Bush's Taxi to the Dark Side

After winning an OSCAR for her documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, a film about the US Government's use of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Australian filmaker, Eva Orner branded the Bush administration "a bunch of war criminals, " who "needed to be stopped." (Oscar winner Eva Orner: US are war criminals, Herald Sun, 26/2/08)

Earlier still, on 14/2/08, Australia's Defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, "denounced the handling of the war in Afghanistan and [said] the allies are disunited, lack a clear plan and have failed to deal with the drug trade." He went on to warn that "a new strategy was required to ensure the Australian contribution was not for 'nil'." (Afghan war being botched: minister, Jonathan Pearlman, SMH, 15/2/08)

A look at the machinations leading up to the US (and Australian) attack on Afghanistan in 2001, bears out the truth of Orner's remarks and raises the question that Fitzgibbon really needs to be asking: Why are we aiding and abetting?

In his 2004 book, Destroying World Order: US Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11, leading American expert in international law, Francis A Boyle, guides us through these murky waters:-

Boyle portrays the Bush government as a warmongering cabal that shamelessly exploited the 9/11 tragedy to wage "an illegal armed aggression [against Afghanistan] that has created a hunanitarian catastrophe for the 22 million people of [that country] and is promoting terrible regional instability." He points out that "there is not and may never be conclusive proof as to who was behind the terrible bombings in New York and Washington DC, on September 11, 2001," and describes how the Bush administration, "deliberately invoking the rhetoric of Pearl Harbour," misrepresented an act of terrorism against the US as an act of war, which is defined by international law and practice as "a military attack by one nation state upon another nation state." Boyle writes, "The implication was that if this is an act of war, then you do not deal with it by means of international treaties and negotiations: You deal with an act of war by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made...to ignore and abandon the entire framework of international treaties that had been established under the auspices of the United Nations Organization for the past 25 years in order to deal with acts of terrorism and instead go to war against Afghanistan, a UN member state. In order to prevent the momentum towards war from being impeded, Bush Jr issued an impossible ultimatum, refusing all negotiations with the Taliban government, as well as all the extensive due process protections that are required between sovereign states related to extraditions, etc. The Taliban government's requests for proof and offers to surrender bin Laden to a third party, similar to those which ultimately brought the Libyan Lockerbie suspects to trial, were all peremptorily ignored."

Bush failed to get either the UN Security Council or the US Congress to authorize war. Boyle writes that he "went to the US Congress and exploited the raw emotions of this national tragedy to ram through a congressional authorization to use force....[however], Congress failed to give Bush Jr [a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got from Congress after Pearl Harbour] and for a very good reason...it would have made Bush Jr a 'consitutional dictator' insofar as that, basically, Americans would now all be living under martial law. Congress might have just as well closed up and gone home for the rest of the duration of the Bush Jr war against terrorism for all the difference they would have made."

"Instead of a formal declaration of war, the US Congress gave Bush Jr what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization [which] basically gives [him] a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges - by means of his own ipse dixit - was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11, or else harboured those who were," despite the fact that the UN Charter expressly forbids an armed agression against a UN member state.

Two further attempts to get the Security Council's authorization to use military force failed, leading to the US invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter and informing the Security Council that "the US reserved its right to use force in self-defense against any state that the Bush Jr administration felt the need to victimize in order to fight their holy war against international terrorism as determined by themselves" - the same defense asserted by the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945.

Boyle's conclusion: "The Bush Jr war against Afghanistan, in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the UN Charter of 1945 [both requiring contracting parties to resolve international disputes peacefully], constitutes a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace." Orner knows this. Fitzgibbon & Co don't want to.

Postscript (4/3/08): In his Sydney Morning Herald opinion column, Harry puts the prince in principle (4/3/08), radical neocon pundit (and self-confessed republican) Gerard Henderson, in telling us how impressed he was by "Prince Harry putting his life on the line in Afghanistan" (a bit of palace PR if ever there was one), went on to misrepresent Eva Orner's accusation that the Bush administration were "war criminals" as a "far left" position. It speaks volumes about the kind of world we are now living in, that support for the principles of international law can be dismissed in this way. The sine qua non of the neocon, of course, is a massive contempt for international law and a belief that it should be replaced by the law of the jungle, which Henderson dresses up as (quoting from Andrew Roberts' A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900): "[T]he English-speaking peoples unmistakably demonstrat[ing] to the rest of the world that they still enjoy global hegemony," or, in his own words, "[T]he moral imperative of the West to intervene in the world, sometimes militarily, to help spread democracy."