A continuación
reproducimos una dolida nota de Nicolas J S Davies publicada ayer en el sitio
web Strategic Culture Foundation. Su tema: la impunidad del Imperio frente a
sus atropellos, saqueos, genocidios, propaganda y doble rasero para casi todo.
Davies es autor del libro Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and
Destruction of Iraq, entre otras contribuciones éditas. Acá va:
Título: US
Impunity Erodes World Justice
Texto: In the
past week, Burundi and South Africa have joined Namibia in declaring their
intention to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court
(ICC). They are likely to be followed by a parade of other African countries,
jeopardizing the future of an international court that has prosecuted 39
officials from eight African countries but has failed to indict a single person
who is not African.
Ironically,
African countries were among the first to embrace the ICC, so it is a striking
turnaround that they are now the first to give up on it.
But it is the
United States that has played the leading role in preventing the ICC from
fulfilling the universal mandate for which it was formed, to hold officials of
all countries accountable for the worst crimes in the world: genocide; crimes
against humanity; and war crimes – not least the crime of international
aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg defined as “the supreme international
crime” from which all other war crimes follow.
As the ICC’s
founding father, former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz, lamented in
2011, “You don’t have to be a criminologist to realize that if you want to
deter a crime, you must persuade potential criminals that, if they commit
crimes, they will be hauled into court and be held accountable. It is the
policy of the United States to do just the opposite as far as the crime of
aggression is concerned. Our government has gone to great pains to be sure that
no American will be tried by any international criminal court for the supreme
crime of illegal war-making.”
The U.S. has not
only refused to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC over its own citizens. It
has gone further, pressuring other countries to sign Bilateral Immunity
Agreements (BIA), in which they renounce the right to refer U.S. citizens to
the ICC for war crimes committed on their territory.
The U.S. has also
threatened to cut off U.S. aid to countries that refuse to sign them. The BIAs
violate those countries’ own commitments under the ICC statute, and the U.S.
pressure to sign them has been rightly condemned as an outrageous effort to
ensure impunity for U.S. war crimes.
Resistance to
U.S. Impunity
To the credit of
our international neighbors, this U.S. strategy has met with substantial
resistance. The European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating
that BIAs are incompatible with E.U. membership, and urged E.U.- member states
and countries seeking E.U. membership not to sign them.
At the start of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S.
military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as
At the start of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S.
military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and
awe.”
Fifty-four
countries have publicly refused to sign BIAs, and 24 have accepted cut-offs of
U.S. aid as a consequence of their refusal. Of 102 countries that have signed a
BIA, only 48 are members of the ICC in any case, and only 15 of those countries
are on record as having ratified the BIAs in their own parliaments.
Thirty-two other
ICC members have apparently allowed BIAs to take effect without parliamentary
ratification, but this has been challenged by their own country’s legal experts
in many cases.
The U.S. campaign
to undermine the ICC is part of a much broader effort by the U.S. government to
evade all forms of accountability under the laws that are supposed to govern
international behavior in the modern world, even as it continues to masquerade
as a global champion of the rule of law.
The treaties that
U.S. policy systematically violates today were crafted by American statesmen
and diplomats, working with their foreign colleagues, to build a world where
all people would enjoy some basic protections from the worst atrocities,
instead of being subject only to the law of the jungle or “might makes right.”
So current U.S.
policy is a cynical betrayal of the work and wisdom of past generations of
Americans, as well as of countless victims all over the world to whom we are
effectively denying the protections of the U.N. Charter, the Geneva
Conventions, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and other
multilateral treaties that our country ignores, violates or refuses to ratify.
Avoiding the
jurisdiction of international courts is only one of the ways that the U.S.
evades international accountability for its criminal behavior. Another involves
an elaborate and well-disguised public relations campaign that exploit the
powerful position of U.S. corporations in the world of commercial media.
Major Propaganda
Funding
The U.S.
government spends a billion dollars per year on public relations or, more
bluntly, propaganda, including $600 million from the Pentagon budget. The work
of its P.R. teams and contractors is laundered by U.S. newspapers and repeated
and analyzed ad nauseam by monolithic, flag-waving TV networks.
These profitable
corporate operations monopolize the public airwaves in the U.S., and also use
their financial clout, slick marketing and the support of the U.S. State
Department to maintain a powerful presence in foreign and international media
markets.
