Ousting Saddam 'no cause for war'

[papau]

Ousting Saddam 'no cause for war' (Human Rights Watch )


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3430331.stm

Ousting Saddam 'no cause for war' -
The reasons for the war are still being questioned

A leading human rights group has said the US and UK are wrong to use the toppling of a brutal regime in Baghdad to justify going to war against Iraq.

In its annual World Report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said:
• Human rights are deteriorating in Afghanistan due to a reliance by US-led forces on warlords to defeat Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters
• The Bush administration uses threats to national security to justify putting executive action in the United States above the law
• Russian authorities justify the war in Chechnya as their contribution to the war on terror, while European and other governments ignore appalling human rights abuses there
• There was a "moment of hope" in Africa with African leaders trying to stop regional wars and the associated abuses, through bodies like the African Union <snip>

"Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life in using military force for humanitarian purposes," it said.
"Brutal as Saddam Hussein's reign had been, the scope of the Iraq Government's killing in March 2003, was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention.
"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair." <snip>

[papau]

1. UK papers have story - but not US Media?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=485143

The United States and Britain had no justification for invading Iraq either on the grounds of alleged threats from illicit weapons and terrorism, or as a humanitarian mission, an international civil rights group said yesterday.

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has left President George Bush and Tony Blair claiming that the invasion was on humanitarian grounds, said a hard-hitting annual report of Human Rights Watch. It said that the West had done nothing when Saddam massacred Kurds and Shias in the past, and there was no evidence of any continuing mass killings at the start of the war in March 2003.

The report claimed that the US and British occupation forces had "sidelined human rights... as a matter of secondary importance. The rule of law has not arrived and Iraq is still beset by the legacy of human rights abuses of the former government, as well as new ones that have emerged under the occupation." The reasons given for war by Mr Bush and Mr Blair - WMD and Saddam's alleged links with international terrorism - hadnot been proved, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the organisation.

[Whoa_Nelly]

2. From MSNBC

Rights' group blasts Iraq war rationale

HRW says Saddam' overthrow not justified on human rights' groundsThe
Associated Press
Updated: 12:54 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2004

LONDON - The war in Iraq cannot be justified as an intervention in defense of human rights even though it ended a brutal regime, Human Rights Watch said Monday, dismissing one of the Bush administration’s main arguments for the invasion.

<snip>
“The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair,” executive director Kenneth Roth said.

Atrocities such as Saddam’s 1988 mass killing of Kurds would have justified humanitarian intervention, Roth said.

“But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter,” he added. “They shouldn’t be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past.”

<snip>
“The administration’s actions display a perilous belief that, in the fight against terrorism, the executive is above the law,” the report said.

more...
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4064043/