Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
Although I believe (strongly) in peace I also recognize the importance of defending oneself. Unfortunately, portions of the human population aren't interested in peace and feel political and economic ambitions should be realized through force. So, while working for peace I feel it's equally important to remain vigilant and defensive. The utility of violence as an instrument of state craft is pretty limited but always present - history has shown us, countless times, how important it is to remain strong regardless our desire for peace. - Roger J. Wendell, July 2001
War Crimes
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
The formal concept of war crimes emerged from the codification of the customary international law that applied to warfare between sovereign states, such as the Lieber Code (1863) of the Union Army in the American Civil War and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 for international war. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the war-crime trials of the leaders of the Axis powers established the Nuremberg principles of law, such as that international criminal law defines what is a war crime. In 1949, the Geneva Conventions legally defined new war crimes and established that states could exercise universal jurisdiction over war criminals. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, international courts extrapolated and defined additional categories of war crimes applicable to a civil war.
"LET'S BE CLEAR: War is about killing. It's not about glory and duty and saving small children and acts of heroism. It's about killing another living human being before he can do the same to you - in order to achieve some goal established by a political entity. If you are directly attacked you will defend yourself in a moment of desperation. On the other hand, premeditated murder is considered to be the most heinous crime and carries the heaviest punishment. Yet was is politically organized premeditated mass murder. Condoned killing is what separates war from all other human social activities. Although individuals are punished and taken out of society for murder, political entities are usually not delegitimized for waging war."
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Click Here for my page on Military Madness... |
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Click Here for my page on Spooks, Spies, Thugs and Bureaucrats... |
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Click Here for my page about Nukes... |
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"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country" - Hermann Göring, April 18, 1946 (in conversations with psychologist Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg) |
CNN.com
February 11, 2008:
"I can not support anybody with the foreign policy he [John McCain] advocates - you know, perpetual war... I think it's un-American, unconstitutional, immoral, and not Republican,"- Texas Congressman Ron Paul (Republican)
CNN.com
May 29, 2007:
"Paper: 94 Senators didn't read pre-Iraqi war report""The [90-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq] report did contain passages that raised questions about the weapons conclusions, said John McLaughlin, then deputy director of the CIA."
"I think if someone read the entire report, they would walk away thinking the intelligence community generally thinks he has weapons of mass destruction, but there are quite a bit of differences," he said."
"For members of Congress to read the report, they had to go to a secure location on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post reported in 2004 that no more than six senators and a handful of House members were logged as reading the document."
Anthropology:
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"Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Like lions, wolves and our own species Homo
sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters. Other predators, sitting atop the food chain, have
few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds. Neanderthals faced the
same problem – if other species didn’t control their numbers, conflict would have. "This territoriality has deep roots in humans. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behaviour strikingly like human warfare. This implies that cooperative aggression evolved in a common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, at least seven million years ago. If so, Neanderthals will have inherited these same tendencies towards cooperative aggression. "Warfare is an intrinsic part of being human. War isn’t a modern invention, but an ancient, fundamental part of our humanity. Historically, all peoples warred. Our oldest writings are filled with war stories. Archaeology reveals ancient fortresses and battles, and sites of prehistoric massacres going back millennia." |
"The human evolutionary career has produced a highly unusual animal - an animal which has an ability arbitrarily to manipulate the environment unequaled by any other; an animal whose life is centered on the products of its own inventive mind; an animal which, like no other, wages organized murder on its own kind - warfare - which is totally foreign to the rest of the animal kingdom. Why?""Before we can start to try to answer this question it has to be admitted that war is an outrageously successful activity. History demonstrates this over and over again. In a world dominated by material possessions - whether of goods, land, or natural resources - a population of people may win for themselves enormous advantage through military victory over another group; the benefits gained must, of course, outweigh the costs of combat (time, resources, and lives). A materially based world undoubtedly provides a favorable environment in which warfare can flourish. And it has flourished more and more with the steady rise in the complexity of social structure. As American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins points out, 'War increases in intensity, bloodiness and duration... through the evolution of culture, reaching its culmination in modern civilization.'"
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The 9-11 Commission Report Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed
By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank "The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq." |
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"What was the war in Iraq about? It was strategically about setting up a police station in the middle of a very large bad neighborhood. It was also about dividing the Islamic world physically in half to create a buffer between the aggressive gangs on the east side of the police station (Iraq, Iran, Pakistan) and the politically touchy gangs on the other side (Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and, of course, the anomaly, Israel). On a closer scale, the Iraq war was an attempt to establish a forward base adjacent to Iran and Arabia, to moderate and influence the behavior of both of them, to discourage adventures by Iran and to be ready in case of trouble in Arabia. One of the first things the United States did after invading Iraq in 2003 was to station two armored divisions on the Iraq-Saudi Arabian border."
The Long Emergency pp 85-86 |
Think on this:
- Who wouldn't agree that Saddam, his sons and associates were evil (and corrupt) and needed to be removed from power? However, did we really have the right to invade another country, in violation of law, to undertake such questionable activities?
- Wouldn't it be better to go without certain international friendships rather than form alliances with evil-doers and crooks? Here is a 1983 photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand at a time when America was arming, supporting and encouraging Saddam...
