Sayings

Rescinding the Geneva Conventions

The following is the third in a series of transcriptions taken from a talk given by Noam Chomsky entitled "The Imperial Presidency". The entire talk is available for purchase from the G7 Welcoming Committee website.

Going back to Gonzales, the President’s council then, he transmitted to the President the conclusion of the Justice Department that the President has the authority to rescind the Geneva Conventions. It’s the supreme law of the land, under the US constitution, and the foundation of modern international humanitarian law.

Gonzales advised the President that this would be a good idea, in his words, “it substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution of administration officials under the war crimes act of 1996, which carries the death penalty for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, so you’d better rescind them quickly.” Well, we can see, right on today’s front pages, why the Justice department was right to be concerned that the President and his advisors might be subject to the death penalty under the laws passed by the Republican Congress in 1996, and of course, under the principles of Nuremberg, if anyone took them seriously.

Two weeks ago, on the front page of the New York Times, prominently displayed, was a picture of Fallujah general hospital, the accompanying story said, “patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit, or lie on the floor, while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” And that’s what the picture shows, armed soldiers standing over people patients and doctors lying on the floor with their hands tied behind their backs. That’s described in the front page stories as “an important achievement” quote New York Times, “It shut down a propaganda weapon for the militants, Fallujah general hospital had been producing a stream of reports of civilian causalities, and these “inflated figures”, inflated because our leader so declares, “were inflaming opinion throughout the country and the region, driving up the political costs of the conflict”. Incidentally, the word “conflict” has become a common euphemism for US aggression, as when we read on the same front pages that “the US must now rebuild what the conflict just destroyed.” A conflict has no agents, it’s like a hurricane, it happens, then we have to come in and rebuild it.

Well let’s go back to the picture and the story about the closing of the propaganda weapon, the main hospital. There are some relevant documents, including the Geneva conventions, so here’s a principle of the Geneva conventions, “fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the medical service may in no circumstances be attacked and shall at all times be respected and protected by parties to the conflict” So page one of the worlds leading newspaper is cheerfully depicting war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to death, under US law. No wonder that the attorney general warned the president, as his council, that he should use the constitutional authority that the Justice Department concocted to rescind the supreme law of the land, adopting the concept of Presidential sovereignty devised by Hitler’s primary legal advisor.

Well the world’s greatest newspaper also tells us that “the US military achieved almost all of their objectives in Fallujah, well ahead of schedule, leaving much of the city in smoking ruins.” But it was not a complete success. Why? There was little evidence of “dead pack rats and their warrens or the streets” These are their words, not mine. They did find a body of a dead woman, although it’s not known whether she was an Iraqi or a foreigner, that’s the only question that’s raised, and apparently, the only one that comes to mind. This is all on the front page of the world’s greatest newspaper. The front page account also quotes a marine commander who says “it oughta go down in the history books” and perhaps is should, if so, we know very well on what page of history it will go down, and who will be right beside it, along with those who praise it, and even those who tolerate it.

One might at least mention the counterparts that immediately come to mind, for example the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years ago, that’s a city of about the same size, or Srebrenica, which is almost universally described as genocide in the west, in that case, as we know in detail from an extensive Dutch government report, and other sources, this Muslim enclave in Serb territory was very lightly protected, was being used as a base in attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place it was horrendous, the Serbs drove out all but the military aged men, then moved in to kill them. That’s familiar, that’s Fallujah basically, but there are some differences. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, as in the Fallujah case, but they were trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts, we can be sure of that, to exhume the last possible corpses of the “pack rats and their warrens” in Fallujah. There are other differences which are arguably unfair to the Serbs.

