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TechnoratiTop judge: US and UK Acted as 'Vigilantes' in Iraq Invasion
Former senior law lord condemns 'serious violation of international law'
One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante".
![[A British soldier patrols the northern suburbs of the southern Iraqi city of Basra. One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante". (Photograph: Dave Clark/AFP/Getty images)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/britishsoldier1118.jpg "britishsoldier1118.jpg")
Lord
Bingham, in his first major speech since retiring as the senior law
lord, rejected the then attorney general's defence of the 2003 invasion
as fundamentally flawed.
Contradicting head-on Lord Goldsmith's advice that the invasion was lawful, Bingham stated: "It was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had." Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions "passes belief".
Governments were bound by international law as much as by their domestic laws, he said. "The current ministerial code," he added "binding on British ministers, requires them as an overarching duty to 'comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations'."
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats continue to press for an independent inquiry into the circumstances around the invasion. The government says an inquiry would be harmful while British troops are in Iraq. Ministers say most of the remaining 4,000 will leave by mid-2009.
Addressing the British Institute of International and Comparative Law last night, Bingham said: "If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK, and some other states was unauthorised by the security council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.
"For the effect of acting unilaterally was to undermine the foundation on which the post-1945 consensus had been constructed: the prohibition of force (save in self-defence, or perhaps, to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe) unless formally authorised by the nations of the world empowered to make collective decisions in the security council ..."
The moment a state treated the rules of international law as binding on others but not on itself, the compact on which the law rested was broken, Bingham argued. Quoting a comment made by a leading academic lawyer, he added: "It is, as has been said, 'the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante'."
Bingham said he had very recently provided an advance copy of his speech to Goldsmith and to Jack Straw, foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq. He told his audience he should make it plain they challenged his conclusions.
Both men emphasised that point last night by intervening to defend their views as consistent with those held at the time of the invasion. Goldsmith said in a statement: "I stand by my advice of March 2003 that it was legal for Britain to take military action in Iraq. I would not have given that advice if it were not genuinely my view. Lord Bingham is entitled to his own legal perspective five years after the event." Goldsmith defended what is known as the "revival argument" - namely that Saddam Hussein had failed to comply with previous UN resolutions which could now take effect. Goldsmith added that Tony Blair had told him it was his "unequivocal view" that Iraq was in breach of its UN obligations to give up weapons of mass destruction.
Straw said last night that he shared Goldsmith's view. He continued: "However controversial the view that military action was justified in international law it was our attorney general's view that it was lawful and that view was widely shared across the world."
Bingham also criticised the post-invasion record of Britain as "an occupying power in Iraq". It is "sullied by a number of incidents, most notably the shameful beating to death of Mr Baha Mousa [a hotel receptionist] in Basra [in 2003]", he said.
Such breaches of the law, however, were not the result of deliberate government policy and the rights of victims had been recognised, Bingham observed.
He contrasted that with the "unilateral decisions of the US government" on issues such as the detention conditions in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
After referring to mistreatment of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, Bingham added: "Particularly disturbing to proponents of the rule of law is the cynical lack of concern for international legality among some top officials in the Bush administration."
33 Comments so far
Show AllThis is a slow process, but as long as people like this continue to speak up and demand justice, we will bring the truth out into the open and people will have no choice but to acknowledge it.
http://www.ryanhartman.wordpress.com
It's another "well, duh" moment.
Bring America Back !!!! Well, praise be to Former Law Lord Bingham for this solid statement that the Bush Administration and the Blair Administration are war criminals in outright violation of International Law. !!!
****THIS is prime evidence and reason why NO Republican should be appointed or hold any position in the Obama Administration !!! Especially, Colin Powell, who sat outright before the UN Security Council and lied thru his teeth with the Bush party war line that Iraq had WMD's. NO to Robert Gates, NO to Chuck Hagel.
***And a great big NO to Hillary Clinton who voted FOR the IRAQ war !!!!
As an Enabler of BUSH War Crimes==she has NO credentials for becoming
Secretary of State, or any other Departmental Head. HER flawed support of BUSH\
handling of US foreign relations is stupifying, and Obama would do the world a
big favor to put Eliot Richardson at State, instead of FOX TV darling Hillary !
