Hi Folks,

I have interspersed comments between this tripe.

Robert Fisk: We are the war criminals now
'Everything we have believed in since the Second World War goes by the board as we pursue our own exclusive war'
29 November 2001
We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The US Air Force bombs Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic Afghan allies – who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996 – move into the city and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters.

Between 1992 and 1996 the Northern Alliance have been engaged in a war with the Taliban. If 50,000 people have been 'slaughtered' by the Northern Alliance an equal number of Northern Alliance members have also been slain. Death happens when people shoot guns and blow things up. That's war.

However, in an amateurish propaganda attempt by Mr. Fisk, this prejudiced statement prefaces the attributed 300 deaths so as to taint the readers view.

Our 'Heroic' Afghan Allies have nowhere been called 'Heroes' by any media outlet I am aware of. In fact, these folks have been slurred by the media for their primitive state - as if the media is unaware these folks have received almost no formal education. This is that willful media distortion again. Some savage peoples are to be pitied and doted upon by relief efforts - and other savage peoples (once aligned with the USA and subsequently George Bush) are now pariahs - worthy only of contempt.

This is why I 'hate' liberals. Their compassion is fake. They have only love for themselves ands their agenda's. The fact that these people may indeed be heroes to their families who have been persecuted for seeking increased freedom from religious and political persecution is entirely lost on them. Yet if these same folks 'slaughtered' western tourists - sympathy from the left would emerge decrying oppression from the west and their 'cries for help'.

The report is a footnote on the television satellite channels, a "nib" in journalistic parlance. Perfectly normal, it seems. The Afghans have a "tradition" of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed.

What does the USAF have to do with anything? Air support was requested to help quell armed opposition forces. No war crime was committed by anyone in the USAF.


Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison "revolt", in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. US Special Forces – and, it has emerged, British troops – helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were "executed" trying to escape.

Is this a surprise? Armed people are you shot at to subdue them. If 'execution' is a word used to describe the prison deaths, then that is a blatant, twisting, misstatement.


It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes. Within days, The Independent's Justin Huggler has found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.

Well whoop-de-doo. If he 'found' them they were already dead and he could not have witnessed the circumstances of their death. To smear UK forces with this accusation is reprehensible and just a typical 'antiwar' propaganda piece.


The Americans have even less excuse for this massacre. For the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop "if the Northern Alliance requested it". Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers of the Taliban, Mr Rumsfeld's incriminating remark places Washington in the witness box of any war-crimes trial over Kunduz.

Give me a break. No massacre occurred. If the Taliban prisoners had not tried to kill their captors - they would still be here. The fact that they were prisoners in the first place shows how restrained the Northern ALliance has been under US supervision.

If the Northern Alliance wanted to massacre folks - they wouldn't have been gone through the hassle of putting them in prisons now would they?

The 'thug' here is Mr. Fisk and his criminal slandering of folks he doesn't know and of events he was not present to witness.


US were acting in full military co-operation with the Northern Alliance militia.

Yes, the US has a military alliance with these folks. Is that news?


Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful crimes.

Perhaps because they realize no crime was commited.

Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What on earth has gone wrong with our moral compass since 11 September?

Once again our quick-witted Mr. Fisk seems to be jealous of his colleagues who are closer to the action than he. And so from the safety of his UK flat - he writes this piece of drivel to make himself important - by levying false accusations and applying sensationalistic practices to reporting news.


Perhaps I can suggest an answer. After both the First and Second World Wars, we – the "West" – grew a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes. The very first Anglo-French-Russian attempt to formulate such laws was provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; The Entente said it would hold personally responsible "all members of the (Turkish) Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres". After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 1945, article 6 (C) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN Convention on genocide referred to "crimes against humanity". Each new post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the creation of evermore human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western values.



Wonderful. Yet all this is irrelevant to the facts at hand and trying to link past war crimes to present events is another amateurish association technique used by folks who have no evidence to back their claims.

Over the past 50 years, we sat on our moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing – in nauseous detail – the secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too.

Again, more irrelevant rhetoric designed to whip the unaware reader into a fury.

Amateurish.

Yet suddenly, after 11 September, we went mad. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants – blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for our slaughter

This is so insulting and ludicrous it is laughable. The US sat on its hands for weeks. We sent in limited task forces to assess and locate the terrorist network Al Qaida. We offered the Taliban many opportunities to disassociate themselves with bin Laden - but they were up to their eyeballs with bin Laden and could not do so.

We have not bombed vilages into rubble but have targeted Taliban defense infrastructure and military targets, some of which are naturally located in civilian inhabited areas.

That is war. However, the US has done everything in its power to reduce civilian casualties. The folks who make decisions here are not unaware of the outrage of wanton destruction and have no desire to waste ammunition or expensive munitions on a non-military target.

Contrary to popular belief we are not drowning in munitions - or are trying to eliminate old stock. We need to have stockpiles to protect US interests at home and abroad. If targets are not clear or are not worthy of the drop - we save the munitions and fly back fully armed. We would rather waste fuel 0- which is relatively inexpensive than very expensive munitions.

