Targeting War Criminals

Not Bush, not Cheney, but war criminals nonetheless

When someone's small grandchildren are killed in a war it always seems especially tragic. And it happens every single day in every single war. It's horrifying and it's part of what drives me crazy about national leaders almost never facing war crimes tribunals. I was mortified that Qaddafi's 29-year old son Saif al-Arab, a non-combatant, and 3 pre-teen grandsons of Qaddafi's were killed in a NATO air strike aimed at taking out Qaddafi last week. But... better his family than anyone else's in Libya. All my life I've been a tremendous fan of regicide and like an anonymous editorialist in the Guardian this week, if for different reasons, I feel that Qaddafi is indeed a legitimate target. The author, "Alaa al-Ameri" (supposedly "a British-Libyan economist and writer") has a more twisted theory of why than I do.

Gaddafi is not a head of state. He is a warlord in control of a personal army that he has tasked with the mass killing and terrorising of Libyans for the crime of wishing to live as free human beings. There is no meaningful Libyan government structure or decision-making body besides Gaddafi himself and his sons.

Which logic or legal principle underlies the notion that while militia in the act of aggression against a civilian population may be attacked, the leader of that militia-- actively engaged in directing the violence-- is off limits? What claim to special rights and privileges can be made by a man who uses rape as a weapon of war? Which principle of international law would be eroded by his death?

...If Gaddafi has lost family members due to Nato bombing, there is only one man to blame – Gaddafi. He funds, arms and directs the horrific violence that his forces have inflicted on the Libyan people simply for desiring to be free. He could stop the violence today but chooses not to. Instead he uses even the death of his son as a tool to serve his own political interests.

Sounds like the "British-Libyan economist and writer" is penning some propaganda for David Cameron's government. I doubt Cameron would approve of my rationale for why Qaddafi is a legitimate target. All aggressive war makers should be, especially heads of countries. Let's try it out for 5 or 6 decades and see if it tamps down violence. Really... what do we have to lose?

Last week we took a look at Lu Chuan's soon-to-be-released (in the U.S.) film City Of Life And Death, about the massacre in/of Nanking by Japanese invaders in 1937. Bad enough that something like 50,000 women were systematically raped by Japanese soldiers-- some estimates say it was closer to 100,000-- but as many as 300,000 men, women and children were butchered, some for sport. Much like George W. Bush did at the onset of the unprovoked aggression against Iraq, "Emperor" Hirohito announced that the Imperial Army was not subject to war crimes laws. Although that didn't stand up after Japan was defeated, Hirohito was never brought to justice. And neither was the mastermind of one of the greatest war crimes in history, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who issued the order to kill all captives. In fact, Asaka was granted immunity by the victorious Americans because of his status as a member of the royal family (who the Americans hoped to use as conservative bulwarks against godless Communism).

This week, no one-- at least no one in the West-- is claiming Osama bin-Laden was due any kind of immunity from cold-blooded execution. He was not firing at the soldiers who entered his home on a kill mission" and he was killed, quite deliberately, while unarmed. I would have preferred a trial but I'm a huge advocate of the death penalty-- especially for war criminals.

Meanwhile, bin-Laden's senior commanders are said to be on the run in Pakistan. Is the ISI trying to shield them or some of them? Or will some be sacrificed to save the Pakistanis further embarrassment? There are at least a dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders the U.S. would like to dump into the sea next to bin-Laden.

1. Ayman al-Zawahri. Egyptian. Age 59-- Osama bin Laden's deputy and current operational commander of al-Qaeda, according to the United States State department. Went into hiding with Bin Laden during the US invasion of Afghanistan and managed to survive a US air strike that targeted him in a Pakistani tribal region in January 2006. There is a $25 million reward on his head.

2. Saif al-Adel. Egyptian. Age around 50-- Thought to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, even perhaps the organisation's military chief. He was thought to be in prison in Iran, but has now almost certainly been released and has returned to North Waziristan in Pakistan. There is a $5 million reward on his head.

3. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Kuwaiti. Age 45-- Al-Qaida spokesman and radical preacher. Detained in Iran in 2003 but released and allowed to leave the country in 2010, according to Kuwait media. Suspected of having rejoined Bin Laden in Pakistan and is still at large.

4. Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. Egyptian. Age late 40s--- Wanted for the 1998 series of bombings on US embassies in East Africa. Member of al-Qaeda's top council. According to US intelligence he fled Nairobi in 1998 and went to Pakistan, where he may remain at large. He may also be in Iran.

5. Adnan al-Shukri Juma. Saudi. 35-- A younger member of al-Qaeda, Shukri Juma may have risen up the ranks because of the loss of more senior members. He spent time living in the US and may have been behind a failed attempt on the New York subway system. He may be in charge of operations for North America and is thought to be in Waziristan.

6. Rashid Rauf. Dual British Pakistani citizenship. Age around 34-- Rauf is suspected of involvement in the failed attempt in 2006 to blow up aircraft leaving from London Heathrow with liquid explosives. He escaped from Pakistani custody in December 2007 and was reportedly killed by a US drone attack in Pakistan in November 2008. But his family have denied his death and some sources believe he remains at large.

7. Ilyas Kashmiri. Pakistani. Age 47-- Kashmiri is one of the most important figures rising up al-Qaeda's ranks. A one-eyed, red-bearded guerrilla warfare expert, he is thought to have masterminded some of the deadliest attacks in India and Pakistan. He is also the commander of Brigade 313, a unit that is sometimes described as al-Qaeda's Pakistani arm, sometimes as a special combat task force, and sometimes as an independent jihadi unit.

