How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage And Crimes Against Humanity

Brilliantly analyzed, argued and presented, this book is chilling in its implication. Despite the horrific events leading up to WWII, it seems the world is back to the dark days of accepting and supporting the worst crimes of aggression as long as the population can be lulled into a sense "moral superiority" and justification based on media propaganda, and the truth of the victims' suffering can be kept off the front pages of our complicit mass media. Goebbels would be ecstatic at this level of global acquiescience. History will render a harsh judgment - we're all good Germans now.

Michael Mandel writes that former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance and former British foreign secretary David Owen presided over a peace process for Bosnia in the early 1990's attempting to make all the ethnic groups in the country feel that they had all their rights and safety. An agreement was reached in early 1992. Everybody supported the deal except the Bosnian Muslims, who were encouraged by the Bush Sr. administration to hold out for more. Almost four years of horrific civil war followed. The U.S. succeeded in convincing its allies at long last in 1995 to bomb the Bosnian Serbs and pressured the Bosnian Muslims to the negotiating table at Dayton and an agreement was signed. Bhoutros Bhoutros Ghali noted later that the old Vance-Owen plans were more or less the same as the 1995 Dayton accords. The whole point of the exercise from the U.S. point of view was to undermine the leadership of its West European allies in reaching a peaceful settlement, maneuvering them to playing second fiddle,, while U.S. military power eventually solved the problem. In 1992 Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, undermining attempts to get the Bosnian Serbs to compromise, announced suddenly his belief that the Serbs in Bosnian and Belgrade should be treated as war criminals.. This is the same man Mandel notes, who was a key state dept. planner while such Nuremberg style offenses took place as the U.S. slaughter of 600,000 Cambodians in 1969-75, U.S. support for the slaughter of 200,000 in East Timor,U.S. support for the terrorist contras and the death squads which slaughtered tens of thousands in Central America in the 80's, the deliberate destruction of Iraq's vital civilian infrastructure by U.S. bombing during the first Gulf War, etc. etc. .Journalists were full of dubious atrocity stories, circulated by the PR firm Rudder Finn, in the pay of the Izetbegobic govt. For instance Roy Gutman wrote in Newsday about a supposed Bosnian Serb Death camp at Brcko. He claimed that 3000 people were slaughtered there, many by having their throats slit. However, years later, the commander of this death camp was only convicted at the Hague of 12 counts of murder and only 66 bodies were found, almost all with pistol shots. Similarly Omarska was claimed to be a death camp reminiscent of the Nazis, but its commander, Dusko Tadic, ended up being charged with only 9 counts of murder. Srebrencia, everybody's favorite Serb massacre could only yield about 2000 bodies. The tribunal investigators conceded that some of the bodies showed signs of having been engaged in combat before death. Mandel estimates about 4000 dead in this case when estimating the alleged "missing" bodies. He notes that these are all terrible atrocities, but hardly the Nazi-style acts that liberals and leftists sobbed over. Bosnian Muslims were convicted by the Hague tribunal too for running the sort of torture and rape camps accused of the Serbs. In August 1995,under cover of U.S. air strikes

I meet the author at lecture and dinner program. He is a great speaker and his book is enlightening. My husband attends York University where the author Michael Mandel is a professor at the Osgode School of Law. I hope to attend more of his lectures and read more of his book(s).

Michael Mandel, Professor of Law at York University, Toronto, has written an important book on current international law. In Part One, he shows that the US wars on Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of aggression, and reminds us of the Nuremberg verdict, "To initiate a war of aggression ... is the supreme international crime." The UN Charter rightly upholds this: aggressive war is the worst of crimes, because from it flow all other crimes: murder, rape, torture, terrorism. In 1999, the US attacked Serbia, on the pretext of stopping ethnic cleansing, but without UN authority. The US used the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to portray its aggression as law enforcement, although the ICTY's first President admitted that the war was illegal. Intervention, whatever the signboard, violates international law and state sovereignty. Bush has perverted the just, self-defensive war against Al Qa'ida into unjust, aggressive wars against nations: the attack on Afghanistan has killed 20,000 Afghanis so far, about half of them civilians. Afghanis now say, "We were better off under the Russians." Only four of the 15 Security Council members voted for Bush and Blair's war against Iraq. They went ahead anyway, unauthorised, illegally. Warmonger Richard Perle wrote, `Thank God for the death of the UN'. In a brilliant discussion of `collateral damage', Mandel reminds us that in law a defendant is equally guilty of murder whether he desired the death, or merely knew that his act was likely to cause death. Part IV of Protocol One to the Geneva Conventions forbids all attacks "which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects." So NATO's perennial excuse, that it does not target civilians, fails. Part Two studies how international criminal law works. The ICTY from its start worked with NATO, refusing even to consider whether NATO's attack on Yugoslavia was a war of aggression. The new International Criminal Court's Statute omits the crime of starting a war, thus encouraging new aggressions. The ICC judges only acts in war, putting aggressor and non-aggressor on an equal footing.