggression that has created a humanitarian
catastrophe for the twenty-two million people of Afghanistan and
is promoting terrible regional instability. The longer Bush Jr.'s
war against Afghanistan goes on -- and at this writing, Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld has stated that U.S. ground troops will remain
in Afghanistan until at least the summer -- the worse it is going
to be not only for the millions of Afghan people but also in the
estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world comprising 58
Muslim states, few of whom really believe the Bush Jr.
administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam.

In fact, the Bush Jr. war against Afghanistan has been akin to
throwing a match into an explosives factory. Among its deleterious
results, India and Pakistan, which have already fought two wars
before over Kashmir and today are nuclear armed, are now standing
"nuclear-eyeball to nuclear-eyeball" over Kashmir. Mimicking the
Bush Administration's response to September 11th, India has
accused internal groups in Pakistan of the December 2001 attack on
the Indian parliament, and demanded, without any offer of proof
for its accusations, that Pakistan proceed against them or else
face military reprisal. The continuing conflict and armed
confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir could
readily go nuclear.


The Facts

There is not and may never be conclusive proof as to who was
behind the terrible bombings in New York and Washington, D.C., on
September 11, 2001. No point would be served here by making a
detailed review of the facts that have so far emerged into the
public record. Suffice it to say that the accounts provided by the
United States government simply do not add up.

The October 3 edition of the New York Times recounted the
definitive briefing by a U.S. ambassador to NATO officials on the
alleged facts as follows:

One Western official at NATO said the briefings, which
were oral, without slides or documents, did not report
any direct order from Mr. bin Laden, nor did they
indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before
they happened.

A senior diplomat for one closely allied nation
characterized the briefing as containing "nothing
particularly new or surprising," adding: "It was rather
descriptive and narrative rather then forensic. There
was no attempt to build a legal case."

In other words, there was no real case against Al Qaeda, bin
Laden, and the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Such was the
conclusion of senior diplomats from friendly nations who attended
the so-called briefing.


The Powell/Blair White Paper
Secretary of State Colin Powell publicly promised that they were
going to produce a "White Paper" documenting their case against
Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization concerning September
11. As those of us in the Peace Movement know all too well from
previous international transgressions, these U.S. government
"White Papers" are all too frequently laden with lies, propaganda,
half-truths, dissimulation, disinformation, etc. that are usually
very easily refuted after a little bit of research and analysis.

What happened here? We never received a "White Paper" produced by
the United States government as publicly promised by Secretary
Powell, who was later overridden by President Bush Jr. What we got
instead was a so-called White Paper produced by British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. Obviously, Blair was acting as Bush Jr.'s
surrogate or, as the British press routinely referred to him,
"Bush's pet-poodle". Tony Blair is neither an elected nor an
appointed official of the U.S. government, not even an American
citizen. Conveniently, no American official could be brought to
task for or even questioned about whatever errors or inadequacies
he might purvey.

The Powell/Blair White Paper fell into that hallowed tradition of
a "White Paper" based upon insinuation, allegation, rumors,
propaganda, lies, half-truths, etc. Even unnamed British
government officials on an off-the-record basis admitted that the
case against bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court.
As a matter of fact, the Blair/Powell White Paper was widely
derided in the British news media. There was nothing there.


The Cover-Ups

Despite the clear import of the matter, at Bush Jr.'s request the
U.S. Congress has so far decided not to empanel a Joint Committee
of the House and of the Senate with subpoena power giving them
access to whatever hard evidence they want throughout any agency
of the United States government -- including the National Security
Council, FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA -- and also to put their respective
Officials under oath to testify as to what happened and why under
penalty of perjury. Obviously a cover-up is underway for the
express purpose of not determining (1) who was ultimately
responsible for the terrible attacks of 11 September 2001; and (2)
why these extravagantly funded U.S. "intelligence" agencies were
either unable or unwilling to prevent these attacks despite
numerous warnings of a serious anti-American attack throughout the
Summer of 2001 -- and yet, amazingly, could assert the identity of
those responsible with such certainty in the space of hours
thereafter so as to preclude any serious investigation of other
possible perpetrators. For reasons not necessary to get into here,
there is also an ongoing governmental cover-up of the obvious
involvement of the Pentagon/CIA, or one of their contractors, in
the attacks inflicting U.S.-produced weapons-grade anthrax upon
those institutional components of American society that the
American right-wing has traditionally viewed with antipathy: the
Democratic Congressional leadership, and the media.


The Bin Laden Video

The so-called bin Laden Video was miraculously discovered in the
rubble of a bombed-out house in the bombed-out city of Jalalabad
by the CIA, who undoubtedly turned the Video over to the
Pentagon's Psyops People, who were operating in Afghanistan. The
Pentagon then had the tape translated by "outside" experts, one of
whom works at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International
Studies (SAIS), where Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
had just been his boss as SAIS Dean. The SAIS/Wolfowitz translator
has not been giving any interviews.

