George Monbiot writes: For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.

When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.

The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”. This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.

That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair’s cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.

His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, “i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack.” None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: “A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers’ advice, none currently exists.”

Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed. [Continue reading…]

Desmond Tutu writes: On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers’ circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr Bush’s chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.

But even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world.

Has the potential for terrorist attacks decreased? To what extent have we succeeded in bringing the so-called Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds closer together, in sowing the seeds of understanding and hope?

Leadership and morality are indivisible. Good leaders are the custodians of morality. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.

The Washington Post reports: Alaa Namiq doesn’t want to talk about it. Or he’s dying to. It’s hard to tell. One minute he’s shaking his head, stone silent. Then he starts bragging about it and he won’t stop talking.

“I dug the hole for him,” he says, his eyes burning with pride.

“The hole,” known to the world as the “spider hole,” is the tiny underground bunker on Namiq’s farm where former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. soldiers on Dec. 13, 2003.

Namiq and his older brother Qais have rarely spoken publicly about how they helped hide the world’s most sought-after fugitive for nearly nine months after the U.S.-led invasion.

But now, sipping tea in the modest little restaurant he opened this summer, a couple of football fields away from “the hole,” Alaa Namiq seems willing.

Maybe enough time has passed. Maybe few have asked. But for whatever reason, Namiq now folds his tall, broad-shouldered frame into a little plastic chair, tugs on a cigarette and talks about hiding the man his family had known for decades.

“He came here and he asked us for help and I said yes,” says Namiq, 41, wearing a long white dishdasha robe. “He said, ‘You might be captured and tortured.’ But in our Arab tribal tradition, and by Islamic law, when someone needs help, we help him.”

Hussein was born in a village near Tikrit, just north of this little town on the banks of the Tigris River. When the U.S. military was searching for him, it became convinced, correctly, that he would find shelter among his Tikriti clansmen in these lush orchards of date palms and orange and pear trees.

Namiq says he and Qais were arrested along with Hussein and spent a miserable six months in Abu Ghraib prison. Once a driver and an aide to Hussein, he has spent the past few years driving a taxi, finally saving enough to open his family restaurant a few weeks ago.

At his restaurant on the riverbank, Namiq greets an American reporter graciously, offering grilled chicken and sweet tea on a sweltering evening. The restaurant is a small cinder-block shack, with a couple of grills and a few plastic tables set outside. Four of his brothers cook and wait tables for customers watching a big flat-screen TV showing Turkish dramas and men’s volleyball.

“I won’t tell you everything,” Namiq says, over and over, during the course of a couple of hours. “Someday I will say all I know. Maybe I will write a book. Maybe a movie. But I won’t tell you everything.”

Then he starts talking.

Namiq says his family, mainly he and Qais (who declined to be interviewed), helped move Hussein among various houses in the area after the March 2003 invasion.

Hussein never used a phone, he says, knowing that the Americans were listening for his voice. Namiq says that Hussein read and wrote extensively, prose and poetry, and that his writings were confiscated by the U.S. troops who captured him.

Namiq says Hussein wrote to his wife and daughters but he never saw them. His only visitors were his sons Uday and Qusay — Namiq says he helped arrange their secret trips to the farm.

Hussein released several fiery speeches during the time he was in hiding, exhorting his supporters to fight the Americans. Namiq says he and Hussein recorded them together on a small tape recorder.

Knowing the Americans would be analyzing the recordings for clues to Hussein’s whereabouts, Namiq says he once drove 10 miles to the city of Samarra, parked on the side of the road and recorded the sounds of urban traffic.

“I wanted to make the Americans feel dizzy and confused,” he says.

Namiq clearly still reveres Hussein, who was hanged in 2006.

“Saddam knew there would be a day that he would be captured and executed,” Namiq says. “In his heart, he knew that everything was gone and that he was no longer president. So he started something new — jihad against the occupiers. He sacrificed everything he had, including his two sons, for the sake of the country.” [Continue reading…]

Juan Cole highlights a detail from Alastair Campbell’s diaries that has so far received little media attention: that in 2002 Ariel Sharon apparently threatened a nuclear strike on Baghdad. Cole interprets this as an example of Israel engaging in nuclear blackmail and wonders whether Netanyahu is now using the same tactic.

Read what Campbell (Tony Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy) actually wrote — it’s not clear to me that Cole’s interpretation actually makes much sense.