Well, it could be argued that all of this is irrelevant. The Nuremberg tribunal, spelling out the UN charter, declared that, and I’m quoting, “initiating a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, differing only from other international war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” hence the “war crimes” in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and so on. Those judged to have played any role in the “supreme crime”, for example the German foreign minister, were sentenced to death by hanging, and the Tokyo tribunal was more severe. There’s an important book on this topic, if you haven’t read it you should, but the Canadian international lawyer Michael Mandel, who reviews in unfortunately convincing detail, how the "powerful have become self- immunized from international law". In fact the Nuremberg tribunal itself established this principle of self-immunity. To bring the Nazi criminals to justice it was necessary to devise definitions of “war-crime” and “crime against humanity” that hadn’t existed precisely in international law. How this was done is explained candidly by Telford Taylor, who was the chief counselor for the prosecution at Nuremberg, and a distinguished author and historian, so I’ll quote him. “Since both sides in World War II had played the terrible game of urban destruction, the Allies far more successfully, there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact, no such charges were brought. Arial bombardment had been used to extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side, as well as the Axis side, that neither at Nuremberg, nor at Tokyo, was the issue made a part of the trials.” So in other words, it goes on like this, the “operative definition of crime is a crime that you committed and we did not” and to underscore that fact, Nazi war criminals were absolved if the defense could show that their US counterparts committed the same “crimes”.

Taylor concludes from this that “to punish the foe, especially the vanquished foe, for conduct in which the enforcer nation has engaged would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves.” Which is correct, but the operative definition also discredits the laws themselves, along with all subsequent tribunals which follow the same principle. Taylor provides this background as part of his explanation why US bombing in Vietnam was not a war-crime, and his argument is plausible, further discrediting the laws themselves. Some of the subsequent tribunals are discredited in perhaps even more extreme ways, such as the Yugoslavia vs. NATO case, which is now being adjudicated by the International Court of Justice, World Court. The US was excused, correctly, on the basis of the argument that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the court in this case, and the reason is when the United States signed the Genocide Convention, which is at issue here, the US finally did sign it after 40 years, it signed it with a reservation saying that it is inapplicable to the US, and the rules of the world court say they can only deal with something if both sides are subjected to it’s jurisdiction.

There was an outraged comment, on the efforts of the Justice Department lawyers to demonstrate that the President has the right to authorize torture, by the dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, and he said that “the notion that the President has the constitutional power to commit torture is like admitting that he has the constitutional power to commit genocide,” well, the President's legal advisors, like the new Attorney General, should have little difficulty arguing that the President indeed does have that power, if the Second Superpower, that’s us, permits him to exercise it.

History and the "Second Superpower"

The following is the first in a series of transcriptions taken from a talk given by Noam Chomsky entitled "The Imperial Presidency". The entire talk is available for purchase from the G7 Welcoming Committee website.

Noam: ...That’s going to be a hard act to follow, but thanks. I guess I have to begin by saying that the phrase that you’ve attributed to me was actually plagiarized, “manufacturing consent” actually comes from Walter Lippmann, who is the dean of American journalism in the 20th century. He thought it was a good idea, he was coming out in favor of it.

It goes without saying that anything that goes on in the United States has an enormous impact on the rest of the world, the last election for example, and conversely, that’s important to remember, what happens in the rest of the world, can not fail to have an important, and in fact, often crucial impact in the United States, and that happens in several ways. For one thing, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do, but in a more significant way what happens elsewhere, like here [Canada], influences the domestic component of what the New York Times ruefully described as “the second superpower”, namely world public opinion, after the enormous protests right before the Iraq invasion. It was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its north American offshoots that a war was massively protested before it was officially launched, that’s a historic event, and it tells us a lot about where we’ve come, and should be encouraging, not depressing. Take, say, by comparison the, what’s called the Vietnam-war, actually the war against South Vietnam, that was launched by JFK in 1962. It was brutal, and barbaric from the outset, began with the bombing of unprotected civilian targets, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps, or urban slums, to eliminate the popular base for the resistance. By the time protests reached the substantial scale, 1967, the highly respected, and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered, quoting him, “whether Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity would escape extinction, as the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area this size,” particularly South Vietnam, which was always the main target of the US assault. When protests finally did develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes, the extension of the war to the north, and the rest of Indochina. These were terrible crimes, but lesser ones, and it’s quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then, through deeply committed popular struggle. It was far too late in developing, but it was ultimately effective.

