Reprinted from the July 18, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper
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BEHIND RUMSFELD'S DEMAND FOR
IMMUNITY: HORROR MOUNTS OVER U.S. WAR CRIMES
By Deirdre Griswold
It was May 23, and the troops were lined up at Fort Bragg, N.C., for the annual 82nd Airborne Division Review. The commander
of the base, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, wasn't there for the ceremony; he had
just left to take over command of the 7,000 U.S.
troops in Afghanistan.
The pep talk was being given by retired Gen. Carl W. Stiner.
"We are now engaged in a different kind of war against the forces of
evil and darkness, against an enemy which does not stand and fight on a linear
battlefield, which does not abide by any treaties or protocols pertaining to
war, an enemy that has no conscience and which intentionally and deliberately
targets innocent civilians," Stiner warned.
A little over a month later, some of the soldiers who had heard Stiner's words
were already in Afghanistan. General McNeill was now running the U.S.
operation there.
Some may even have been among the U.S. forces that
entered the village of Kakrak at first light on July 1 to assess the damage done
the night before.
"As the soldiers neared the center of the cluster of mud-walled
farmhouses, they found a horrifying scene," wrote Carlotta Gall of the New
York Times from Kakrak, describing what she called a "slaughter of
innocents."
"Women and children lay dead and wounded in and around one big house
where they had been gathered for an engagement party, torn apart by cannon fire
from the American attack plane, an AC-130 gunship. Survivors said they were
gathering up the bodies, picking up limbs and body parts from the streets and
adjoining orchard, and carrying the wounded to the village mosque, when the
soldiers arrived." (New York Times, July 8)
It was a nightmarish scene that sickened even these well-trained soldiers.
All they had been told to hate--"an enemy which does not stand and fight
on a linear battlefield, which does not abide by any treaties or protocols
pertaining to war, an enemy that has no conscience and which intentionally and
deliberately targets innocent civilians"--had been there the night before.
Three other villages in the area had also been hit.
Except it was not the Taliban or Al Qaeda that had done it.
It was U.S. warplanes.
These U.S. troops could have echoed the words of Pogo: "We have
met the enemy, and he is us."
U.S. attack planes had screamed through the night skies
over four Afghan villages in Oruzgan Province. In Kakrak alone, they left nearly 50 people dead and
more than 100 injured.
The truth could not be suppressed for long, although the Pentagon tried.
First it denied the casualties. Then it claimed its planes had been fired upon.
But there were too many witnesses saying that was a lie. So the brass are now claiming
they got "faulty intelligence"--from an Afghan source, of course.
SOPHISTICATED INTELLIGENCE AND COMMUNICATION NETWORK
Shortly after McNeill arrived in Afghanistan, the
military had invited the press in to see the sophisticated intelligence and
communication network that the 18th Airborne Corps had set up under his command.
In a new tent city at Bagram Air Base, highly trained soldiers sat hunched over
computers that were all hooked into a central, secure Web site.
Said the Associated Press on May 30, "Commanders in the field send
information up through the Web site, and orders flow back down to them.
Generals at Central Command in Tampa, Florida, which runs the U.S.
military in the Middle East and Central
Asia, can also log on."
McNeill's arrival in Afghanistan had put "the man responsible for the war into
the field," with greater intelligence and communication abilities, Col.
Roger King had told the press corps.
THEY KNOW ENOUGH TO BE GUILTY
When they're not covering up for their crimes, the Pentagon brass are eager
to tell us that their wonderful technology lets them know everything that's
happening in Afghanistan.
They knew these villages were being bombed, just as they've known of all
the other bombings and strafings that have left thousands of Afghans dead--most
of them noncombatants.
They know how powerful their weapons are--they constantly brag of it. They
know that a mud-walled village doesn't stand a chance against guns that shoot
thousands of rounds a minute and bombs made to flatten modern buildings.
McNeill has a long military history, with tours of duty in Vietnam,
Korea, Italy, Saudi Arabia/Iraq, and numerous stateside posts. He
has been in Operations Just Cause, Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and Uphold
Democracy.
Such noble names. But they can't hide the truth. These wars have been nothing
but the slaughter of Third World peoples in the pursuit of empire. The generals
understand this very well. When they "retire," they go to work for
the same corporations that grow fat and sleek from war profits and the
domination of the world's resources.
RUMSFELD WANTS IMMUNITY
No wonder, then, that hundreds of millions of people around the world are
outraged by the Bush administration's arrogant demand that its personnel be
given full immunity from war crimes charges before it will participate in any international
"peacekeeping" operations. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
announced the administration's position on July 2, kicking up a notch the orgy
of flag-waving orchestrated since 9/11.
The administration is not so worried about what could happen to individual
soldiers. Its real concern is that an International Criminal Court "could
prosecute police officers or civilian officials involved in formulating peacekeeping
policies and American combat operations," wrote the New York Times the
next day.
More and more, people in oppressed nations around the world are standing up
against U.S. military occupations and invasions. In south Korea, the movement against U.S. bases has reached a fever pitch, fueled in part by
the courage of elderly survivors of war crimes committed by U.S.
troops during the Korean War.
The world now sees that Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people are totally
underwritten by the U.S. government, which subsidizes Tel Aviv's brutal
occupation force on Palestinian land.
Rumsfeld's statement is directed at the United Nations court now being set
up in The Hague. It is not an independent body representing the
workers and oppressed. The imperialist countries will dominate it, as they do
the UN itself. Nevertheless, Washington is guilty of so many war crimes--against Korea,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Congo, Panama, Cuba, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and many others--that it fears any body it cannot fully
control.
What the Bush administration wants is total extraterritoriality. That was
the word invented by the colonialists in the 19th century to describe their
open violation of the sovereignty of those countries that they plundered and
pillaged. Britain, for example, would not allow China
to try any of its nationals accused of crimes there, even murder. If they faced
prosecution at all, it had to be in a British court, which of course was
stacked against the Chinese.
The U.S. has extended that concept. It is not only refusing
to recognize other countries' jurisdiction over personnel it
has imposed there, but it arrogates to itself the right to
pluck people from other countries and drag them to U.S.
territory, where it can do anything it wants to them.
The new demands of the Bush administration are bound to
further inflame the people of countries like south Korea,
where Rumsfeld wants to redraw the current Status of Forces
Agreements to give U.S. troops immunity.
Meanwhile, most people in the U.S. are unaware of how hated
the rulers of this country have become around the world.
Ironically, as the servants of corporate capitalism prepare
to put more working-class youths into uniform and send them
overseas, they are unwittingly setting them up for a painful
political education on the predatory nature of imperialism.
That's what happened during the Vietnam War, and it
radicalized an entire generation.
- END -
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