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"Democrats really have no problem destroying the Constitution and killing people in faraway lands, so long as a Democrat president does the killing and trashing. In fact, when it comes to war crimes, Bill Clinton leaves George Bush in the dust. Clinton, writes Edward S. Herman, “has gone beyond the Bush [Senior] record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style…. Clinton’s crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.”
"On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged but unproven Iraq plot to assassinate Bush Senior, killing Iraqi civilians, including the distinguished Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar. “This kind of unilateral action in response to an unproven charge is a violation of international law,” notes Herman. A few years later, in 1998, Clinton attacked Afghanistan and the Sudan, destroying a crucial pharmaceutical factory in the latter nation.
"On a roll, Clinton also attacked Yugoslavia, targeting civilian infrastructure and civilian facilities (houses, hospitals, schools, trains, factories, power stations, churches, historical sites). Clinton’s crimes, according to lawyers from several countries that submitted a formal complaint with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1999, include “willful killing, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, employment of poisonous weapons or other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity, attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings, destruction or willful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments and works of art and science,” an “open violation” of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty, the Geneva Conventions and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
"All of this, however, pales in comparison to Clinton’s enforcement of a brutal and genocidal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq. In 1996, the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, claimed sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children (UNICEF rounded the number off to 500,000), through preventable disease and malnourishment, a claim that prompted Clinton’s Secretary of State, at the time UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to declare on CBS’ 60 Minutes that the medieval siege of Iraq and the murder of hundreds of thousands of children was a price worth paying. Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, resigned after a 34 year career with the UN, declaring, “I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in disgust, as did Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq. All told, 1.5 million Iraqis died as a direct result of the sanctions.
Another Day in the Empire
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
1 comment:
All of this, however, pales in comparison to Clinton’s enforcement of a brutal and genocidal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq
It should also be remembered that, although the sanctions were ostensibly put into place to enforce the disarmament (WMD-wise) of Iraq, it was Clinton who insisted that, WMD or no WMD, the sanctions would remain in place as long as Saddam Hussein was in power, thereby making him personally responsible for the deaths as he unilaterally (and without even a democratic vote in his own country changed the purpose of the sanctions.
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