This is what The Guardian reported:

In an account of a conversation [Tony Blair had] with Bush at a Nato summit in Prague in November 2002, as diplomatic pressure intensified on Saddam Hussein, Campbell writes: “[George Bush] felt that if we got rid of Saddam, we could make progress on the Middle East. He reported on some of his discussions with [Ariel] Sharon, and said he had been pretty tough with him. Sharon had said that if Iraq hit Israel, their response would ‘escalate’ which he took to mean go nuclear. Bush said he said to him ‘You will not, you will not do that, it would be crazy.’ He said he would keep them under control, adding ‘A nuke on Baghdad, that could be pretty tricky.'”

The first question is: who is applying nuclear blackmail? Sharon on Bush, or Bush on Blair? Was Bush so intimidated by Sharon that he dared not ask him what kind of escalation he had in mind or did the ambiguity actually provide Bush with some useful leverage? In other words, could Bush use some fear of Mad Dog Israel in order to help build his international alliance against Saddam? It’s noteworthy that Bush’s assurance to Blair was that he would keep Sharon under control.

Whatever form of escalation Sharon was threatening, the one thing the diary does make clear is that this would be a possible response to an Iraqi strike on Israel. Just as much as this might sound like a demand for Bush to strike Iraq so hard that it couldn’t fire any Scuds at Israel, it probably said more about Sharon’s preoccupation with the Second Intifada. Unlike 1991 when Israel had acquiesced to American demands that it stay out of the conflict, even whilst under attack, this time around Sharon would as he said be compelled to make a show of Israel’s strength. Politically, Sharon could not afford to have his inability to prevent suicide attacks coupled with an unwillingness to respond to Scud attacks.

In a column published last year, Chris Hedges wrote: Jess Goodell enlisted in the Marines immediately after she graduated from high school in 2001. She volunteered three years later to serve in the Marine Corps’ first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit, at Camp Al Taqaddum in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to collect and catalog the bodies and personal effects of dead Marines. She put the remains of young Marines in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a “reefer.” The work she did was called “processing.”

“We went through everything,” she said when I reached her by phone in Buffalo, N.Y., where she is about to become a student in a Ph.D. program in counseling at the University of Buffalo. “We would get everything that the body had on it when the Marine died. Everyone had a copy of The Rules of Engagement in their left breast pocket. You found notes that people had written to each other. You found lists. Lists were common, the things they wanted to do when they got home or food they wanted to eat. The most difficult was pictures. Everyone had a picture of their wife or their kids or their family. And then you had the younger kids who might be 18 years old and they had prom pictures or pictures next to what I imagine were their first cars. Everyone had a spoon in their flak jacket. There were pens and trash and wrappers and MRE food. All of it would get sent back [to the Marines’ homes].

“We all had the idea that at any point this could be us on the table,” she said. “I think Marines thought that we went over there to die. And so people wrote letters saying ‘If I die I want you to know I love you.’ ‘I want my car to go to my younger brother.’ Things like that. They carried those letters on their bodies. We had a Marine that we processed and going through his wallet he had a picture of a sonogram of a fetus his wife had sent him. And a lot of Marines had tattooed their vital information under an armpit. It was called a meat tag.”

The unit processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said, almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed, especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” The harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and become their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again—followed by a series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed. [Continue reading…]

Jess Goodell was interviewed on NPR in June 2011.

Jon Schwarz writes: In his new book, It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, Colin Powell writes this about his 2003 presentation at the United Nations about Iraq’s supposed WMD: “I get mad when bl*ggers accuse me of lying – of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.”

Well, I’m a blugger, and I accuse Colin Powell of lying. The evidence is overwhelming that he knew much of what he said in front of the Security Council was false.

This may not seem plausible to people who know Powell only via the media image he’s carefully constructed over decades – that of being Washington’s last honorable man. As journalist Margaret Carlson said in 2003, “Whatever Colin does, I’ll go with.”

But in fact Powell’s image has about as much to do with reality as what he told the UN. Though his entire career Powell has eagerly bent the truth to please his superiors. He started his climb up the Army ladder by covering up the massacre of civilians by U.S. troops in Vietnam, even serving as a character witness for a general who apparently shot Vietnamese from helicopters for fun. During the 1980s, when Powell was assistant to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, he also helped cover up the Iran-contra scandal, and almost certainly deceived congressional investigators. (If there were a Museum of Washington’s Funniest Lies, it would have its own wing for Powell’s statement that, “To my recollection, I don’t have a recollection.”)

