Category Archives: News

In an interview yesterday on the BBC (transcript), former senior State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson explained that Vice President Dick Cheney may have committed an “internatinational crime” in his advocacy of eliminating Geneva Convention protections on prisoners in the so-called “war on terror.” Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Collin Powell from 2002 to 2005 responded to a question by the BBC about whether or not the Vice President was guilty of a war crime by stating that “it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.” Interestingly, Wilkerson used to the term “terror” to refer to the systematic abuse and torture of prisoners in the custody of the United States.

Wilkerson has issued several criticisms of the Bush administration over the past few days, especially with regard to the treatment of detainees in the “war on terror.” Vice President Cheney has continued to advocate exemptions for the CIA in any anti-torture policy even as questions are raised about whether or not the CIA has killed prisoners in their custody. Meanwhile, the European Union has threatened sanctions against any EU country allowing the CIA to operate detention camps in their territory.

A year after the United States led assault on Fallujah, an attack which likely resulted in numerous war crimes due both to the wholesale destruction of the city and the specific targeting of hospitals and mosques, the people of Falluja continue to suffer from a lack of financial compensation, slow reconstruction, and high rates of illness. Last November’s assault damaged or destroyed 36,000 homes, 60 schools, and 65 mosques and killed between 4,000 and 6,000 people, the majority of whom are civilians. Despite promises at the time of compensation by then Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, much of the money has failed to materialize and many residents are still displaced and lack access to potable water and electricity. Moreover, the destruction of hospitals during the assault and the slow reconstruction has increased the rate of disease.

While the civilian population’s suffering during the destruction of Fallujah has received scant attention in the year following the assault, the recent revelations that the United States used white phosphorus weapons against civilians in the assault on Fallujah, which the United States has previously classified as a chemical weapon, increases the likelihood that the war crimes committed in Fallujah may some day be investigated. Of course, an investigation will likely do little to improve the lives of people living in Fallujah, but it is a step towards illuminating one of the worst crimes of the Iraq War. Additionally, trial of two a British trial of two former British government officials is revealing new evidence that the attacks on Fallujah were taken for political reasons rather than strategic reasons.

For more information on both the November 2004 attack on Fallujah and the ongoing effects of the attack, visit Remember Fallujah.

Nearly two weeks after President George W. Bush claimed that opponents of the Iraq War were “rewriting history” when they argue that intelligence was manipulated, the Bush administration’s public relations campaign to discredit critics is failing as new evidence of intelligence distortions continue to be disclosed. On Sunday, a Los Angeles Times article detailed how German intelligence officials warned the Bush administration and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that a key informant’s information was vague, secondhand, and impossible to confirm. The information, coming from a source code-named “Curveball,” detailed allegations of Iraq’s germ weapons program and its “mobile biological weapons labs” and was used repeatedly by the Bush administration to build support for the war, with the information being cited in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address and Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 speech to the United Nations. An article published yesterday in the National Journal raises additional questions about pre-war intelligence and details how the Bush administration was told on September 21, 2001 that there was no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 terrorist attacks and no evidence connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida.