8 leaked British documents provide further evidence of aggression & crime

[G_j]

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/070805Davies/070805davies.html

Special Report

The bloody trail from Downing Street to Washington
8 leaked British documents provide further evidence of aggression & other serious crimes by the US

By Nicolas J. S. Davies
Online Journal Contributing Writer

July 8, 2005—In "The Crime of War: from Nuremberg to Fallujah" (Online Journal, 12/31/04), I described how the war in Iraq constitutes aggression as it is defined under international law. At the time I was writing that report, discussions of legality within and between the U.S. and British governments were closely guarded secrets, and I had to take their public statements as indications of their legal position.

Now, eight leaked British documents have laid bare the British side of those discussions and revealed that British legal advisors explicitly and consistently advised their government and their American counterparts of the illegality of the U.S. war plan. In response to their advice, the two governments hatched a "clever plan" to create a legal pretext for war, but the plan failed when the U.N. Security Council rejected it, leaving the British government with a stark choice between legitimacy and war. The United States had devised and developed this illegal policy over a period of several years and any objections raised by U.S. legal advisors between 1998 and 2002 have yet to be disclosed.

These documents show that the legal argument by which the United States Government eventually claimed legitimacy for the war hinged on the concept of "revival": that the "formal ceasefire" declared in resolution 687 (1991) was conditional on Iraq's ongoing compliance with the other terms of that resolution; that Iraq's alleged "material breach" of certain articles of that resolution could therefore "revive" the authorization of military force contained in resolution 678 (1990); and that certain clauses of resolution 1441 (2002) were intended to act as an automatic trigger for such a "revival" without further action by the council. <1>

In fact, the "formal ceasefire" declared in resolution 687 (1991) was conditional only on Iraq's acceptance of the other terms of that resolution. It contains no language to indicate that the ceasefire was intended to be temporary or conditional on Iraq's future behavior, nor any provision for a "revival" of the authorization of military force. Upon consideration, this is hardly surprising. Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the council already possesses the exclusive authority to order the use of force whenever it finds this to be warranted, so it has no need to reserve any additional authority to itself in this respect. The only function of "revival" would be to delegate a critical portion of its decision-making authority to an individual member or group of members, and there is no provision in the charter for it to do that either. The legitimacy of this whole concept is thus fundamentally suspect.

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[indepat]

1. None of this matters for the mindset of the faithful is a Repug president

must be allowed to do whatever he wants, damn the law, the Constitution, and international law, as evidenced by the near lockstep voting of Repugs in the Congress (and far, far far too many Dems).