These are excerpts from a great recent speech by Noam Chomsky:
Following -- that's just the beginning of it. What followed were really serious outright war crimes. We have just seen one in the last few months: the invasion of Fallujah. In this case, the crimes were not concealed, which may be worse than passing them over in silence. They were openly reported, and then, in fact, proudly reported. You could see on the front page of the New York Times a big picture of the first victory in the conquest of Fallujah. The first target was the Fallujah General Hospital, and the Times featured a big picture on the front page of a soldier standing guard over people lying on the floor in hospital gowns with their hands tied behind their backs. The story explained that the American forces that went in forced patients from their beds, forced them to lie on the floor, and manacled them with their hands behind their backs. The story went on to say that this had had to be done because the Fallujah General Hospital was serving as a propaganda weapon for the insurgents by releasing casualty figures. The Times added, of course, these are inflated casualty figures. They knew they were inflated because our dear leader had announced that, which is apparently enough.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The foundation of contemporary modern post-second World War humanitarian law, in fact, part of the supreme law of the land of the United States is the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions explicitly and unambiguously state that any medical facility must be protected by any combatants in any conflict. Anything other than that is a major war crime, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. Under current U.S. law, the War Crimes Act of 1996 passed by a Republican congress, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions carry a sentence of possible death penalty. Maybe our coming Attorney General had that kind of a thing in mind a couple of years ago when he was legal counsel to President Bush, and advised him in that capacity that he should rescind the -- effectively rescind -- the Geneva Conventions to reduce the likelihood of prosecution. Well, again, you can draw the conclusions yourselves. All of this was passed over very lightly here, mostly without comment, but not elsewhere.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/09/1458256I don't expect anyone in the misadministration to actually face this kind of justice. But if Condi and her husband really expect the European nations to support their follies after pulling this kind of shit, they better go back to the Kool-Aid factory.
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