The text of the translation itself admits it is not a verbatim
transcript, but only provides "messages and information flow,"
whatever that means. Admittedly the tape is disjointed and
non-sequential. Since I am not a technical expert, I will not
comment upon how easy it would be to falsify this video. I doubt
very seriously that any fair, objective and impartial judge would
admit this Video into evidence for consideration by a jury in a
criminal case.

But let us put aside for the time being the long history of U.S.
intelligence agencies operating both at home and abroad in order
to manufacture "evidence" that suits the party line coming out of
Washington, DC.[4] Let us further assume that everything in and
about the bin Laden video is true and can be authenticated to the
satisfaction of an impartial and objective international court of
justice. Even so, the bin Laden video provided no evidence that
implicated the Taliban Government of Afghanistan in the 11
September 2001 attacks upon the United States. The video provides
no justification for the United States to wage war against
Afghanistan, a UN Member State, in gross violation of the United
Nations Charter. The fact that Afghanistan's dysfunctional former
President Rabbani was left to occupy the Afghan "Seat" at the
United Nations makes no legal difference here. The United Nations
Charter protected the State of Afghanistan from aggression by the
United States. Indeed, the Clinton administration had already
negotiated with the Taliban government over letting it have the UN
Seat as well as extending it bilateral de jure recognition in
return, in part, for the construction of the UNOCAL pipeline
across Afghanistan[5] -- a negotiation from which -- ominously,
in light of the onslaught to come -- the Taliban demurred.



Framing a Response to September 11th


Terrorism and the Law

So let us now turn to the law. Immediately after the 11 September
2001 attacks President Bush's first public statement characterized
these terrible attacks as an act of terrorism. Under United States
domestic law there is a definition of terrorism, which clearly
qualifies them as such. To be sure, under international law and
practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism,
for reasons that are too complicated to explain in detail here but
basically relate to that hackneyed aphorism that "one person's
terrorist is another person's freedom fighter."[6] Yet certainly
under United States domestic law this qualified as an act or acts
of terrorism.

What happened? It appears that President Bush consulted with
Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and
characterization of these terrible attacks. They now called them
an act of war -- though clearly this was not an act of war, which
international law and practice define as a military attack by one
nation state upon another nation state.

There are enormous differences and consequences, however, in how
you treat an act of terrorism compared to how you treat an act of
war. This nation and others have dealt with acts of terrorism
before. Normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of
international and domestic law enforcement -- which is, in my
opinion, precisely how these terrible attacks should have been
dealt with -- not as an act of war.

Indeed there is a treaty directly on point to which both the
United States and Afghanistan are party: the 1971 Convention for
the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil
Aviation, the so-called Montreal Sabotage Convention. Article
1(I)(b) thereof criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft
while in service. It has an entire legal regime specifically
designed to deal with this type of situation and all issues
related to it, including reference to the International Court of
Justice to resolve any disputes that could not be settled by
negotiations between the United States and Afghanistan or other
contracting parties. The Bush Jr. administration simply ignored
the Montreal Sabotage Convention completely, as well as the 12 or
so multilateral conventions already on the books that deal with
various components and aspects of what people generally call
international terrorism, many of which could have been used and
relied upon to handle this matter in a lawful, effective, and
peaceful manner.


The U.S. Policy Preference: Not Terrorism -- War

Instead, proving again the Bush Jr. administration's unwillingness
to utilize international conventions which might require the
submission of American power to external restraints, and thereby
constrain rather than facilitate the realization of overt or
covert American objectives, the Bush Jr. administration rejected
this entire multilateral approach and called these terrible
attacks an act of war. They deliberately invoked the rhetoric of
Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. It was a conscious decision to
escalate the emotions and perceptions of the American people
generated on September 11th, and thus dramatically escalate the
stakes, both internationally and domestically.

The implication was that if this is an act of war, then you do not
deal with it by means of international treaties and negotiations:
You deal with an act of war by means of military force. You go to
war. So a decision was made remarkably early in the process to
ignore and abandon the entire framework of international treaties
that had been established under the auspices of the United Nations
Organization for the past 25 years in order to deal with acts of
international terrorism and instead go to war against Afghanistan,
a UN member state. In order to prevent the momentum towards war
from being impeded, Bush Jr. issued an impossible ultimatum,
refusing all negotiations with the Taliban government, as well as
all the extensive due process protections that are required
between sovereign states related to extraditions, etc. The Taliban
government's requests for proof and offers to surrender bin Laden
to a third party, similar to those which ultimately brought the
Libyan Lockerbie suspects to trial, were all peremptorily ignored.
Why such haste?