She is damaged goods and would only subvert Big Time, Obama's need to change world perspective on USA international affairs !!!! Let us NEVER forget that 9/11 was perpetrated on HER Senate Watch in NYC, her very own jurisdiction, her people went down in those WTC buildings that day==Has anyone ever heard Hillary Clinton critize the 9/11 Commission Report as the cover-up it is ????
***My fellow Progs, rhymes with Frogs, raise valid and serious concern over why
Law Lord Bingham has not been screaming this loud over past 7 years of Iraq ???
OUr Dennis Kucinich has been screaming get out of Iraq for 7 years, so we need to call out Law Lord Bingham for explanation why now ?? and what cave is he crawling out of 7 deadly years later ?????????
He couldn't speak out when he was the sitting Senior Law Lord. Like the Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, he could only deliver opinions on the constitutionality of laws when they come before the Law Lords sitting in the House of Lords (the UK supreme court). The invasion of Iraq was not an Act of Parliament and you can bet Bingham was NOT asked for an opinion on the legality of the war because it was a fair bet that anyone would say it was illegal--including him if so asked.
Bring America Back !!!! Which is the point at hand==our Kucinich does not need a prompt, he tells it every time he gets a chance==just like at the Dems Convention when he screamed 4 times: WAKE UP AMERICA !!!!
****but we Yanks know the Law Lord would not want to have tea & crumpets at the
politically incorrect time of day.....say whot Brits...bloody rude that !
His 1st major speech since his retirement?
Got to have a pair of brass ones to wait until retirement 5 1/2 years later to speak up about this.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies. " Groucho Marx
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
H. L. Mencken
The answer to your implied question is above--I mis-placed it.
that's nice, but it took him 6 years to figure this out???
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
I do not know how anyone can conclude that "The majority of world opinion agreed with the US View". This is blatantly false but I suppose that if the liars repeat it enough, people will believe it a fact.
The majority of countries in the world felt it an illegal invasion. Canada's Prime Minister was informed by legal counsel that to join in such an invasion would be a violation of International law.
The United States courted countries such as India, Canada various Arab states for troops and ALL refused. India stated clearly that it could only send troops with a security council resolution which was NOT forthcoming.
The United States and Britain backed down on trying to get such a resolution when it was determined that the SIGNIFICANT majority of the 15 member council would vote against it, this even after the US threatened and bullied many of those same nations.
France, Russia and China all indiocated that they did not give authrorization for the use of force. Th eUS and Britain then tried an end around citing resolutions from over a decade before.
It was an illegal invasion. The Bush and the Blair administration are war criminals.
What is especially vile about how the Bush adminstration acted is how they openly LIED to long standing allies in order to get them to join in on the crime. Apparently they felt that if they could lie other nations into the crime, then their own hands would be made cleaner.
They came to Canada with a powerpoint presentation in the lead up to the war which included all the proof they felt needed to justify an invasion. They tried to get other countries in on the "killing" like some low life street thug trying to round up some buddies to kick the head in on some vagrant.
It was chickenshit . CSIS officials who were lectured by the US brass informed the Canadian Governmnet in no uncertain terms that they felt the "proof" provided by the US was flimsy if not an outright fabrication and that if Canada joined in on the bloodfest, it would be a warcrime.
We were fortunate that Stephen Harper was in opposition at the time because THAT buffoon was all in favor of Canada joining in with the rest of the gangsters.
PK
Pat Murphy
Bless Lord Bingham, who has it dead right! Straw was disingenuous, to put it politely, when he states that the ". . attorney general's view [that it was lawful and that view] was widely shared across the world." Hogwash! It was not 'widely shared across the world'; the U.S. and Britain used great pressure to build the 'coalition of the willing', and most pulled out as the dreary occupation of Iraq went on. Countless public opinion polls all around the world have found that up to 70% and 80% of the world's people disapproved of the invasion and felt it was wrong.
