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Robin Cook
It used to be a standard mantra of Tony Blair’s speeches that “responsibility and rights” are indissolubly linked. It turns out that responsibility is for job-seekers and single parents, not for our ruling classes. Lord Butler has produced elegantly crafted paragraphs explaining that none of them need take responsibility for the biggest blunder in British foreign and security policy since Suez. What a shame that at the time Anthony Eden did not have a Lord Butler around to explain he was not responsible for his decision to invade.
Robert Fisk
Lord Butler told us yesterday that Tony Blair acted in good faith. So that’s all right then. At the al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad yesterday morning, there was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the doctors, blood on the stretchers. In the dangerous oven of Baghdad, 10 more lives had just ended. So what was it Tony Blair said in the Commons yesterday afternoon? “We are not killing civilians in Iraq; terrorists are killing civilians in Iraq.” So that’s all right then. Question: Are Baghdad and London on the same planet?
Mark Hertsgaard
At the height of his power, Joseph McCarthy appeared invincible. Beginning in 1950, the senator from Wisconsin made a name for himself by claiming that the USA government employed hundreds of communists. For the next four years, no one in Washington dared stand up to McCarthy’s witch hunting. Yet his over-reach soon prompted the establishment to regard him as an unsteady extremist and to turn against him. Within months, the USA Senate had voted overwhelmingly to censure the demagogue, and McCarthy’s career was finished. Fifty years later, USA President George W. Bush is about to suffer the same fate.
Ian Williams, Asia Times.
It is not often that the International Court of Justice comes out with such an unequivocal opinion as it did recently on Israel?s “security barrier” inside the Occupied Territories. Just because it ruled against Israel and, by extension, its USA protector, on every point, does not invalidate the reasoning for the rest of the world. You cannot cherry-pick international law. People who attack the court for its decision should beware. In doing so, they are calling into question the United Nations Charter, and the whole foundation of international law and humanitarian conventions and treaties: which in the end are the legal basis of the state of Israel’s international recognition, and, in a broader sense, everyone else’s best hope for a global order that does not rely on anarchistic violence and force majeure.
Diana Buttu
Even prior to its ruling on the illegality of the wall, the International Court of Justice was denounced by Israeli government pundits as a “kangaroo court.” After the ruling, one commentator opined, “The court is biased.” Another proclaimed that the ICJ decision would “find its place in the garbage can of history.” The same stance was not, however, taken with respect to the Israel High Court decison. Justice Minister Yosef Lapid aptly summarized Israel’s position on these two decisions: “We will comply with our High Court decisions, and not with the International Court.” Herein lies the fundamental problem: Israel reserves the right to act both as defendant and judge of any suit against it and will not accede to independent adjudication of its crimes.
George Monbiot
Tomorrow the Butler report will reopen the debate in the UK about who was to blame for the lies with which we went to war ? the government or the intelligence agencies. One thing the news networks will not be discussing is the culpability of the news networks. After this inquiry, we will need another one, whose purpose is to discover why journalists help governments to lie to the people. I don?t need to discuss the failings of the USA news networks, some of which could reasonably be described as components of the military-industrial complex. But the failures of the British media, and in particular the BBC, in the light of British academic research, require more explanation.
Linda S. Heard
The recent USA Supreme Court ruling questioning the legality of Camp Delta in Guantanamo, Cuba, giving detainees the right to challenge their incarceration and treatment in USA courts, could well spell the beginning of the end for this shameful detention centre. It has recently come to light that Tony Blair has repeatedly asked his USA counterpart to send the remaining British prisoners home, as Britain does not accept the premise that military tribunals is a just way forward. It, therefore, seems inconceivable that Britain would be involved with secret detentions, and rumoured torture, on its own territory of Diego Garcia, especially since it is a signatory to the International Criminal Court and various human rights treaties, while the USA is not. Yet the signs are that Britain is just as mired in the human rights scandal as the Americans.
Robin Cook
For one of the British establishment’s most reliable and well known figures to openly criticise the Prime Minister, and leader of his own Party, is bad news enough for Tony Blair. For one to publicly claim that the effective head of state is either a liar or profoundly incompetent would at one time be grounds for a public hanging, or a revolution. But in the week that the report is due for publication into British intelligence failures in the run up to the war against Iraq, the man who until recently was Leader of the House of Commons, and Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair himself has spoken out with his most damning indictment yet, of his leader and his government. Tony Blair, according to Sir Robin Cook, knew before the war that Iraq was no threat to the world. And he is either so forgetful and incompetent as to beggar belief, or he lied to Britain and the world about the threat from Saddam Hussein.
Andrew Lichterman
Refusing to act in the service of our view of what is truly lawful changes not only the meaning of the law, but the meaning of our story, of our history. Our government lied to justify an aggressive war. It now appears likely that our government?s highest officials promulgated policies that resulted in the torture and killing of prisoners. If we fail to do everything in our power, consistent with our vision of lawfulness, to hold them to account, then even the meaning of Nuremberg will darken. Instead of being a step in the realization of a universal normative and legal vision, those trials so many years ago will look more like revenge killings of an emerging global superpower, bent on establishing a world in which it rules through force while standing above the law.
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