The UN Security Council Disagrees: Terrorism, not War

An act of war has a technical legal meaning: basically, a military
attack by one nation state against another nation state. While
this is what happened on December 7, 1941, it is not what happened
on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, immediately after September
11th, the Bush Jr. administration went to the United Nations
Security Council in order to get a resolution authorizing the use
of military force against Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. They failed.
Indeed, the Security Council resolution that was adopted, instead
of calling this an "armed attack" by one state against another
state, denominated these events "terrorist attacks."[7] And again
there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one
state against another state, which is an act of war, and aterrorist attack, which is not. Again, terrorists are dealt with
as criminals. Terrorists are not treated like nation states.
Terrorists are dealt with by means of international and domestic
law enforcement. Terrorists are not given the dignity of special
status under international law and practice.


Bush Sr. v. Bush Jr.

What the Bush Jr. administration tried to do in the Security
Council was to get a resolution similar to that obtained by the
Bush Sr. administration in the run up to the Gulf War in the late
Fall of 1990. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Council
authorizing UN member states to use "all necessary means" in order
to expel Iraq from Kuwait.[8] The Bush Sr. administration
originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use
of military force in haec verba. The Chinese objected, so the
Security Council employed the euphemism by "all necessary means,"
though everyone knew what that meant. Besides, even if it may have
been induced to do so, Iraq had actually invaded Kuwait, which was
contrary to international law -- a real act of war.[9]

The first Bush Jr. Security Council resolution, on the other hand,
provided no authority to use military force at all. That language
simply was not in there. A close reading of the Security Council
Resolution indicates that Bush Jr. tried but failed to get the
authorization to use force that Bush Sr. got. Bush Jr. was
defeated at the Security Council. This failure, of course, did not
make national headlines; rather, it was subsumed in commentary
which dwelt on a UN supposedly galvanized behind the Bush Jr.
administration to combat terrorism.



No Declaration of War from Congress

Having failed to co-opt the UN Security Council for war as his
father had, Bush Jr. then went to the United States Congress and
exploited the raw emotions of this national tragedy to ram through
a congressional authorization to use force. The exact nature of
the Bush Jr. proposal to Congress at that time is unknown.
However, reading between the lines of a public statement made by
Senator Robert Byrd that was reported in the New York Times, it
appears that Bush Jr. wanted a formal declaration of war along the
lines of what President Roosevelt got from Congress after Pearl
Harbor.[10] Congress failed to give Bush Jr. that -- and for a
very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been passed
by Congress, it would have made Bush Jr. a "constitutional
dictator" insofar as that, basically, Americans would now all be
living under marshal law.[11] Congress might have just as well
closed up and gone home for the rest of the duration of the Bush
Jr. war against terrorism for all the difference they would have
made. Bush Jr./Sr. would have known that full well. Indeed, prior
to September 11th, President Bush Jr. had publicly opined about
becoming a U.S. "dictator."


The Infamy of Korematsu

As a direct result of that congressional declaration of war after
Pearl Harbor, America made the infamous Korematsu mistake, whereby
about 100,000 Japanese-American citizens and Japanese immigrants
were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of
nothing more than an Executive Order that later on turned out to
be based upon a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation
that Japanese in America constituted some type of unique security
threat different from Germans in America or Italians in American,
inter alia.[12] Obviously, in Korematsu race made all the
difference. Again today, race is making all the difference in the
Bush Jr. administration's specific targeting of Arabs and Muslims
from the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

Had Bush Jr. received a formal declaration of war from Congress,
many groups of American citizens could have been on the exact same
legal footing of the terrible Korematsu case, which has never been
overturned by the United States Supreme Court. We could have
witnessed the mass internment of American citizens of Arab,
Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, and African American (many of whom
are Muslims) descent. Instead, to date at least, the Bush Jr.
administration has been restricting itself to detaining aliens who
fit into these racial and religious categories. Of course such
discrimination violates the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which the
United States is a contracting party -- yet another international
convention that the Bush Jr. administration has set at naught. And
we still could be seeing the mass detention and internment of
American citizens of whatever ethnicity who may become engaged in
civil resistance against administration policies if Bush Jr.,
Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House Counsel Alberto
Gonzales and their reactionary coterie of Federalist Society
Lawyers can ultimately get their way. They have already instigated
a nation-wide campaign of illegal profiling against the racial and
religious categories of U.S. citizens and aliens mentioned above.


Instead, A Blank Check to Use Military Force

Instead of a formal declaration of war, the U.S. Congress gave
Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization. The
War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed over President Nixon's
veto by a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress, and was
expressly designed to prevent another Vietnam War.[13] Although
the resolution that Bush Jr. did get from Congress is not a formal
declaration of war, it was stronger than the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution,[14] which served as the legal pretext for President
Johnson's massive escalation of the Vietnam War into outright
genocide against the Vietnamese People. Only one courageous Member
of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African American representative from
Oakland, voted against it, as a matter of principle.