- Guantanamo Bay was never a proud example of American jurisprudence - it's not what we're supposed to be about! [On June 29, 2006, a couple of years after I had created this page, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees. The court said that the trials were illegal under U.S. and international law.]
- Shouldn't prisoners be afforded a certain level of treatment that's relatively constant throughout our entire system? I, myself, heard the likes of Rush Limbaugh suggest that the mistreatment and torture of Iraqi prisoners was acceptable at times - he, and the other prominent personalities who support such a philosophy are wrong!
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Click Here for the 2003 ad Dan Poresky placed in the Allentown Morning Call. Dan published his prophetic piece just a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. My signature, also in protest of the war, is down there with the 700 others in Dan's ad... |
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It is with great sadness that I would hear, almost daily, about the deaths of our young soldiers in Iraq throughout 2003, 2004, 2005, and much of 2006. Here is that famous 2004 Seattle Times photo of flag drapped coffins being prepared for return to our country... |
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Remembering the Chilean terrorism of September 11, 1973 (Henry Kissinger had a lot to do with this one...) |
September 06, 2006:
 Signs of Protest |
President Bush gave a speech that covered a lot of ground concerning Guantanamo Bay, the CIA, and the "war" on terrorism in general. Some of his speech acknowledged our use of "alternative" interrogation methods and the CIA's secret detention system. Although I'm suspicious of his motives a lot of the detail he provided is a welcome change to the secrecy and illegal practices of the past five years. Of course there was no mention of American military bases in Arab countries, Israel's theft and occupation of Palestinian lands, or the other reasons terrorism remains such a threat to our country... |
 Click Here for the original September 11th video clips showing George W. Bush refusing to move or act, for over 5 minutes, after his Chief of Staff advised him that America was under attack. |
Editorials, The Nation, April 4, 2005, p.3 "Since September 11, we've heard a lot about the 'intelligence failures' that left the United States unprepared for the atttacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon. These failures were not simply the result of poor espionage or of bureacratic incomptetence. They reflected a deeper failure to understand a region and its hitorical wounds, a number of which - though not all - were inflicted by Western powers. The future of America's profoundly stained relations with the Arab and Muslim world depends, to a great extent, on educating the public. Yet the very people who are in a position to perform this vital task have instead found themselves under siege from extremist pressure groups and craven politicians. Their crime? Challenging the nostrums of those formidalble authorities on the Arab world, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon." |
In 1846 the war with Mexico had barely begun when writer Henry David Thoreau, in protest, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax. Thoreau was jailed, but released the next day when his friends paid the tax without his consent. Friend and fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed with Thoreau but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Throeau in jail he asked, "What are you doing in there?" Reportedly Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?"
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- Howard Zinn
- Ralph Nader, June 2003 |
McNamera:
"Proportionality should be a guideline to war."Killing 50 to 90 percent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The US/Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all human history.
"What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time, and today, has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it the rules of war. Was there a rule, then that said, you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in a night?
"Lemay [General Curtis Emerson Lemay] said if we had lost the war we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals and I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. That Lemay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral, if his side had lost, but what makes it immoral if you lose or if you win?
"If we can't persuade nations with comparable values, of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.
"What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment?"
Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamera
from the 2004 Errol Morris film documentary, The Fog of War
"Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war"
(transcribed by me and Tami)
Carter:
WASHINGTON (CNN)
Wednesday, October 10, 2007"I don't think it. I know it, certainly." the former president told CNN's Wolf Blitzer when asked if he thinks the United States commits torture.
"Our country for the first time in my lifetime has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter continued. "We've said that the Geneva Convention does not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused."
| Torture: | |
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| Terrorism, a Definition: | |
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Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington
By DAVID FIRESTONE
New York Times, Online, Sunday, September 14, 2003
"WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents."Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be borrowed, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the next generation of taxpayers and the generation after that. The $166 billion cost of the work so far in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known."
Did you know?
Torture:
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Shortly after 9-11 there were some suggestions that torture be used to determine when and where the next
attack on America was going to take place. Then, in May 2004, it was revealed that U.S. military personnel,
and contractors, were torturing Iraqi prisoners. Also, it was revealed in late 2007 that not only had the CIA earlier engaged in torture but later destroyed the video records!
From the start, Rush Limbaugh, and a small handful of others, attempted to justify the use of torture by suggesting it was related to "letting off steam," or that the interrogators were just using some coercive measures that were authorized from above. In my opinion, and that of most civilized peoples, is that the use torture is not acceptable under any circumstances, period!
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 (Click on this photo for an expanded view) |
Movie quote:
WarGames (1983) |
Lyrics:
Masters of War (1963) |
Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.
Part III : Status and treatment of protected persons #Section III : Occupied territories
ARTICLE 49
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. Nevertheless, the Occupying Power may undertake total or partial evacuation of a given area if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. Such evacuations may not involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement. Persons thus evacuated shall be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased. The Occupying Power undertaking such transfers or evacuations shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to receive the protected persons, that the removals are effected in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that members of the same family are not separated. The Protecting Power shall be informed of any transfers and evacuations as soon as they have taken place. The Occupying Power shall not detain protected persons in an area particularly exposed to the dangers of war unless the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
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