Lawyers can, if they so wish, say the law is anything they want it to be. If lawyers tell you that 2 + 2 = 5 and all their cronies nod and say uh huh and higher courts uphold it, then 2 + 2 = 5. That is the "logic" of the invasion and occupation of Iraq according to the closet throatstickers of the Bush and Blair regimes.
From what I've seen, everything the Nazis did was legal under then current German law.
Lord Bingham is too late. The illegal war in Iraq will go on for years to come, regardless of what President-Elect Obama says.
And don't expect anyone of the warmongers to be brought to trial. They are well protected by the cabal who instigated this atrocity.
To me, change is not reducing the number of troops in Iraq just to send them over to Afganistan. Change means bringing troops home.
At this point, Lord Bingham's remarks are irrelevant.
"Straw said last night that he shared Goldsmith's view. He continued: "However controversial the view that military action was justified in international law it was our attorney general's view that it was lawful and that view was widely shared across the world.""
Specious logic. Law is not intended to be interpreted by majority (or minority) rule. By this "logic", if the majority says murder is legal, it's time to start killing people you don't like, just because you don't like them.
Considering the fact that the UN mandates were used as an excuse to attack a defenseless country, the fact of the UN NOT approving the attack would seem to be more to the point. It doesn't matter who thought this was justified, only the UN had the authority to call this one. However, Lord High Torturer Bushemada didn't need no damn UN to kill people...he had total control of the US Military, and he wanted to use that big gun. And he did. And many many hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders (men, women, children, babies and fetus's) were murdered as a result.
The master race mentality of the US seems to be one of the justifications, i.e. the US is automatically correct and "good" in all things, and thus this cannot, by definition, be wrong...because the master race always does the right thing, and is always the champion of human rights even when it's blatantly eviscerating them. Rule of law? What law? The master race says what is law and what is not, and has only contempt for the UN, unless it's involved with self-interest. If the UN is saying what we want them to say, they're our friends, but the moment they don't, they're irrelevant. This is all such shameless sophistry.
If these things had been done by any other than the biggest bully nation in the world, there would be hell to pay. If Russia had decided to go after Saddam, in violation of UN mandates, and overthrown Iraq, do you think the US would have sat back and let it happen? How bout if Russia decided to overthrow Canada? Or Mexico? The US is a nation of hypocrites, and it's government an entrenched, deeply criminal institution. And the next administration will differ from the current one only in so much as it will be more sophisticated in it's criminal enterprises. The entrenched criminality goes far too deep to be challenged by ANY new President.
War crimes tribunals need to be started. It is up to the International Court to try all of the war criminals in absentia if necessary, or in the docket if possible.
lord_buckley is right. The Iraqis will need to try the US and UK criminals seeing how Nancy Pelosi gave the Bush Regime a license to steal and murder with no expiration date.
It is the dubious distinction of my home state of Montana to have been the birthplace of American vigilantism. Although preceded by spates of popular lynchings in other locales, the Vigilance Committee of Bannack and Alder Gulch in 1864 was unprecedented in scope and deadly effect (57 victims). This purging of undesirables and political rivals constituted the nascent structures of power and commerce in the new territories. The names of the ancestors of these yahoos still adorn Montana's streets, schools and public buildings, and as founders of the state historical society they got to tell the story to suit themselves.
I offer this link http://www.voxclamantis.com/pages/vigil.html to an exchange I had with a friend last summer on the subject of vigilantism and the obvious connection between the vigilante mind set and the Bush administration.
Wasn't Montana also the home of Sheriff (or was it Marshall?) Plum?
Henry Plummer, the "outlaw sheriff, lynched on a freezing night in January 1864 by feral Masons. By all credible accounts he was innocent of the crimes charged against him. Due process at the time consisted of arrest, a short hike to the nearest horizontal beam, and summary execution.
And King Herod feared John was a Prophet. So you mean in today's world there are Leaders of Nations who aren't anything more than criminally insane? Go figure. Time flys when your having fun.