This War Powers Resolution authorization basically gives Bush Jr.
a blank check to use military force against any individual,
organization, or state that he alleges -- by means of his own ipse
dixit -- was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11th, or
else harbored those who were.[15] To date, the number of
potential targets has fluctuated from between 30 to 60 nation
states, all of which are UN Members and thus protected from U.S.
aggression by the UN Charter. In other words, Bush Jr. has
received a blank check from the United States Congress to exert
military force pretty much against any state he wants to despite
the UN Charter. This was then followed by Congress granting Bush
Jr. a $20 billion appropriation as a cash down payment on this
blank check in order to exert military force against Afghanistan,
for starters.

Bush Sr. v. Bush Jr. Redux

Let us compare and contrast this congressional resolution with the
War Powers Resolution obtained by Bush Sr. in January of 1991.
First, Bush Sr. got the Security Council resolution mentioned
above, which he took to the U.S. Congress for authorization under
the War Powers Resolution to use military force in order to carry
it out. Congress then gave Bush Sr. a very precise authorization
to use military force for the express purpose of carrying out the
Security Council resolution, that is, only for the purpose of
expelling Iraq from Kuwait.[16] And indeed that is what Bush Sr.
did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait, stopping south of Basra, saying
that was all the authority he had. This is not to approve what
Bush Sr. did in that war, but simply to compare it with Bush Jr.

While Bush Sr. has been criticized on the grounds that he should
have marched all the way to Baghdad, he truly had no authority
from either the Security Council or from the United States
Congress to do so. Compare that to Bush Jr.'s War Powers
Resolution that basically gave Bush Jr. a blank check to use
military force against anyone he wants to, and with no more than
his asserting the need to do so. It is astounding to believe. With
such latitude, even more extensive than that of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, can another Vietnam War be far behind? Has one already
commenced, with direct U.S. military re-intervention into the
Philippines?



"Ending States"

At this writing, the Bush Jr. administration is publicly debating
the "wisdom" of launching yet another massive military attack upon
Iraq -- only this time for the express purpose of deposing and
replacing the Government of Iraq. Needless to say, such an
unwarranted and aggressive attack on yet another sovereign state
would violate the United Nations Charter, inter alia. Worse yet,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has publicly bragged
about "ending states"[17] -- a rhetorical escalation from efforts
to designate some as "failed" states, whose institutional and
legal structures might thereby be illegally disregarded by the
United States. Terminating states, if actually carried out, would
violate the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which the United States
is a contracting party. Such a reprehensible statement by
Wolfowitz acting within the scope of his official duties could be
taken to the World Court and filed in order to prove the existence
of genocidal intent by the United States government. Indeed, there
is a good chance that the first victim of this Wolfowitz threat
may be the Republic of Iraq, which has been continuously and
illegally bombed by the United States and the United Kingdom since
the end of the Gulf War eleven years ago under the pretext of
enforcing unauthorized "no-fly zones." In this regard, Bush Jr.'s
aggressive threat to Iraq, Iran and North Korea uttered during the
course of his State of the Union Address to Congress on 29 January
2002 does not augur well. It appears from his language that the
Bush Jr. administration is deliberately preparing the ground for a
bogus claim to "anticipatory self-defense" in order to justify
their pre-planned aggression against Iraq.



Honest Nuclear War-Mongering

Since the events of September 11th, the American people may have
been treated to more truth from their government than ever before.
In the post-Vietnam era, when the notorious Phoenix program of
assassinations finally came to light, public indignation was
sufficient to empower investigation by the Church Committee, and a
subsequent ban on foreign assassinations. Over the past decade and
increasingly under the Bush Jr. administration, however, open talk
of intended foreign assassinations, efforts to overthrow the
leaders of other sovereign states, or invasions of an unspecified
array of nations can reach the daily papers through on-record
remarks by elected officials. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
can call for the apprehension of suspects "dead or alive" or even
"preferably dead" -- which would happily avoid all the legal
difficulties of proving bin Laden guilty in an evidentiary manner,
or indeed the possibility of being confronted by a range of legal
improprieties or malfeasances committed on the American side,
especially by the CIA.[18] Even the International Herald Tribune,
in its effort to convince European readerships of the longstanding
struggle of the U.S. to deal with Al Qaeda, revealed how the
comparatively temperate Clinton had signed three highly classified
Memorandums of Notification authorizing killing instead of
capturing Mr. bin Laden, then added several of Al Qaeda's senior
lieutenants to the list, and finally approved the shooting down of
private civilian aircraft on which they flew.[19]

It should come as no surprise therefore, in this onslaught of
candid revelation of Machiavellian Realpolitik, that the
historically covert intent of America's nuclear deterrence policy
should come to light through almost off-the-cuff remarks such as
those by the omnipresent Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz
appearing in the 9 January 2002 edition of the New York Times:

"We're looking at a transformation of our deterrence
posture from an almost exclusive emphasis on offensive
nuclear forces [italics added] to a force that includes
defenses as well as offenses, that includes conventional
strike capabilities as well as nuclear strike
capabilities, and includes a much reduced level of
nuclear strike capability," the deputy secretary of
defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, said.

