Crimes of War Iraq

by Falk, Richard; Gendzier, Irene; Lifton, Robert Jay

• ISBN13: 9781560258032
• ISBN10: 1560258039
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-18
• Publisher: Bold Type Books

Summary

Crimes of WarIraq provides a comprehensive legal, historical, and psychological exploration of the war in Iraq from the same editorial team whose 1971 Crimes of War was a landmark book about Vietnam and the revelation of American war crimes. The editors apply standards of international criminal law, as set forth at Nuremberg after World War II, and by subsequent developments regarding individual responsibility and accountability. These principles have to do with the waging of aggressive war, attacks on civilian centers of population, rights of resistance against an illegal occupation, and the abuse of prisoners. Explorations of psychology and human behavior include levels of motivation and response in connection with torture at Abu Ghraib; the phenomenon of the atrocity-producing situation in both Vietnam and Iraq (in which counter-insurgency, military policies, and angry grief could cause ordinary people to participate in atrocities); the behavior of doctors and medics in colluding in torture at Abu Ghraib; emerging testimony of American veterans of Iraq concerning the confusions of the mission, and the widespread killing of civilians; and accounts of broadening unease and psychological disturbance among men and women engaged in combat.

Author Biography

Robert Jay Lifton is the visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard. From 1995 he has been conducting psychological research on the problem of apocalyptic violence. He is the author of many books including Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. He lives in Boston
Richard Falk, chair of the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, is the author of Religion and Humane Global Governance and, most recently, The Great Terror War. He lives in Washington DC.

Table of Contents

Introduction : on the responsibility and accountability of leaders, military personnel, and citizens in wartime
A legal framework
U.S. Constitution, Art. VI(2)	p. 5
UN charter provisions	p. 5
International committee of the Red Cross summary of international humanitarian law	p. 8
Genocide convention (1948)	p. 24
Convention on protection of cultural property in armed conflict	p. 29
Convention against torture (1984)	p. 31
Declaration on the prohibition on nuclear weapons (1961)	p. 34
Kosovo report, independent international commission on Kosovo (2000)	p. 38
The responsibility to protect, report of the International Commission On Intervention And Sovereignty (2001)	p. 43
UN high-level panel on threats, challenges and change (2005) [excerpts]	p. 47
Justice Jackson's opening and closing statements as prosecutor (1945)	p. 55
Nuremberg judgment	p. 61
Nuremberg principles	p. 74
Preemption, Iraq, and international law	p. 77
National security strategy of the USA, White House, 2002	p. 83
A new international legal order	p. 88
Contesting empire's law and human rights as "swords of empire"	p. 102
Iraq : one year later	p. 109
Downing Street memo, 23 July 2002	p. 126
Lord Millett's separate opinion in the House of Lords decision in the Pinochet extraction case (March 24, 1999)	p. 131
The Princeton principles on universal jurisdiction (2001)	p. 145
Jean Paul Sartre's inaugural statement	p. 154
David Dellinger's appeal to American and world opinion	p. 157
Opening and closing statements at the world tribunal on Iraq	p. 159
Opening statement at the world tribunal on Iraq [excerpts]	p. 163
Declaration of the jury of conscience at the world tribunal on Iraq	p. 168
U.S. policy in Iraq
Introduction : on averting our eyes	p. 183
Exclusive : Saddam key in early CIA plot	p. 192
A tyrant 40 years in the making	p. 195
U.S. District Court (Florida : southern district) affidavit, United States of America, plaintiff, v. Carlos Cardoen [et al]	p. 197
Democracy, deception, and the arms trade : the U.S., Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction	p. 202
Testimony before the senate committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs	p. 212
The Iraq sanctions debate : destruction of a people	p. 218
Between Iraq and a hard place : a critique of the case for UN economic sanctions	p. 222
The war before the war	p. 232
Iraq, lies, and videotape	p. 235
Mind games	p. 242
The war of occupation	p. 248
Pentagon expects long-term access to four key bases in Iraq	p. 260
America : the U.S. military now puts machine guns into the hands of mercenaries	p. 264
Oil in Iraq : the heart of the crisis	p. 266
Media advisory : Cheney energy task force documents feature map of Iraqi oilfields	p. 275
Operation oil immunity	p. 277
U.S. contractors reap the windfalls of post-war reconstruction	p. 279
So, Mr. Bremer, where did all the money go?	p. 292
Executive plans and authorization to violate international law concerning treatment and interrogation of detainees [excerpts]	p. 301
Summary background statement of the report, "mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq : cluster sample survey,"	p. 312
A survey estimating the death toll from the war in Iraq : a lay-person's summary	p. 313
Seven theses on the current period, the war, and the antiwar movement	p. 315
Preventive war, "the supreme crime"	p. 322
It is not only Iraq that is occupied : America is, too	p. 327
The psychological and ethical context
Conditions of atrocity	p. 340
Doctors and torture	p. 342
Doctors and interrogators at Guantanamo Bay	p. 345
Break them down : systematic use of psychological torture by U.S. forces	p. 350
A stain on medical ethics	p. 362
A situationist perspective on the psychology of evil : understanding how good people art transformed into perpetrators	p. 366
Power turns good soldiers into "bad apples"	p. 370
The policy context of torture : a social psychological analysis	p. 371
Obedience to authority : an experimental view	p. 379
Breaking ranks : an interview with Mike Hoffman	p. 387
What have we done?	p. 393
Narrative	p. 396
The hidden toll of the war in Iraq	p. 399
A war of disabilities : Iraq's hidden costs are coming home	p. 410
This is our Guernica	p. 415
Fallujah refugees tell of life and death in the kill zone	p. 418
Unnamed and unnoticed : Iraqi casualties	p. 420
Americans as survivors	p. 427
They died for their country	p. 431
The normalization of war	p. 433
The war president	p. 442
The war against Islam	p. 444
The bomb and Karl Rove	p. 445
A war over meaning	p. 448
What kind of extremist will you be?	p. 449
Acts of hope : challenging empire on the world stage	p. 451
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