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Topic: RE: virus: 'Philosopher's stone' (Read 815 times) |
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: 'Philosopher's stone'
« on: 2005-11-04 15:42:23 » |
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[Blunderov] Kendall-Smith is a very cogent man. Would his legal activism
work in the USA too? Might be worth a try...
Best Regards
<snip>Chris Floyd: 'Philosopher's stone'
Posted on Friday, November 04 @ 10:05:46 EST
Chris Floyd, Moscow Times
Last week, a legal thunderbolt struck at the heart of the grubby conspiracy
that led the United States and Britain into an illegal war of aggression
against Iraq. But this searing blow didn't fall in Washington, where a media
frenzy raged over a White House indictment, but in southern England, in a
military courtroom, where a lone soldier stood against the full force of the
great war-crime enterprise, armed only with a single, rusty, obsolete
weapon: the law.
While Potomac courtiers were reading the entrails of the cooked goose of
Scooter Libby -- the first Bushist honcho caught in the slow-grinding gears
of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation -- in Wiltshire,
Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith faced a court martial after
declaring that the Iraq war was illegal and refusing to return for his third
tour of duty there, The Guardian reports.
He has been charged with four counts of "disobeying a lawful command." But
Kendall-Smith, a decorated medical officer in the Royal Air Force, says that
his study of the recently revealed evidence about the lies, distortions and
manipulations used to justify the invasion has convinced him that both the
war and the occupation are "manifestly illegal." Thus any order arising from
this criminal action is itself an "unlawful command," The Sunday Times
reports. In fact, the RAF's own manual of law compels him to refuse such
illegal orders, Kendall-Smith insists.
The flight lieutenant is no ordinary war protester, and no shirker of combat
-- unlike, say, the pair of prissy cowards at the head of the U.S.-British
"coalition." Kendall-Smith, who has dual New Zealand-British citizenship --
and a pair of university degrees in medicine and Kantian moral philosophy --
has served three tours at the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not
claiming any conscientious objections against war in general, nor do
religious scruples play any part in his stance. It is based solely on the
law.
Central to his case are the sinister backroom legal dealings between London
and Washington in the days before the invasion. Less than two weeks before
the initial "shock and awe" bombings began slaughtering civilians across
Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, gave Prime Minister Tony
Blair a detailed briefing full of doubts and equivocations about the
legality of the coming war, adding that Britain's participation in an attack
unsanctioned by the United Nations would "likely" lead to "close scrutiny"
by the International Criminal Court for potential war crimes charges, The
Observer reports.
But Blair and Goldsmith withheld this report from Parliament, the Cabinet
and British military brass, who were demanding a clear-cut legal sanction
for the impending action. Then, just three days before the bloodletting
began, Goldsmith suddenly produced another paper, this time for public
consumption: a brief, clear, unequivocal statement that the invasion would
be legal. This statement was almost certainly crafted in Washington, where
Goldsmith had recently been "tutored" by the Bush gang's consiglieres,
including the legal advisers to Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and
Condoleezza Rice.
Leading this pack of war-baying legal beagles was George W. Bush's top
counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who had overseen the White House's own efforts to
weasel out of potential war crimes charges by declaring -- without any basis
in Anglo-American jurisprudence or the U.S. Constitution -- that Bush was
not bound by any law whatsoever in any military action he undertook: a blank
check for aggression, murder and torture that Bush has gleefully cashed over
and over. Alberto and the boys leaned hard on Goldsmith, who finally caved
in and replicated the Americans' contorted and specious legal arguments for
launching the attack.
Of course, Kendall-Smith knew none of this during his first two tours in
Iraq: Goldsmith's Bush-induced backflip was only divulged in April 2005. Nor
did he know then of the "Downing Street Memos," the "smoking gun" minutes
that record Blair's inner circle dutifully lining up behind Bush's hell-bent
drive for war -- as far back as 2002 -- and their conspiracy with the Bush
gang to manipulate their countries into war. The memos, which emerged in May
2005 and have never been denied or repudiated by the British government,
show Blair's slavish acquiescence in Bush's criminal scheme to "fix the
facts and the intelligence around the policy" of unprovoked military
aggression. Confronted with this new evidence -- and revelations about the
mountain of doubts expressed by U.S. intelligence before the invasion but
deliberately ignored by the Bushist war party -- Kendall-Smith took the only
honorable course for a soldier who has been duped into serving an evil
cause.
The moral rigor of his defiance has sent tremors through the British
military establishment, already shaken by the strange, unexplained shooting
deaths of two military inspectors investigating atrocity allegations in
Iraq, The Guardian reports. British brass are panicky about the Goldsmith
revelations; indeed, the leader of the British invasion force, Admiral
Michael Boyce, said that he now believed his country's military did not have
"the legal cover necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes," The
Observer reports. Boyce added that if he and his officers were eventually
put on trial for waging aggressive war, he'd make sure that Blair and
Goldsmith were in the dock beside them.
Bush, Blair and their minions have committed a monstrous crime, and they
know it -- hence all the convolutions, before the war and after, to
inoculate themselves from prosecution. But with Kendall-Smith and
Fitzgerald, the long-moribund figure of the law is re-awakening. It's weak,
it's bleary, it certainly might fail. But now the conspirators will have to
live cowering in its shadow for the rest of their days.
Copyright C 2005 The Moscow Times.
Source: The Moscow Times</snip>
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/157310/
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: 'Philosopher's stone'
« Reply #2 on: 2005-11-06 00:37:06 » |
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[Blunderov] Pathetic attempt to change subject noted. It doesn't work anymore. Take it somewhere else.
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