Well at least he was honest about it.

Wolfowitz admitted that the current U.S. practice of so-called
nuclear "deterrence" is in fact really based upon "an almost
exclusive emphasis on offensive nuclear forces." To reiterate,
since this deserves emphasis: The U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense
has publicly admitted and conceded that "almost" all U.S. nuclear
forces are really "offensive" and not really "defenses." Once
again, that Statement could be taken to the International Court of
Justice and filed against the United States government as an
Admission against Interest, Wolfowitz acting within the scope of
his official duties. Of course the Peace Movement and informed
American public knew this was true all along. Nonetheless, it
should be regarded as an ominous sign of the times that the
Pentagon has become so brazen that it is publicly admitting U.S.
nuclear criminality to the entire world.



The Prostitution of NATO

In furtherance of its quest for war-making pseudo-legitimacy, the
Bush Jr. administration also went to NATO headquarters in Brussels
to get a resolution of support for the use of force. NATO
proceeded to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact.[20] Article 5 of
the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with an armed attack by a
nation state or states against a NATO member state or states. It
is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist
attack.

NATO was originally organized as a collective self-defense pact
pursuant to Article 51 of the UN Charter, recognizing the right of
individual and collective self-defense in the event of an armed
attack by one nation state against another nation state. In
theory, the NATO Pact was supposed to deal with an armed attack
upon a NATO member state or states by a member or members of the
Warsaw Pact, especially the Soviet Union. But with the collapse of
the Warsaw Pact and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there
was no real justification or excuse anymore for the continued
existence of NATO. NATO had lost its supposed raison d'être.

In an effort to keep NATO alive, Bush Sr. then tried to transmute
its very nature in order to serve two additional purposes: (1)
policing Eastern Europe; and (2) military intervention into the
Middle East in order to secure the oil and gas fields. The NATO
Council basically approved Bush Sr.'s transmutation of NATO from a
lawful collective self-defense agreement into an illegal,
offensive interventionary pact.[21] Shades of the 1939
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that was the necessary precursor to
Hitler's invasion of Poland, thus leading to the commencement of
World War II!

A generation later, Bush Sr. would set the political predicate for
NATO's illegal war against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 under the
criminal leadership of President Bill Clinton. Serbia never
attacked a NATO member state; rather, the reverse was true. The
NATO Alliance attacked Serbia with no authorization from the UN
Security Council.[22] But this was what "policing" Eastern Europe
was supposed to be all about in the estimation of Bush Sr. and
Clinton. As I always asked my law students from 1991 to 2001:
Please explain to me the basic difference between Clinton and Bush
Sr.?

The main legal problem here is that the NATO Pact provides no
authorization to do this at all and indeed should have to be
amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify
either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force
against the Middle East. Furthermore, any such offensive mission
for NATO would also have required the express authorization of the
UN Security Council on a case-by-case basis as clearly required by
UN Charter Article 53(1). Bush Sr. and Clinton simply wanted a
useful tool for collective, offensive military intervention under
the predominant control of the United States that would provide a
thin veneer of multilateralism for domestic and international
propaganda purposes, while at the same time avoiding the
supervisory jurisdiction of the UN Security Council in accordance
with the requirements of the UN Charter. The same was true for the
Bush Jr. Leaguers in their prostitution of NATO after 11 September
2001.

Immediately thereafter, Bush Jr. simply followed in the illegal
pathway that had already been carved out for him by Bush Sr. and
Clinton. The Bush Jr. invocation of NATO Article 5 was completely
bogus. It is a matter of some irony but little surprise that the
United States, which allegedly set up NATO in order to "protect"
Europe from an armed attack by the Soviet Union, has become the
very first beneficiary of NATO's invocation of Article 5. He who
pays the piper calls the tune. Or as Clinton officials readily
admitted during their illegal NATO war against Serbia over Kosovo:
The U.S. is NATO! This seeming paradox can be resolved by
understanding that the real reason why the United States set up
NATO in the first place was to secure American control and
domination of the European Continent.[23] That still is NATO's
primary purpose, even as Europe struggles to bring into being its
own military force for collective self-defense.