After the 9-11 mass murder, the Taliban said they would turn bin Laden over if he were tried in an independent, third party country. Bush refused. He, Cheney Rumsfeld, et al then murdered one million+ people in Iraq. Maybe we should make sure it is the Iraqis who put these people on trial.
'Vigilantes' that wanted to remake the Iraqi flag in Israeli blue and divert all their water to Israel.
The troops that inflicted the cruelty of Abu Ghraib were carefully trained by the IDF.
Who are these 'vigilanties' that control U.S. and U.K. foreign policy?
Vigilantes? No, vigilantes take the law into their own hands to redress a legitimate injustice. What the U.S. and U.K. did is more akin to a home invasion.
Dave
http://daveeriqat.wordpress.com/
It was an attempted armed robbery and the members of the Iraqi resistance made up the vigilante force trying to stop it in the absence of a legitimate Iraqi government or an international police force. Now the Iraqi people are being held hostage until the demands of the robbers are met, particularly the demands that agreements are made, for the benefit of the masters of the robbers, with regard to profit-sharing of the oil revenue.
The constant refrain is that "It's all about oil." Well about oil revenue of course, but not only.
It wasn't just the oil revenue the US thugs were after, and it wasn't just the Bush thugs.
Lying abed in a hospital in November of 1998 I dully watched the babbling on CNN but perked up wide-eyed and angry when I heard the head of the CIA in Iraq state to the CNN talking head that the sanctions in Iraq wouldn't end until Iraq agreed to free trade.
That's right: we were holding Iraq hostage and killing their kids at the rate of 5,000 a month (according to the UN) until the Bath government, regardless of who was in power, agreed to the free trade that would let the US rape the nation of its advanced social welfare structure and exploit both the people and their resources - all their resources - just like free trade has done for the US elsewhere in the world.
Most of the thugs in Congress at that time are still there. All of the people who buy our politicians are still around and most have even more money to buy votes. The US doesn't merely need a change of faces in government, it needs a completely new system of government. The government won't change itself, it serves those who own it very well just as it is. Only the people can change the system. The question is will the masses rise from their apathy and take over from their moneyed masters.
I can agree with that. As I wrote, the agreements with regard to oil were particularly important, but, as you argue, the armed robbers want it all. This is of course consistent with Naomi Klein's thesis in "The Shock Doctrine," and a similar approach can be seen with respect to Iran.
Tony Blair is like a sucker fish who latches on to the back of a shark for a free ride. The shark in this case was George Wanker Bush. And the free ride to Glory and the vapors of British imperialism turned out to be anything but. Haven't heard much from Mr. Blair lately. Did Bush eat him for lunch?
Tony Blair jumped ship from the British Labour party before they had chance to throw him overboard and has got himself a position with the UN to bring peace to the Middle East. Anyone who doesn't see the irony of that is brain dead anyway, but Blair also happens to be a devout Catholic (from whom, god save us!) whose (Catholic's) attitude to other religions anyway (particularly Muslims), in spite of Obergruppensfuehrer Ratzinger's latest foray, is hardly what I would call tolerant.
Oh, by the way Lord Bingham, nice comments. Just as a matter of interest, where were you 5 or 6 years ago when you might just, at a stretch, have been able to make a difference?
'Straw said last night that he shared Goldsmith's view. He continued: "However controversial the view that military action was justified in international law it was our attorney general's view that it was lawful and that view was widely shared across the world."'
Across the world? Did he mean that monkey in the White House? Or the general consensus of the people of the planet? First, legality or otherwise is actually a point of law, not popular opinion, and secondly, from where I stood, popular opinion was totally opposed to it, so that hardly makes it widely shared (unless he meant geographically, rather than numerically).
"Such breaches of the law [beating a hotel receptionist to death], however, were not the result of deliberate government policy and the rights of victims had been recognised, Bingham observed."
Oh, well that's alright then, so long as their rights have been recognised. (/sarcasm)
"Oh, by the way Lord Bingham, nice comments. Just as a matter of interest, where were you 5 or 6 years ago when you might just, at a stretch, have been able to make a difference?"
