American Third Position Endorses Former CIA Officer’s Calls for Nuremburg Trials over Iraq War
The American Third Position has endorsed a call by former Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer Philip Giradli, for Nuremburg war crimes trials to punish those responsible for the invasion of Iraq.
Mr. Giraldi, who is also Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, made the call in his column on the antiwar.com website.
He also condemned America’s political system which, he said, requires “neither party to behave responsibly” which meant that “decisions will be made without regard for the consequences.
“Seven years ago a major war crime was committed when Iraq was attacked yet no one has been punished, nor has anyone even been seriously challenged on the steps taken that led up to war,” Mr. Giraldi, who was also Ron Paul’s foreign policy advisor during the 2008 presidential primaries, wrote.
“The United States bombed and then invaded a country that posed no threat and that had no ability in any event to strike against Americans or American targets.
“In 1946, the judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia,” he continued.
“In spite of the fact that a majority of Republicans now considers the Iraq war to have been a ‘mistake,’ a view certainly shared by most Democrats and the public, no American government official was even fired as a consequence,” he said.
Mr. Giraldi’s argument is correct. The main charge at the Nuremburg Trials was one of “waging aggressive war” which was predicated on the fact that Germany had invaded Poland which represented no physical threat.
The international legal precedent has therefore been set: a political leader is guilty of “waging aggressive war” if they cause another nation to be invaded which represents no threat to the invading nation.
Iraq was accused of being responsible for the attacks of 9-11, which it obviously was not. Iraq was accused of being a threat to the U.S., which it obviously was not.
Iraq was the subject of some of the most vicious public lies ever to be seen in recent American history which ranged from accusations that it was building a nuclear bomb right through to “chemical weapons factories.”
All of these claims were disproved and shown to be deliberate lies. It is unlikely that anyone will ever forget the disgraceful sight of Colin Powell lying to the United Nations in the infamous presentation which “justified” the invasion.
The war in Iraq has cost in excess of $739,539,000,000 dollars at a time when America is in a deep financial crisis. Apart from the financial cost, more than 4,000 American soldiers have been killed while Iraqi deaths have been estimated to be anywhere up to 1.25 million.
Mr. Giraldi went on to name those who should be brought to justice, starting with Condoleezza Rice (who he described as “an inept National Security Adviser and then as an only marginally better Secretary of State”).
“She once thrilled the American public and the fawning media by describing her vision of nuclear mushroom clouds over U.S. cities courtesy of Saddam Hussein, who, at the time, had no ability to do harm to anyone but his own people,” Mr. Giraldi wrote.
“One might have expected public and congressional demands that Rice be called to account for the foreign policy shipwreck she participated in, but she has instead been rewarded and is currently both a tenured professor at Stanford University and a Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is even being spoken of as a possible Republican presidential candidate somewhere down the road.”
Others named by Mr. Giraldi included George W. Bush, George Tenet, “the CIA Director . . . who cooked the intelligence to make the war possible to curry favor with the White House [and who] is now Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.”
Mr. Giraldi pointed out that Mr. Tenet’s memoirs, called At the Center of the Storm, specifically admitted that the U.S. invaded Iraq for no good reason.
Another person to be put on trial, Mr. Giraldi continued, is Dick Cheney who “made numerous visits to the CIA headquarters to oversee the generation of the Iraq NIE to make sure that it said what the White House wanted it to say.
“Cheney and his colleague in crime Scooter Libby also served as a conduit for bogus information being generated by the Pentagon, bypassing the usual intelligence channels through the CIA and the National Security Adviser.
“Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the ‘intellectual’ driving force behind the invasion of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Wolfowitz’s chief deputy at the Pentagon, Doug Feith, was the architect of the invasion of Iraq. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, he ran the infamous Office of Special Plans (OSP).
“OSP collected and disseminated information that CIA and State Department Intelligence had found to be suspect. Not surprisingly, Feith’s reports supported the case that Iraq presented a threat to the United States.”
Category: Establishment News
One of the problems rest with our own Congress who hasn't made a formal declaration of war since WWII. Instead they've given up their Constitutional responsiblities and allow our Presidents since that time to essentially go to war against any country without any preliminary investigation or debate or any good cause.
There is absolutely no accountibility under the present political machine in Washington!
Excellent article.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
~Noam Chomsky
The irony as shown in the article, is that the cast of characters named all have cushy jobs while the rest of the nation including myself is paying for their acts. All the people mentioned and those in the current administration are nothing but 5th columnists, bent on selling us down the river, and destroying this great nation. Shame on them!
Anyone who has read the true history of the gargantuan mockery of justice that occured at these communist-style "show trials" (at Nuremburg) certainly wants none of the same ever to be repeated again. However, I do get your point. What is needed is a FAIR, HONEST and IMPARTIAL investigation into this unjustified, immoral, unwarranted criminal invasion of Iraq and toppling of its leader to appease the Zionists.
Right on, Robert.