Bush Jr.'s Crusade

Today the NATO Member States are readily enlisting in the Bush Jr.
holy war against international terrorism in Afghanistan, Somalia,
and other Arab and Muslim countries. We are witnessing another
medieval Crusade by the White, European, Christian colonial powers
against the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world organized into about
58 countries, most of whom are or are regarded as People of Color
in the racist European mindset, and who happen to legally own the
massive oil and natural gas resources of the Middle East, Central
Asia, and Southeast Asia that the West so desperately craves. That
is what is really going on here. And if you have any doubt,
remember that it was Bush Jr. himself who publicly called his holy
war against international terrorism a "Crusade."

Of course the Muslim World knows all about Western Crusades and
Western Crusaders. The "Clash of Civilizations" forecast by my
fellow Harvard Ph.D. graduate Samuel Huntington has received
intensive discussion in the West,[24] while the Iranian riposte
calling for "a Dialogue between Civilizations" has gone unnoticed.
The Muslim World has recently witnessed widespread extermination
of Muslim Peoples by Western Crusaders and their surrogates in
Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and now Afghanistan.
It is almost as if the script for the Bush Sr./Jr. New World Order
had been lifted from Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.
Ominously, that ponderous tome ends with a prognosticated
catastrophic war between the United States and China -- bringing
to mind again the Bush Jr. administration's reckless hostility
towards the PRC in its earliest days.



The U.S./UN Ambassador of Death

By going to NATO, the Bush Jr. administration was attempting to
get some type of multilateral endorsement for a war against
Afghanistan after it had failed to achieve the same at the United
Nations Security Council. The Bush Jr. administration then tried
once again to get authority for war from the Security Council, but
all they got was a Presidential Statement, which legally meant
nothing. They then tried yet a third time to get some type of
authorization to use military force from the Security Council.
This time they did get stronger language but -- and it is
necessary to emphasize this, since the UN stand has not been
clearly impressed upon the American public -- they still failed to
get any authorization from the Security Council to use military
force for any reason, let alone a full scale war against
Afghanistan, a UN Member state.[25]

Then the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John
Negroponte, sent a letter to the UN Security Council asserting
Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.[26] Some of us in the
Peace Movement are familiar with Negroponte, who was the U.S.
Ambassador in Honduras during the Reagan/Bush Contra Terror War
against Nicaragua, and has the blood of about 35,000 Nicaraguan
civilians on his hands -- about ten times the number of victims
from the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Indeed, because
of this, the only way Bush Jr. could get him confirmed by the
Senate was to ram Negroponte's name through the Senate
"confirmation" process right after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Yet another Machiavellian exploitation of this terrible national
tragedy by George W. Bush. In an unwitting tribute to Orwell, the
Bush Jr. administration selected Negroponte to lecture the entire
world at the UN about international terrorism -- a subject upon
which he is an acknowledged expert by dint of vast personal
experience.

Bush Sr. v. Bush Jr. Redux

Let us compare and contrast this congressional resolution with the
War Powers Resolution obtained by Bush Sr. in January of 1991.
First, Bush Sr. got the Security Council resolution mentioned
above, which he took to the U.S. Congress for authorization under
the War Powers Resolution to use military force in order to carry
it out. Congress then gave Bush Sr. a very precise authorization
to use military force for the express purpose of carrying out the
Security Council resolution, that is, only for the purpose of
expelling Iraq from Kuwait.[16] And indeed that is what Bush Sr.
did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait, stopping south of Basra, saying
that was all the authority he had. This is not to approve what
Bush Sr. did in that war, but simply to compare it with Bush Jr.

While Bush Sr. has been criticized on the grounds that he should
have marched all the way to Baghdad, he truly had no authority
from either the Security Council or from the United States
Congress to do so. Compare that to Bush Jr.'s War Powers
Resolution that basically gave Bush Jr. a blank check to use
military force against anyone he wants to, and with no more than
his asserting the need to do so. It is astounding to believe. With
such latitude, even more extensive than that of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, can another Vietnam War be far behind? Has one already
commenced, with direct U.S. military re-intervention into the
Philippines?



"Ending States"

At this writing, the Bush Jr. administration is publicly debating
the "wisdom" of launching yet another massive military attack upon
Iraq -- only this time for the express purpose of deposing and
replacing the Government of Iraq. Needless to say, such an
unwarranted and aggressive attack on yet another sovereign state
would violate the United Nations Charter, inter alia. Worse yet,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has publicly bragged
about "ending states"[17] -- a rhetorical escalation from efforts
to designate some as "failed" states, whose institutional and
legal structures might thereby be illegally disregarded by the
United States. Terminating states, if actually carried out, would
violate the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which the United States
is a contracting party. Such a reprehensible statement by
Wolfowitz acting within the scope of his official duties could be
taken to the World Court and filed in order to prove the existence
of genocidal intent by the United States government. Indeed, there
is a good chance that the first victim of this Wolfowitz threat
may be the Republic of Iraq, which has been continuously and
illegally bombed by the United States and the United Kingdom since
the end of the Gulf War eleven years ago under the pretext of
enforcing unauthorized "no-fly zones." In this regard, Bush Jr.'s
aggressive threat to Iraq, Iran and North Korea uttered during the
course of his State of the Union Address to Congress on 29 January
2002 does not augur well. It appears from his language that the
Bush Jr. administration is deliberately preparing the ground for a
bogus claim to "anticipatory self-defense" in order to justify
their pre-planned aggression against Iraq.



