- Last week, a legal thunderbolt struck at the heart of
the grubby conspiracy that led the United States and Britain into an illegal
war of aggression against Iraq. But this searing blow didn't fall in Washington,
where a media frenzy raged over a White House indictment, but in southern
England, in a military courtroom, where a lone soldier stood against the
full force of the great war-crime enterprise, armed only with a single,
rusty, obsolete weapon: the law.
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- While Potomac courtiers were reading the entrails of
the cooked goose of Scooter Libby -- the first Bushist honcho caught in
the slow-grinding gears of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation
-- in Wiltshire, Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith faced a court
martial after declaring that the Iraq war was illegal and refusing to return
for his third tour of duty there, The Guardian reports.
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- He has been charged with four counts of "disobeying
a lawful command." But Kendall-Smith, a decorated medical officer
in the Royal Air Force, says that his study of the recently revealed evidence
about the lies, distortions and manipulations used to justify the invasion
has convinced him that both the war and the occupation are "manifestly
illegal." Thus any order arising from this criminal action is itself
an "unlawful command," The Sunday Times reports. In fact, the
RAF's own manual of law compels him to refuse such illegal orders, Kendall-Smith
insists.
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- The flight lieutenant is no ordinary war protester, and
no shirker of combat -- unlike, say, the pair of prissy cowards at the
head of the U.S.-British "coalition." Kendall-Smith, who has
dual New Zealand-British citizenship -- and a pair of university degrees
in medicine and Kantian moral philosophy -- has served three tours at the
front in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not claiming any conscientious objections
against war in general, nor do religious scruples play any part in his
stance. It is based solely on the law.
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- Central to his case are the sinister backroom legal dealings
between London and Washington in the days before the invasion. Less than
two weeks before the initial "shock and awe" bombings began slaughtering
civilians across Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, gave
Prime Minister Tony Blair a detailed briefing full of doubts and equivocations
about the legality of the coming war, adding that Britain's participation
in an attack unsanctioned by the United Nations would "likely"
lead to "close scrutiny" by the International Criminal Court
for potential war crimes charges, The Observer reports.
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- But Blair and Goldsmith withheld this report from Parliament,
the Cabinet and British military brass, who were demanding a clear-cut
legal sanction for the impending action. Then, just three days before the
bloodletting began, Goldsmith suddenly produced another paper, this time
for public consumption: a brief, clear, unequivocal statement that the
invasion would be legal. This statement was almost certainly crafted in
Washington, where Goldsmith had recently been "tutored" by the
Bush gang's consiglieres, including the legal advisers to Colin Powell,
Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.
-
- Leading this pack of war-baying legal beagles was George
W. Bush's top counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who had overseen the White House's
own efforts to weasel out of potential war crimes charges by declaring
-- without any basis in Anglo-American jurisprudence or the U.S. Constitution
-- that Bush was not bound by any law whatsoever in any military action
he undertook: a blank check for aggression, murder and torture that Bush
has gleefully cashed over and over. Alberto and the boys leaned hard on
Goldsmith, who finally caved in and replicated the Americans' contorted
and specious legal arguments for launching the attack.
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- Of course, Kendall-Smith knew none of this during his
first two tours in Iraq: Goldsmith's Bush-induced backflip was only divulged
in April 2005. Nor did he know then of the "Downing Street Memos,"
the "smoking gun" minutes that record Blair's inner circle dutifully
lining up behind Bush's hell-bent drive for war -- as far back as 2002
-- and their conspiracy with the Bush gang to manipulate their countries
into war. The memos, which emerged in May 2005 and have never been denied
or repudiated by the British government, show Blair's slavish acquiescence
in Bush's criminal scheme to "fix the facts and the intelligence around
the policy" of unprovoked military aggression. Confronted with this
new evidence -- and revelations about the mountain of doubts expressed
by U.S. intelligence before the invasion but deliberately ignored by the
Bushist war party -- Kendall-Smith took the only honorable course for a
soldier who has been duped into serving an evil cause.
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- The moral rigor of his defiance has sent tremors through
the British military establishment, already shaken by the strange, unexplained
shooting deaths of two military inspectors investigating atrocity allegations
in Iraq, The Guardian reports. British brass are panicky about the Goldsmith
revelations; indeed, the leader of the British invasion force, Admiral
Michael Boyce, said that he now believed his country's military did not
have "the legal cover necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes,"
The Observer reports. Boyce added that if he and his officers were eventually
put on trial for waging aggressive war, he'd make sure that Blair and Goldsmith
were in the dock beside them.
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- Bush, Blair and their minions have committed a monstrous
crime, and they know it -- hence all the convolutions, before the war and
after, to inoculate themselves from prosecution. But with Kendall-Smith
and Fitzgerald, the long-moribund figure of the law is re-awakening. It's
weak, it's bleary, it certainly might fail. But now the conspirators will
have to live cowering in its shadow for the rest of their days.
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- Annotations
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- RAF Doctor Stands by Decision to Refuse to Serve in 'Illegal'
Iraq War
The Guardian, Oct. 28, 2005
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- Applauding a Military Refusenik
New Statesman, Oct. 31, 2005
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- Iraq War Objector a Thinker, Friends Say
Sunday Star-Times, Oct. 23, 2005
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- RAF Officer Faces Jail for Refusing to Return to Iraq
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Oct. 21, 2005
RAF Officer Faces Jail Over 'Illegal War'
The Sunday Times, Oct. 16, 2005
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- British Military Chief Reveals new Legal Fears Over Iraq
war
The Observer, May 1, 2005
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- Complete Set of Downing Street Documents
AfterDowningStreet.org, July 18, 2005
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- British Forces Feel Pressure from Abuse Claims
The Guardian, Oct. 17, 2005
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- Senior Military Investigator Found Dead in Iraq
The Independent, Oct. 17, 2005
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- Senior Officers Tried to Block Iraq Killing Investigation'
The Guardian, Oct. 12, 2005
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- International Court Hears Anti-war Claims
The Guardian, May 6, 2005
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- The Secret Way to War
New York Review of Books, June 9, 2005
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- Colin Powell: The Most Honest Man on Earth
A Tiny Revolution, Oct. 11, 2005
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- Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights
reserved.
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