So everyone’s default assumption should have been that Powell would lie to Americans and the world at the UN. And – as anyone can see just by looking at what’s in the public record – he did. Below is a look line by line through Powell’s presentation to demonstrate the chasm between what he knew and what he said. [Continue reading…]

Part One: For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.

But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed.

It’s as difficult to write this kind of report as it is to understand the courage of his family. Many of the Fallujah families whose children have been born with what doctors call “congenital birth anomalies” prefer to keep their doors closed to strangers, regarding their children as a mark of personal shame rather than possible proof that something terrible took place here after the two great American battles against insurgents in the city in 2004, and another conflict in 2007.

After at first denying the use of phosphorous shells during the second battle of Fallujah, US forces later admitted that they had fired the munitions against buildings in the city. Independent reports have spoken of a birth-defect rate in Fallujah far higher than other areas of Iraq, let alone other Arab countries. No one, of course, can produce cast-iron evidence that American munitions have caused the tragedy of Fallujah’s children. [Continue reading…]

Part Two: The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

“We see this all the time now,” Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as this in all my service,” she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There’s always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word “propaganda” under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby’s head. A doctor beside me speaks of “Tetralogy of Fallot”, a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – “all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body.”

This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published. [Continue reading…]

Part Three: “He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It’s a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing.”

And all the while his father talks, five-year-old Sayef Ala’a sits obediently on the sofa beside us, doing as his father tells him, moving his head to show us the scrappy bit of flesh that constitutes his left ear, tipping his head to one side so we can take pictures of it. Compared to other children with birth deformities, Sayef Ala’a is lucky. He can see, breathe, walk, run, play and listen to his father and friends with his right ear. And he is a little boy of much courage.

“He hasn’t learnt much yet – that’s because he hasn’t been to school,” his father says. “I’m worried he would be bullied at school. He’s a child, but sometimes he comes to me and says he knows he has a deformed ear; but it doesn’t matter, he says, because he has no other problems. He is shy but he doesn’t mind seeing you.” And here the father points at us as we sit beside his son on the sofa. “But no other foreigners come to see him.”

Like others in Fallujah, Sayef Ala’a’s father, who is a businessman, hopes that NGO officials will turn up at his door one day and offer the boy a foreign visa, medical treatment abroad, education. It is a dream that will never be realised – not so long as even the Iraqi government takes no interest in the deformed children of Fallujah. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: The teacher still keeps family photos of the dead, visual mementos of lives cut short in an unremitting hail of gunfire.

“The Americans killed children who were hiding inside the cupboards or under the beds,” said Rafid Abdul Majeed Hadithi, 43, a teacher in the city of Haditha who says he witnessed the 2005 assault by U.S. Marines that took the lives of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. “Was this Marine charged with dereliction of duty because he didn’t kill more? Is Iraqi blood so cheap?”

In the United States, the brutal saga of Haditha — among the dead were seven children, including a toddler, three women, and a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair — may have concluded Monday with Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich’s guilty plea to negligent dereliction of duty. A military judge said Tuesday that Wuterich will serve no time in the brig under the terms of his plea bargain.

Charges were previously dropped against six others involved in the Euphrates Valley incident; a seventh Marine was acquitted. The plea closed the books on a politically charged case that sparked debate about the manner in which U.S. troops react amid the “fog of war” and the tension of combat.

For many Iraqis, however, Haditha remains a visceral reminder of the most troubling aspects of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of their homeland.

Along with the Abu Ghraib prison where Iraqi prisoners were abused by U.S. military police, and Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were allegedly shot dead in 2007 by employees of American private contractor Blackwater, Haditha stands out as an inglorious icon.

Christian Science Monitor reports: At least 50 people were killed today in two predominantly Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, underlining Iraq’s tenuous stability as a political crisis threatens to inflame stark sectarian divisions.

There were at least four explosions across Baghdad. The first attack took place in Sadr City, in northeast Baghdad, and killed at least a dozen people. A half-hour later, another bomb went off nearby, killing one, the Guardian reports. The neighborhood of Kadhamiya, home to an important Shiite shrine, was blasted by a pair of almost simultaneous bombs two hours later. Yesterday there were a series of attacks on the homes of police officers and a member of a Sunni militia with ties to the government.

No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings yet, but The New York Times reports that they “appear similar” to previous attacks carried out by the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq. On Dec. 22, AQI staged a series of explosions throughout the capital that killed more than 60 people.

Two days before those attacks, the Monitor’s Dan Murphy warned of the growing parallels between trendlines of violence today, and the situation at the height of Iraq’s civil war.