Honest Nuclear War-Mongering

Since the events of September 11th, the American people may have
been treated to more truth from their government than ever before.
In the post-Vietnam era, when the notorious Phoenix program of
assassinations finally came to light, public indignation was
sufficient to empower investigation by the Church Committee, and a
subsequent ban on foreign assassinations. Over the past decade and
increasingly under the Bush Jr. administration, however, open talk
of intended foreign assassinations, efforts to overthrow the
leaders of other sovereign states, or invasions of an unspecified
array of nations can reach the daily papers through on-record
remarks by elected officials. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
can call for the apprehension of suspects "dead or alive" or even
"preferably dead" -- which would happily avoid all the legal
difficulties of proving bin Laden guilty in an evidentiary manner,
or indeed the possibility of being confronted by a range of legal
improprieties or malfeasances committed on the American side,
especially by the CIA.[18] Even the International Herald Tribune,
in its effort to convince European readerships of the longstanding
struggle of the U.S. to deal with Al Qaeda, revealed how the
comparatively temperate Clinton had signed three highly classified
Memorandums of Notification authorizing killing instead of
capturing Mr. bin Laden, then added several of Al Qaeda's senior
lieutenants to the list, and finally approved the shooting down of
private civilian aircraft on which they flew.[19]

It should come as no surprise therefore, in this onslaught of
candid revelation of Machiavellian Realpolitik, that the
historically covert intent of America's nuclear deterrence policy
should come to light through almost off-the-cuff remarks such as
those by the omnipresent Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz
appearing in the 9 January 2002 edition of the New York Times:

"We're looking at a transformation of our deterrence
posture from an almost exclusive emphasis on offensive
nuclear forces [italics added] to a force that includes
defenses as well as offenses, that includes conventional
strike capabilities as well as nuclear strike
capabilities, and includes a much reduced level of
nuclear strike capability," the deputy secretary of
defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, said.

Well at least he was honest about it.

Wolfowitz admitted that the current U.S. practice of so-called
nuclear "deterrence" is in fact really based upon "an almost
exclusive emphasis on offensive nuclear forces." To reiterate,
since this deserves emphasis: The U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense
has publicly admitted and conceded that "almost" all U.S. nuclear
forces are really "offensive" and not really "defenses." Once
again, that Statement could be taken to the International Court of
Justice and filed against the United States government as an
Admission against Interest, Wolfowitz acting within the scope of
his official duties. Of course the Peace Movement and informed
American public knew this was true all along. Nonetheless, it
should be regarded as an ominous sign of the times that the
Pentagon has become so brazen that it is publicly admitting U.S.
nuclear criminality to the entire world.



The Prostitution of NATO

In furtherance of its quest for war-making pseudo-legitimacy, the
Bush Jr. administration also went to NATO headquarters in Brussels
to get a resolution of support for the use of force. NATO
proceeded to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact.[20] Article 5 of
the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with an armed attack by a
nation state or states against a NATO member state or states. It
is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist
attack.

NATO was originally organized as a collective self-defense pact
pursuant to Article 51 of the UN Charter, recognizing the right of
individual and collective self-defense in the event of an armed
attack by one nation state against another nation state. In
theory, the NATO Pact was supposed to deal with an armed attack
upon a NATO member state or states by a member or members of the
Warsaw Pact, especially the Soviet Union. But with the collapse of
the Warsaw Pact and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there
was no real justification or excuse anymore for the continued
existence of NATO. NATO had lost its supposed raison d'être.

In an effort to keep NATO alive, Bush Sr. then tried to transmute
its very nature in order to serve two additional purposes: (1)
policing Eastern Europe; and (2) military intervention into the
Middle East in order to secure the oil and gas fields. The NATO
Council basically approved Bush Sr.'s transmutation of NATO from a
lawful collective self-defense agreement into an illegal,
offensive interventionary pact.[21] Shades of the 1939
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that was the necessary precursor to
Hitler's invasion of Poland, thus leading to the commencement of
World War II!