Foreign media in
allied countries provide further legitimacy and credibility to U.S.
talking-points and narratives as they echo around the world. Meanwhile,
Hollywood fills cinema and TV screens across the world with an idealized,
glamorized, inspirational version of America that still mesmerizes many people.
This whole
elaborate “information warfare” machine presents the United States as a global
leader for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, even as it
systematically and catastrophically undermines those same principles. It
enables our leaders to loudly and persuasively demonize other countries and
their leaders as dangerous violators of international law, even as the U.S. and
its allies commit far worse crimes.
Double Standards
in Syria / Iraq
Today, for
instance, the U.S. and its allies are accusing Syria and Russia of war crimes
in east Aleppo, even as America’s own and allied forces launch a similar
assault on Mosul. Both attacks are killing civilians and reducing much of a
city to rubble; the rationale is the same, counterterrorism; and there are many
more people in the line of fire in Mosul than in east Aleppo.
But the U.S.
propaganda machine ensures that most Americans see one, in Mosul, as a
legitimate counterterrorism operation (with Islamic State accused of using the
civilians as “human shields”) and the other, in east Aleppo, as a massacre
(with the presence of Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the former Nusra Front,
virtually whited out of the West’s coverage, which focuses almost entirely on
the children and makes no mention of “human shields”).
The phrase
“aggressive war” is also a no-no in the Western media when the U.S. government
launches attacks across international borders. In the past 20 years, the U.S.
has violated the U.N. Charter to attack at least eight countries (Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria), and the
resulting wars have killed about two million people.
A complex
whirlwind of conflict and chaos rages on in all the countries where the U.S.
and its allies have lit the flames of war since 2001, but U.S. leaders still
debate new interventions and escalations as if we are the fire brigade not the
arsonists. (By contrast, the U.S. government and the Western media are quick to
accuse Russia or other countries of “aggression” even in legally murky
situations, such as after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 that ousted the elected
president of Ukraine.)
Systematic
violations of the Geneva Conventions are an integral part of U.S. war-making.
Most are shrouded in secrecy, and the propaganda machine spins the atrocities
that slip through into the public record as a disconnected series of
aberrations, accidents and “bad apples,” instead of as the result of illegal
rules of engagement and unlawful orders from higher-ups.
The senior
officers and civilian officials who are criminally responsible for these crimes
under U.S. and international law systematically abuse their powerful positions
to subvert investigations, cover up their crimes and avoid any accountability
whatsoever.
Pinter’s
Complaint
When British
playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he
bravely and brilliantly used his Nobel lecture to speak about the real role
that the U.S. plays in the world and how it whitewashes its crimes. Pinter
recounted a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in London in the 1980s in which a
senior embassy official, Raymond Seitz, flatly denied U.S. war crimes against
Nicaragua for which the U.S. was in fact convicted of aggression by the
International Court of Justice (ICJ). Seitz went on to serve as Assistant Secretary
of State, U.S. Ambassador to the U.K., and then Vice-Chairman of Lehman
Brothers.
As Pinter
explained: “this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was
conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never
happened.
“The United
States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military
dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to
Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines,
Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States
inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
“Hundreds of
thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place?
And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes
they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But
you wouldn’t know it.
“It never
happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.
It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have
been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have
actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a
quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force
for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis.”
If in 2016 the
world seems to be more violent and chaotic than ever, it is not because the
United States lacks the will to use force or project power, as both major party
candidates for President and their military advisers appear to believe, but
because our leaders have placed too much stock in the illegal threat and use of
force and have lost faith in the rule of law, international cooperation and
diplomacy.
After a century
of commercial dominance, and 75 years of investing disproportionately in
weapons, military forces and geopolitical schemes, perhaps it is understandable
that U.S. leaders have forgotten how to deal fairly and respectfully with our
international neighbors. But it is no longer an option to muddle along, leaving
a trail of death, ruin and chaos in our wake, counting on an elaborate
propaganda machine to minimize the blowback on our country and our lives.
Sooner rather
than later, Americans and our leaders must knuckle down and master the very
different attitudes and skills we will need to become law-abiding global
citizens in a peaceful, sustainable, multipolar world.
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