What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
SPECIAL REPORT: How Iraq is Being
Destroyed
"A
weak Iraq suits many." Three years after the US attack,
Iraq is breaking apart. Eyewitness report from Patrick Cockburn
in Irbil. One of the great
left journalists of his time, he was on the front lines in Korea
and Vietnam. Chris Reed on Wilfrid Burchett, the man who made
Murdoch foam at the mouth.Katrina
washes whitest. Bill Quigley in New Orleans reports tales of
lunacy and hope. CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember,
we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch. Please
support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
To even ask the question is to go far
beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media.
A few weeks ago, when a class
of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for
a mock trial to assess whether Bush has committed war crimes,
a media tempest ensued.
Typical was the response from
MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, who found the very idea of such accusations
against Bush to be unfathomable. The classroom exercise "implies
people are accusing him of a crime against humanity," Carlson
said. "It's ludicrous."
In Tennessee, the Chattanooga
Times Free Press thundered in an editorial:
"That some American 'educators'
would have students 'try' our American president for 'war crimes'
during time of war tells us that our problems are not only with
terrorists abroad."
The standard way for media
to refer to Bush and war crimes in the same breath is along the
lines of this lead-in to a news report on CNN's "American
Morning" in late March: "The Supreme Court's about
to consider a landmark case and one that could have far-reaching
implications. At issue is President Bush's powers to create war
crimes tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners."
In medialand, when the subject
is war crimes, the president of the United States points the
finger at others. Any suggestion that Bush should face such a
charge is assumed to be oxymoronic.
But a few journalists, outside
the corporate media structures, are seriously probing Bush's
culpability for war crimes. One of them is Robert Parry.
During the 1980s, Parry covered
U.S. foreign policy for Associated Press and Newsweek; in the
process he broke many stories related to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Now he's the editor of the 10-year-old website Consortiumnews.com,
an outlet he founded that has little use for the narrow journalistic
path along Pennsylvania Avenue.
"In a world where might
did not make right," Parry wrote in a recent piece, "George
W. Bush, Tony Blair and their key enablers would be in shackles
before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague, rather than sitting
in the White House, 10 Downing Street or some other comfortable
environs in Washington and London."
Over the top? I don't think
so. In fact, Parry's evidence and analysis seem much more cogent
-- and relevant to our true situation -- than the prodigious
output of countless liberal-minded pundits who won't go beyond
complaining about Bush's deceptions, miscalculations and tactical
errors in connection with the Iraq war.
Is Congress ready to consider
the possibility that the commander in chief has committed war
crimes during the past few years? Of course not. But the role
of journalists shouldn't be to snuggle within the mental confines
of Capitol Hill. We need the news media to fearlessly address
matters of truth, not cravenly adhere to limits of expediency.
When top officials in Lyndon
Johnson's administration said that North Vietnam had launched
two unprovoked attacks on U.S. vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin,
the press corps took their word for it. When top officials in
George W. Bush's administration said that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction, the press corps took their word for it.
We haven't yet seen any noticeable
part of the Washington press corps raise the matter of war crimes
by the president. Very few dare to come near the terrain that
Parry explored in his March 28 article "Time to Talk War
Crimes."
That article cites key statements
by the U.S. representative to the Nuremberg Tribunal immediately
after the Second World War. "Our position," declared
Robert Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, "is that whatever
grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds
the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling
those grievances or for altering those conditions."
During a March 26 appearance
on the NBC program "Meet the Press," Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice tried to justify the invasion of Iraq this way:
"We faced the outcome
of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had
to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle
East. The new Iraq will be a part of the new Middle East, and
we will all be safer."
But, in a new essay on April
3, Parry points out that "this doctrine -- that the Bush
administration has the right to invade other nations for reasons
as vague as social engineering -- represents a repudiation of
the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter's ban
on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders
six decades ago."
Parry flags the core of the
administration's maneuver: "Gradually, Rice and other senior
Bush aides shifted their rationale from Hussein's WMD to a strategic
justification, that is, politically transforming the Middle East."
He concludes that "implicit in the U.S. news media's non-coverage
of Rice's new rationale for war is that there is nothing objectionable
or alarming about the Bush administration turning its back on
principles of civilized behavior promulgated by U.S. statesmen
at the Nuremberg Tribunal six decades ago."
Although the evidence is ample
that President Bush led the way to aggressive warfare against
Iraq, the mainstream U.S. news media keep proceeding on the assumption
that -- when the subject is war crimes -- he's well cast as an
accuser but should never be viewed as an appropriate defendant.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.