A generation later, Bush Sr. would set the political predicate for
NATO's illegal war against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 under the
criminal leadership of President Bill Clinton. Serbia never
attacked a NATO member state; rather, the reverse was true. The
NATO Alliance attacked Serbia with no authorization from the UN
Security Council.[22] But this was what "policing" Eastern Europe
was supposed to be all about in the estimation of Bush Sr. and
Clinton. As I always asked my law students from 1991 to 2001:
Please explain to me the basic difference between Clinton and Bush
Sr.?

The main legal problem here is that the NATO Pact provides no
authorization to do this at all and indeed should have to be
amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify
either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force
against the Middle East. Furthermore, any such offensive mission
for NATO would also have required the express authorization of the
UN Security Council on a case-by-case basis as clearly required by
UN Charter Article 53(1). Bush Sr. and Clinton simply wanted a
useful tool for collective, offensive military intervention under
the predominant control of the United States that would provide a
thin veneer of multilateralism for domestic and international
propaganda purposes, while at the same time avoiding the
supervisory jurisdiction of the UN Security Council in accordance
with the requirements of the UN Charter. The same was true for the
Bush Jr. Leaguers in their prostitution of NATO after 11 September
2001.

Immediately thereafter, Bush Jr. simply followed in the illegal
pathway that had already been carved out for him by Bush Sr. and
Clinton. The Bush Jr. invocation of NATO Article 5 was completely
bogus. It is a matter of some irony but little surprise that the
United States, which allegedly set up NATO in order to "protect"
Europe from an armed attack by the Soviet Union, has become the
very first beneficiary of NATO's invocation of Article 5. He who
pays the piper calls the tune. Or as Clinton officials readily
admitted during their illegal NATO war against Serbia over Kosovo:
The U.S. is NATO! This seeming paradox can be resolved by
understanding that the real reason why the United States set up
NATO in the first place was to secure American control and
domination of the European Continent.[23] That still is NATO's
primary purpose, even as Europe struggles to bring into being its
own military force for collective self-defense.



Bush Jr.'s Crusade

Today the NATO Member States are readily enlisting in the Bush Jr.
holy war against international terrorism in Afghanistan, Somalia,
and other Arab and Muslim countries. We are witnessing another
medieval Crusade by the White, European, Christian colonial powers
against the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world organized into about
58 countries, most of whom are or are regarded as People of Color
in the racist European mindset, and who happen to legally own the
massive oil and natural gas resources of the Middle East, Central
Asia, and Southeast Asia that the West so desperately craves. That
is what is really going on here. And if you have any doubt,
remember that it was Bush Jr. himself who publicly called his holy
war against international terrorism a "Crusade."

Of course the Muslim World knows all about Western Crusades and
Western Crusaders. The "Clash of Civilizations" forecast by my
fellow Harvard Ph.D. graduate Samuel Huntington has received
intensive discussion in the West,[24] while the Iranian riposte
calling for "a Dialogue between Civilizations" has gone unnoticed.
The Muslim World has recently witnessed widespread extermination
of Muslim Peoples by Western Crusaders and their surrogates in
Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and now Afghanistan.
It is almost as if the script for the Bush Sr./Jr. New World Order
had been lifted from Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.
Ominously, that ponderous tome ends with a prognosticated
catastrophic war between the United States and China -- bringing
to mind again the Bush Jr. administration's reckless hostility
towards the PRC in its earliest days.



The U.S./UN Ambassador of Death

By going to NATO, the Bush Jr. administration was attempting to
get some type of multilateral endorsement for a war against
Afghanistan after it had failed to achieve the same at the United
Nations Security Council. The Bush Jr. administration then tried
once again to get authority for war from the Security Council, but
all they got was a Presidential Statement, which legally meant
nothing. They then tried yet a third time to get some type of
authorization to use military force from the Security Council.
This time they did get stronger language but -- and it is
necessary to emphasize this, since the UN stand has not been
clearly impressed upon the American public -- they still failed to
get any authorization from the Security Council to use military
force for any reason, let alone a full scale war against
Afghanistan, a UN Member state.[25]

Then the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John
Negroponte, sent a letter to the UN Security Council asserting
Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.[26] Some of us in the
Peace Movement are familiar with Negroponte, who was the U.S.
Ambassador in Honduras during the Reagan/Bush Contra Terror War
against Nicaragua, and has the blood of about 35,000 Nicaraguan
civilians on his hands -- about ten times the number of victims
from the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Indeed, because
of this, the only way Bush Jr. could get him confirmed by the
Senate was to ram Negroponte's name through the Senate
"confirmation" process right after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Yet another Machiavellian exploitation of this terrible national
tragedy by George W. Bush. In an unwitting tribute to Orwell, the
Bush Jr. administration selected Negroponte to lecture the entire
world at the UN about international terrorism -- a subject upon
which he is an acknowledged expert by dint of vast personal
experience.

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