Another Contradiction Between U.S. law and the Blind Spot of Self-Aggrandizement

The other night I happened to be listening to the Monitor program on KPFT FM radio out of Houston, Texas. One of the interviewees was Marjorie Cohn, a lawyer and president of the National Lawyer's Guild. Ms. Cohn is also a very enthusiastic activist especially around issues that relate to the military, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and other wars inspired by a system engulfed and consumer by Empire. Marjorie Cohn, along with Kathleen Gilberd, have authored a book entitled Rules of Disengagement. I really enjoyed this interview, and learned some new things.

The book Rules of Disengagement speaks to the issues of people who want to disengage from the military-industrial-digital war machine. One chapter deals with Conscientous Objection. This peeked my interest because I was a CO during the Vietnam Era. Most don't know that that GIs and other military personnel, from the inside, were some of the prime catalysts of resistance to cause the eventually pulling out of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of troops deserted because they knew the system would stand against them. Some fled to Canada, and some went underground. Discussions about the philosophical, moral, economic, and ethical sources of resistance were held in coffeehouses in many cities nearby military installations in this nation and in others across the globe. The rebellion against fighting an illegal war was slowly but surely instigated by many sectors of the anti-war movement until it reached a huge conflagration and the government had to take some kind of responsive action to the voice of the people.

One of the most salient points made by Marjorie Cohn in this Monitor interview is one of the best-kept-by-reason-of-intention-secrets to be hidden from the American people: the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is illegal. It's illegal for two reasons: first of all, to be legal war, and country has to be attacked by an aggressor state. To use 911 as a precursor to the so-called Iraqi Freedom invasion is to continue to be mired in the deception used as a reason for the attack in the first place. The attackers on 911 were mainly Saudis, and disconnected from Iraq, and even Afghanistan. If we are to take the administration's presumption as a bonafide real argument, it wasn't the attack of the Iraqi people on the U.S., but it was the attack of a group of terrorists led by Osama Bin Laden. To invade and occupy a country, setting up a hand-picked government, making it possible to realize huge rewards of oil to U.S. oil companies, by cleverly and deftly getting that set-up government to pass laws that would guarantee this legal theft to fall into the hands of people and systems that can only see profits, the murder and heinous crimes to civilians by military personnel, the continual torture of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, etc. is illegal under international conventions and laws.

The consequence of this, as Cohn has argued in many courts, it that there can be no real military justice if the orders given to those dissenting from the occupation are illegal. It's like habeous corpus. The military is in actuality holding military staff against their will if they don't want to follow the U.S.'s illegal course of action. War is horrible enough, but to try and foist off this kind of deception and seduction onto the American people is a war crime in itself.

The other reason this is an illegal war, and orders to go anywhere to support or fight it are illegal is that treaties created by the U.N. were in place. These treaties have to do with the protection of human rights of all peoples in all countries. No one country has the right to contravene these conventions and ratified treaties by the international organization whose purpose it is to insure the human rights of the world's citizens.

At the heart of U.S. imperialism is the notion that the Empire can make or break international laws and compacts at will. To use the excuse 'we are protecting our national interest' simply won't cut it any more. Neither will any one nation riding roughshod over any other nation's protection of human rights. The U.S. chooses what laws it sees fit to call legitimate or illegitimate is sort of like a bird in a bubble with no air. For awhile it lives in the bubble (with its residual air supply) thinking everything is ok. This bird thinks it has got it made. But eventually the needle of actual legitimacy of all human beings will pop the bubble, and down it will go.

This state of doing business is slowly dying off in that it's obsolete in our new age. When will the U.S. decide to truly come into the company and community of nations who value everyone's human rights, not just those of its own citizens? The resistance given to living the Universal Treaty of Human Rights, first ratified in 1948, at the grass roots level, both in and outside the nation, by the U.S. imperialistic presumption of superior power and cultural racism, has wrapped inside of it its own demise. As the prophet of the Bahai faith (I'm not a Bahai by the way, but I know truth when I see it) once said (parphrasing) 'the nations of the world are like a huge tree. The branches are many and diverse, but they are hooked into one tree.' If I may extemporize on this saying, our root system is the internalization of our oneness as human beings. When we ignore this truth, we live in a world of peril. This is our wake up call.