– and now we have allowed our gruesome militia allies to execute their prisoners.

We haven't allowed anyone to do anything. US forces were not in significant numbers on the ground to watch all Northern Alliance soldiers or supervise all sorties! If some soldier of the Northern Alliance shot some unarmed Taliban member or surrendering one - then that is indeed very sad. However in warfare - far worse occurs, and grenade wielding 'surrendering Taliban' is not unusual - and so many shoot first - and take no chances. This is war. It is awful and it is not pretty.

President George Bush has signed into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a "terrorist murderer" in the eyes of America's awesomely inefficient intelligence services.

These same 'awesomely inefficient intelligence services' were the first on the ground. Not the marines. Not UK commandos - but US intelligence services. That should tell you how respected they are and how 'awesomely inefficient' they must be to be chosen for this perilous task.

And make no mistake about it, we are talking here about legally sanctioned American government death squads. They have been created, of course, so that Osama bin Laden and his men should they be caught rather than killed, will have no public defence; just a pseudo trial and a firing squad.

These military tribunals have been set up so that they can occur globally and not just in a US court of law which could become a prime terrorist target if any trial were to occur.

This way the trial can occur anywhere, anyplace and sentence carried out without terrorist intervention.

Under normal circumstances this would not be necessary, but these are not normal times.

These are not 'death squads' - and it shows how little respect is afforded military officers and the military in general.

The victor in any war calls the shots. A perfectly fair trial is an impossibility. If Germany had won WWII the US 'war crimes' would be revealed - instead the German war crimes were revealed. Yet, the Japanese atrocities exceeded both the US and German atrocities - combined - and no trials were held for many of these folks.

No justice exists which is perfect. To lament the US decision is simply not understanding the given circumstances.

It's quite clear what has happened. When people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the "civilised" world. We are the masters of human rights, the Liberals, the great and good who can preach to the impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered – when our glittering buildings are destroyed – then we tear up every piece of human rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.

I thought I had recovered from my illness, but this passage makes me retch some more. Pure anti-western rhetoric. Pro-communist, pure anti-caucasion liberal drivel. Colin Powell has brown skin. So does Condoleeza Rice. This is not about race or color, the author knows it but falls back on the evil caucasion, imperialist steretype - knowing that his loyal readers have lots of guilt and self-loathing.

Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact that Hitler's monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths – 10,000 times greater than the victims of 11 September – the Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg because US President Truman made a remarkable decision. "Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, "without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."

The world changes. During the Civil War you could buy back prisoners - and they would fight again. The French Revolution set the stage for mass executions upon the change of power and this stuck in some quarters - no mercy and no prisoners.

The US has always been more enlightened - only because we are not fond of massacres.

No one should be surprised that Mr Bush – a small-time Texas Governor-Executioner – should fail to understand the morality of a statesman in the Whitehouse.

So were back to capital punishment! Why don't we just kill 'small-time Texas Governor' George Bush - right Mr. Fisk? He is the only one evil enough to be worthy of an execution, right?

The Governor does not Execute people - the LAW does. Governors can commute sentences - but they are not 'Executioners' this is a gross distortion perpetuated by the left to slander Bush - when they couldn't find any other dirt.

What is so shocking is that the Blairs, Schröders, Chiracs and all the television boys should have remained so gutlessly silent in the face of the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation sanctified since 11 September.

There are ghostly shadows around to remind us of the consequences of state murder. In France, a general goes on trial after admitting to torture and murder in the 1954-62 Algerian war, because he referred to his deeds as "justifiable acts of duty performed without pleasure or remorse". And in Brussels, a judge will decide if the Israeli Prime Minister, Arial Sharon, can be prosecuted for his "personal responsibility" for the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Chatila.

Now, after not proving anything other than that he is a slanderer... let's watch him wrap himself up in a cloak of apparent reason...here goes....

Yes, I know the Taliban were a cruel bunch of bastards. They committed most of their massacres outside Mazar-i-Sharif in the late 1990s. They executed women in the Kabul football stadium. And yes, lets remember that 11 September was a crime against humanity.

But I have a problem with all this. George Bush says that "you are either for us or against us" in the war for civilisation against evil. Well, I'm sure not for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the brutal, cynical, lying "war of civilisation" that he has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Centre mass murder.

At this moment, I can't help remembering my dad. He was old enough to have fought in the First World War. In the third Battle of Arras. And as great age overwhelmed him near the end of the century, he raged against the waste and murder of the 1914-1918 war. When he died in 1992, I inherited the campaign medal of which he was once so proud, proof that he had survived a war he had come to hate and loathe and despise. On the back, it says: "The Great War for Civilisation." Maybe I should send it to George Bush.

Since his dad grew to loathe the great war...that's normal. If he liked the war earlier - he would be an exception to the rule.

His campaign medal sure does not pass courage to his son...who slanders others and is full of hatred for those who are charged with preserving peace and ensuring security for citizens.

If he has a much better way of catching terrorists - I'd love to hear it. But he does not. He can only rail away at people who risk their lives to protect his derriere.

The sad thing is that this piece gets printed at all.

SDAI-Tech1