Mumia Abu-Jamal piece: WAR CRIMES & WIKILEAKS

WAR CRIMES & WIKILEAKS

{col. writ. 1/2/11] (c) '11 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Among the maniac right, calls have come for the assassination of Julian Assange, of Wikileaks fame. Some have called for his quick arrest, prosecution and conviction for alleged violations of U.S. anti spying laws (despite the fact that he's not a U.S. citizen.)

Although the din may've died down somewhat, U.S. government officials are livid with the Australian, with some issuing dark and foreboding threats.

if Wikileaks is guilty of anything, it's failing to abide by the unwritten rules of the corporate press, that of keeping state secrets secret.

The catcalls for Assange's prosecution are startling given the seas of silence on the prosecution of U.S. government officials for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the war itself was a brazen violation of international law, for it violated both the letter and spirit of the U.N. Charter which forbids member states from staging unprovoked attacks on other countries. Thus, the war was a war crime!

This, even if the U.S. didn't torture people, kill civilians, destroy historic sites (such as Babylon -- one of the world's first cities!), and shatter nations on false pretenses.

Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, said recently what millions already knew: "The Iraq War is largely about oil."*

And yet, former President George W. Bush and his entire Cabinet are not facing war crime charges, as if the UN has an idiocy exception to violating International law ('Oops! No WMD's! My bad!')

Millions have been hurled into exile, the nation is carved into ethnic ghettos, hundreds of thousands (a conservative estimate!) are dead, and the infrastructure has been bombed to hell -- and there are no violations of International law?

Apparently not. For the aggrieved were just Arabs.

Former Economics Professor, Edward R. Herman and journalist/researcher, David Peterson, in their 2010 book, The Politics of Genocide, noted how International law practitioners have ignored violations by --shall we say? -- certain powers:

Just as the guardians of "International Justice" have yet to find a single crime committed by a Great White-Northern Power against people of color that crosses their threshold of gravity, so too all of the fine talk about the "responsibility to protect" and the "end of impunity" has never once been extended to the victims of these same powers no matter how egregious the crimes. The Western establishment rushed to proclaim "genocide" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Arfur, and also agitated for tribunals to hold the alleged perpetrators accountable. In contrast, its silence over the crimes committed by its own regimes against the peoples of Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, and Sub Saharan Africa is deafening.

(c) '11 maj

*{sources: Greenspan, A., The Age of Turbulence (NY,: Penguin, 2007), p.464; Herman, e. & D. Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (NY: Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.112.)