The most interesting part of the Pentagon papers which is rarely mentioned for good reasons, is the last section; the Pentagon papers ends the middle of 1968, and as many of you will remember, January ’68 was the Tet offensive, which convinced corporate elite in the United States that the war just wasn’t worth it, and the US had won many of it’s objectives. It had destroyed any serious hope of independent successful development in Vietnam, which was its main purpose, as in many other cases, and it was just becoming too costly for the United States. Too costly because of the rising anti-war movement, which was compelling the president to fight what was called a “guns and butter” war, couldn’t declare a national mobilization, which probably would have been good for the economy, the way it was during the second world war, but kind of had to buy the population off, because there was just too much disruption, and it was just becoming too costly. That was the Tet offensive. The Pentagon papers, the sort of internal record of Pentagon history that Dan Ellsberg released, it ends a couple of months after that, and it turns out that right after the Tet offensive the president wanted to send 200,000 more troops to South Vietnam and the Joint Chiefs of Staff objected, they didn’t want to do it, and they refused. And the reason, they said, is they would need those troops for civil disorder control in the US, because of the rising protests among women, young people, minorities, in fact the large part of the population. So it was just too dangerous to send more troops to Indochina.

That continued, and grew, over the next 10 years, and elite groups thought they had it under control. When Reagan came into office, he tried to duplicate what JFK had done in South Vietnam 20 years earlier, in fact—Reagan probably didn’t know what was going—but his advisors just point by point duplicated it, this was 1981, and the target then was central America, under what was called, incidentally, a “war against terror”, which was declared in 1981, not in 2001. They had to back off because there was just too much spontaneous protest, from church groups, from—by then all over the mainstream of the country, not just young people, and so on. So they backed off, and they turned to what was called “clandestine war”, and “clandestine war” is a technical term which means “a war that everybody knows about, except the population of the United States.” They don’t know it for a good reason, about which some people have something to answer for, so the Reagan administration fought this clandestine war with a huge international terror network, so the cover “war on terror”. That was terrible enough, a couple hundred thousand people were killed, four countries devastated, but it wasn’t B-52s, which are much worse, and it wasn’t mass-murder operations, which happened to be peaking in 1969, at the time when John Kerry was deep in the Mekong delta in the south, which by then had been largely devastated. The popular reaction to even the clandestine war, as it was called, even broke new ground in history, another historically unprecedented development, and that was the origin of the solidarity movements, for Central America, which were coming right out of the mainstream. Tens of thousands of people from the US actually went to help the victims. That had never happened in the history of European imperialism, or its North American offshoots, and by now they’re all over the world, and again that’s something entirely new in western history, and another testimony to the success of these movements, which are many. And the state managers are well aware of it, when a new president comes in, first thing he does is an intelligence assessment, the intelligence community, as it’s called, gives an assessment of the world situation. And George Bush I, he did it too. So in 1989 there was an assessment of the world situation, and a piece of it leaked, and we don’t usually hear about these things for, like, 4 years, if ever. But a little part of it leaked, and was published, and hushed up, and it’s an interesting part and obviously somebody in the Pentagon, or CIA, or somewhere didn’t like it, and leaked it to the press. It was a discussion of the kinds of wars that the US would be fighting. Wars against, what it called, “much weaker enemies”, those are the only kinds of wars you fight if you have any sense. Wars against much weaker enemies, it said, in the case of such wars, the United States would have to win them “rapidly and decisively”, because there simply is no political support for anything more than that, it’s not like the sixties when you could go on for years and years with no protest and destroy a country before it significantly develops. Well, that’s significant, and the world is a pretty awful place and you can look at it and get pretty depressed, but it’s far better than it was yesterday and that’s not only with regard to the unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in innumerable other ways, many of which we now just take for granted, which is good, we should take it for granted, but we should remember that not many years ago, it wasn’t like that. Well these are very important lessons, and they should always be foremost in our mind.

If I had a little more time, I intended to say a little bit about Canada’s role in the Indochina wars, which is pretty interesting, but I’ll skip that, and just say that I’m being polite. But you should know about it, if you don’t already—it’s pretty ugly.