Category: gmoses

Fighting for One World of Human Rights and Global Law

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / IndyMedia – NYC & Austin / ILCA Online / Alternet / Civil Rights Org

By continuing to withdraw his administration from the spirit and letter of human rights and global law, President Bush is seceding from the rest of the world. Through a moral equivalent of Civil War, we must prevent this secession from taking place.

If we agree with the terse thesis of Francis A. Boyle–that the Bush movement constitutes “a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international legal order”–then the muscle of the Bush grip at home is connected through sinews of illegality to the trigger finger in Falluja. The bad news about Bushist secessionism is that principles of law are under attack at home and abroad. The good news is that principles of resistance can be welded together. From every node of resistance, we can forge ladders of international law, the better to scale collectively the walls of fortress Bush.

Bush has appropriated enormous power from the government of the USA as he belittles “focus groups” at home and “international tests” abroad. When millions of Americans hit the streets pleading with Bush not to pursue a literal war on terrorism, Bush called the protesters nothing but “focus groups.” When his campaign opponent said that presidents should respect international law, Bush scoffed at the concept of an international test, saying quizzically, “I’m not exactly sure what you mean…”

In a moral equivalent of Civil War, Bush’s belligerence toward international law is cultural heir to secessionist Governors in the American South who once scoffed at federal authority as stridently as they cherished their own authority over others. (No wonder, then, that Black voters in America today are 88 percent likely to vote against Bushsim. Why Jewish voters also refuse to be drawn into BushWorld speaks to longstanding filiations, I think, between Dixie and Nazi ideologies.) At home and abroad, we can speak with converging voices if we demand reconciliation between the Bush movement and obligations of international law.

At home, Bushist secessionism attacks Constitutional rights and liberties that have won international standing as human rights and liberties. Respecting women’s reproductive rights, or the rights of people to form their own families, plain-speaking Bush refuses to speak up. Regarding rights to due process, open records, and free speech, the warm-faced president works with bone-cold hands.

As for Iraq, argues Professor Boyle, laws of war compel definition of USA soldiers as “belligerent occupants.” So long as these soldiers remain in Iraq, they should take no actions that would contravene Articles 42-56 of the Laws of War as adopted at Hague II.

Yet, Globelaw editor Duncan Currie notes with concern that, “incidents have been reported to have been initiated by the coalition forces involving civilian casualties, including the bombing of a Syrian bus, use of cluster bombs, destruction of electricity supplies leading to disruption of civilian water supplies, attacks on Iraqi television stations, on Al-Jazeera and on the Palestine hotel, on markets at Al-Shaab and Shula, on civilians at Nasiriya and Hilla, on a van at Najaf, shooting at ambulances, and shooting of protesters.”

“In addition,” continues Currie, “there have been reports of a failure to restore water, electricity and other humanitarian needs and encouragement, toleration and failure to avoid looting, including of nuclear installations. State responsibility and individual criminal liability for these and other actions has yet to be determined. Any responsibility or liability assistance after the fact of other States or individuals or the adoption of these acts by other States, or the actions of States as belligerent occupants in Iraq, could be determined by the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or an ad hoc or arbitral tribunal.”

Currie’s allegations were made in May 2003, within weeks of the invasion. During that same month, Leah Wells of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation questioned USA intentions for Iraq’s water. She worried about water privatization. More recently, Daniel O’Huiginn in behalf of Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq (CASI) has documented allegations that water cutoff has been used as a weapon. Yet, people have rights to water. Here is another area where Bushist secession from international law must be stopped.

Naomi Klein also appeals to international law in her muckraking review of the Bremer administration, published in Harpers. When international law declares that belligerent occupiers are supposed to treat occupied properties as “private”–that means treat the properties as if they belong to the people who live there. But in sinister misappropriations of legal spirit, the Bremer occupation “privatizes” Iraq and puts it out for bid. The legal obligation to “usufruct” is replaced with a license to usurp. As a result, writes Klein, “where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch.” International law (go figure) may offer a better structure for doing business than Bushist secessionism.

Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) brings news that one American innovation in Iraq involves “a system of monopoly rights over seed.” The FPIF discussion paper appeals to international rights of “food sovereignty”–the right of a nation, “to define their own food and agriculture policies, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade, to decide the way food should be produced, and to determine what should be grown locally and what should be imported.”

Since Americans have been told very little about the privatization of Iraq, the population of the USA is little prepared to empathize with righteous indignations that Iraqis feel as they witness their own country sold out from under their feet. Neither can the average American understand the aggravation that must be provoked among Iraqis watching Bush play to global cameras with his schtick about American gifts of freedom and democracy. For Iraqis, a big schtick, indeed.

At least 56 million Americans, however, are open to suggestion that something about the Bush agenda is headed in the wrong direction. Bushist secessionism declares a Civil War that we have no choice but to stop. Both at home and abroad, a unifying theme of struggle may be found in a call to restore BushWorld to a global sovereignty of rights and laws.