From the article "Lord Bingham, in his first major speech since retiring as the senior law lord..."
The law Lords within the British House of Lords perform the same function as the US Supreme Court. So a comment by Lord Bingham on government policy would have been essentially the same as William Rehnquist commenting upon the Bush administration's policy; something that does not occur with the partition of the US government into its 3 branches.
War, or in this case an illegal invasion, is hardly Government Policy. I would have thought that, particularly as a law Lord, the rule of law might have meant something to him, but I guess the same rules apply. Namely, it's OK to kill a million people somewhere else, but we musn't go saying things that disagree with and might embarrass the idiot views of those in power.
Lord Bingham is absolutely correct in his candid assessment of the illegality of the US/British decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein under international law in effect in the spring of 2003.
The revived stubborn insistence by former attorney general Goldsmith and Jack Straw that the invasion was legally justified by the Baath regime's refusal to abide by previous "UN resolutions to give up weapons of mass destruction" blithely skips past and ignores the historical significance of the Downing Street memos: during the summer of 2002, top British intelligence and foreign policy officials were personally informed in highly classified briefing sessions in Washington that the Bush regime had decided to invade Iraq (preferably before the end of the year), and US "intelligence was being fixed around the policy" decision to launch an aggressive war of choice. Both Mr. Goldsmith and Mr. Straw personally knew the contents of Dearlove's now historically infamous memos.
Sure, the Brits (and Bush/Cheney for that matter) may well have genuinely believed that when the dust settled, their military forces would find some weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had clandestinely squirreled away from the UN inspectors. That is not the point.
The point is that both the Bush and Blair governments were fully aware that they were flat out lying with their public propaganda claims that their respective intelligence agencies possessed actual, credible real-world evidence that proved Saddam in fact had hidden WMD, weapons that posed an imminent threat.
They lied. Thousands died.
Just like there's a difference between being a world policeman and a world vigilante, there's also a difference between pretending you have a good faith belief that you are acting lawfully, and subjectively knowing full well that you're lying while you barrel on ahead.
It's the difference between shooting a nighttime intruder in defense of your hearth and home, as opposed to shooting your neighbor deliberately and pretending you mistook him for a burglar. Just because it's a plausible cover story doesn't make it legal.
Bill from Saginaw
Bushwacker and the rest of his criminals have murdered over 4000 of our brave and patriotic soldiers ( not to mention who knows how many Iraqi's ) and the American people should not rest until they are all behind bars, pardons or no pardons; otherwise, America cannot call itself a Democracy ruled by law.
I think it is well known that the number is in the upper hundreds of thousands of dead, possibly over a million dead Iraqi people by now. In Viet Nam more than two million were dead before the USA finally quit the place at the fall of Saigon.
White Rose,
Re: S.E. Asia War Dead, 1958-1975
Former Secretary of Defense(sic) Robert McNamara speaking to the camera in the film "The Fog of War" admitted to 3.4 Million Vietnamese killed between 1958 and 1975, the period of time that the U.S. was illegally engaged in a war of conquest in that nation. You may add to that total the over 2 million Cambodians who died in the Killing Fields and related causes due to American destabilization of that nation. Add in a few hundred thousand more war-related deaths in Laos and we can be reasonably assured that the low end of the tally of unnecessary deaths caused by American imperialism in South East Asia in a 17 year period is over 6 Million killed. Not including the 58,000 American service personnel who lost their lives on an immoral imperialist adventure.
Keep in mind that up until that lying son-of-a-bitch Lyndon Johnson conned the nation with his fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin fantasies, the toll had been far less than one million total deaths as of August, 1964. Never underestimate the damage that a lying politician can do to innocent victims. I'm already dreading the history that will be written of Barack Obama's reign of terror. What in the world is this man thinking that he needs to fight "the War on Terror" in the Stans? The only enemies he faces are in the other wing of the Corporate Party he now leads. And the only threat he faces is electoral obsolescence in four years. For this Obama proposes the slaughter of another million innocent people? I'm prepared to impeach the bastard already. [wink]