LINKS:

Hague II Laws of War, Article 42 [Avalon]
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague02.htm#art42

Duncan Currie on US legal obligations in Iraq [Globelaw]
http://www.globelaw.com/Iraq/Preventive_war_after_iraq.htm

Leah Wells on Iraq Water [CounterPunch]
http://www.counterpunch.org/wells05162003.html

CASI Report on Water Cutoffs in Iraq [pdf]

Click to access 041110denialofwater.pdf

Monopolizing Seed in Iraqi Agriculture [FPIF]
http://www.fpif.org/papers/0411grain.html

Great to hear a voice of compassion and honesty. I am a Canadian of Pakistani origin. As you are aware, we the peoples of the third world suffered centuries of humiliation at the hands of the colonialists. I thought that the African Americans could relate to our situation, in view of their own experience with the practitioners of the ‘white man’s burden’ philosophy; it is really incomprehensible to me how someone like Colin Powell and Condi Rice, could join hands with the same people in their effort to dominate the world.

The word ‘stockpile’ has been frequently used with reference to WMD’s. Now, if America were to put all of its WMD’s in a stockpile, it would easily exceed the height of Mt. Everest; and if Israel were to put its WMD’s in a stockpile, they would most definitely dwarf the Pyramids of Egypt. In my quest to explore certain defintions, why I wonder are nations like Iraq, which were only SUSPECTED of having WMD’s referred to as a ROGUE NATION?

Many thanks and God Bless

Shahid

Nicely said, Greg. We have been down the road with this kind of nuttiness before, and some of us who’ve lived in out of the way places like Fairbanks, Las Cruces, Bend, Lodi, Phoenixville, Oneonta, Clewiston, we know the “Amurrikins” are always busting our chops. They just get louder every once in awhile, and need a good ass whumping. So let’s get about the business of making sure they receive that which they are so desperately asking for. I’m tired of listening to the whining. The hard, cold truth is that the reelection of Bush is just another turd in the shit sandwich that a lot of people in this country have been eating for a long time. Let’s roll, as the bastards say. The workers will win.—M. H. Perez, Seattle

This New American Barbarism Will End

By Greg Moses

Counterpunch / Austin IndyMedia / ILCA Online

If, at the break of this century, you feel like an abolitionist, who 200 years ago hissed at bloody murder, then you have but three-score years and one Civil War to go.

If, in 2004, your outrage feels like W.E.B. Du Bois in 1904, censuring American pornographies of lynch, then you have only six decades, two World Wars, exile, and death between you and The Dream.

If, today, you would share the choice fates of abolitionists and anti-lynchers who wrestled America down, then, on or about Juneteenth of the year 2063, you shall carry your story, finally, beyond the killing zone. But, Lord, don’t be foolish about the costs these journeys take.

In the moral history of America, presidents have always fed public appetite for turf, guns, and frontier contracts. In the case of Jefferson, who got re-elected in 1804, land-grabbing and Indian genocide went right along with slavery.

Teddy Roosevelt, by the time he got re-elected in 1904, had already stolen Guantanamo Bay from the Spanish and leased it to the Marines. Meanwhile on the domestic front, reported Mary Church Terrell, “Before 1904 was three months old, thirty-one negroes had been lynched.”

And how have the press helped out, as presidents helped themselves? Let’s see what Terrell says about that: “The facts are often suppressed, intentionally or unintentionally, or distorted by the press.” Because pornographers of violence love a good, bloody fight, lynching news, like war news, could be instigated, and according to Terrell, it was.

So let’s keep a few wits sharpened as we read about gunpoint executions in the City of Mosques or trash bags filled with voting records in Florida. This is not a beast we have never known before. Nor is it a power that we have not tamed.

As the slave whip of 1804 and the lynching rope of 1904 were both finally taken out of popular hands, so will the black bags of 2004 eventually be lifted from the heads of prisoners, and the terror of US foreign policy will be brought to law. But the popular will that supports these technologies will require the moral equivalent of civil war to defeat.

“And in each nation,” scolded Thrasymachus in Republic Book I, “whoever rules passes the laws that are to their own advantage. After they pass these laws, they say that justice is obeying the law.” Thrasymachus was a hothead patriot, whose heirs today pound their steering wheels to the rhythms of kick-ass country music.

“Whoever fails to keep the law is punished as unjust and a lawbreaker. So that, my good man, is what I say justice is.” Although the loudmouth opinion of Thrasymachus echoes down our halls of power today, endorsed by a Texas attorney who would become Attorney General, we don’t forget how Socrates could make that man blush.

So these are old, old struggles and we’re walking in well worn shoes. We’re gonna fight these war crimes that seek to globalize the whips and ropes that we once put down, and we’re gonna resist these attorneys who never got as far as Republic Book II. And as for all this lately talk about the downright popularity of homophobic core values, please pass the earplugs. That kind of noise only keeps us from our work.