8. Hakimullah Mehsud. Pakistani. Age 32-- Hakimullah Mehsud is the leader of the Tehrik-I-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement, which has been described as having a symbiotic relationship with al-Qaeda by the US.

"TTP draws ideological guidance from al-Qaeda while al-Qaeda relies on the TTP for safe haven in the Pashtun areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border," said Daniel Benjamin, a US counterterrorism chief. An aggressive field commander, Mehsud was thought to be killed by a drone attack in January 2010, but subsequent videos proved he survived the attack.

9. Ghulam Mustafa. Pakistani. 40-- Very little has been reported of Mustafa since he was released by Pakistan in 2006. Before then he was thought to be al-Qaeda's chief in Pakistan. However, he was never formally charged or handed over to the US and has quietly disappeared from view. He may have left al-Qaeda, tainted by suspicion of co-operation with Pakistani intelligence.

10. Abu Yahya al-Libi. Libyan. Age 47-- A high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, Libi escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and is thought to have subsequently survived a US drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. He is considered to be "the scholar" of al-Qaeda and often takes on the role of a preacher. He has released a number of videotaped sermons.

11. Anas al-Liby (also known as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Raghie), Libyan. Age late 40s-- Charged by the US with involvement in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Has a $5 million reward on his head. Has worked as a computer specialist for al-Qaeda.

12. Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Nationality and age unknown--- the leader of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI, or the Movement of Islamic Holy War), is an alleged member of al-Qaeda who was released by Pakistan from custody last December. He was reported to have trained 3,500 operatives in Afghanistan shortly before the US invasion.

City Of Life And Death

Friday I went to a press screening for Lu Chuan's 2008 film, City of Life And Death, which is opening in NYC (May 11th) and L.A. (June 17th) after years of delay, and starkly depicts a snapshot, albeit an epic one, of the holocaust described in Iris Chang's classic book, The Rape of Nanking (1998). A big-- and surprise-- hit in China and Hong Kong two years ago, it's hard to imagine the movie will go beyond art houses in the U.S. So far it's scheduled to play in a dozen American cities, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Denver Atlanta, Honolulu, Boston, Minneapolis, St Louis, Sante Fe, Albuquerque... Generally, American film goers aren't interested in East Asia and aren't interested in 1937, which is where and when the film takes place. When I first wrote about the Rape of Nanking in 2007, there wasn't a single Digg.

The film is in Chinese, Japanese, English and German. It wasn't any kind of a hindrance. One of the earliest scenes is of victorious Japanese soldiers pulling down a statue of Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, in a scene that would be reminiscent to any American of American soldiers pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein once Baghdad had been captured. Thought through, it isn't a flattering comparison of course, but that's probably what Lu had in mind. For those not familiar with what went down in Nanking, then the capital of China, when Japan captured it in 1937, allow me to quote from the press kit:

"The Nanjing Massacre is a very special memory for every Chinese person," says City of Life and Death director, writer and executive producer Lu Chuan. Though born decades after the massacre, Lu Chuan was, like the rest of his countrymen, thoroughly indoctrinated in the official history of the 1937 crimes that clamed an estimated 300,000 victims, from boyhood on. "Every Chinese citizen knows that history," he says... The Second Sino-Japanese War, as Imperial Japan's pre-WWII assault on China is known, was the culmination of half a century of enmity between newly industrialized Japan and the fledging Republic of China. As the Imperial Army prepared to assault the Republic's capital Nanjing on December 9 of 1937, the mood amongst Japanese foot soldiers and commanders alike was vengeful. "The reason that the [10th Army] is advancing to Nanking quite rapidly," wrote a Japanese journalist embedded with the Imperial Army at the time, "is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish."

Emboldened by their swift victory on December 13, the Japanese occupation spiraled into a level of savagery at Nanjing that would claim an estimated 300,000 Chinese lives in just 6 weeks. The thousands of victorious, young, battle-weary Japanese soldiers had been raised and trained within the xenophobic social order of an empire that had never occupied a foreign capital. Emperor Hirohito had declared [much the way George W. Bush did more recently] that the Imperial Army was not subject to war crimes laws, and thousands of young Chinese men, all assumed to be Chinese soldiers, were rounded up and shot, burned alive, blown up with landmines, bayoneted or drowned in the Yangtze River.

Eyewitness accounts detailed daily acts of savagery and barbarism perpetrated by the Japanese on the rest of the city population. According to the New York Times' correspondent on the scene, "The killing of civilians was widespread. Some of the victims were aged men, women and children. Nearly every building was entered by Japanese soldiers, often under the eyes of their officers, and then men took whatever they wanted.

"After killing the Chinese soldiers who threw down their arms and surrendered, the Japanese combed the city for men in civilian garb who they suspected of being former soldiers. In one building in the refugee zone 400 men were seized. They were marched off, tied in batches of 50, between lines of riflemen and machine gunners, to the execution ground." A Japanese correspondent described massive execution lines, piles of burning corpses and a "contest" held between Japanese officers to see who could collect the most severed heads.

Gang rapes, abductions, lethal sexual assaults and dismemberment of Chinese men, women and children of nearly every age (some pregnant) were documented by foreign residents of Nanjing into 1938. American missionary Minnie Vautrin compiled a detailed diary of the civilian atrocities she witnessed during the massacre. "In my wrath, I wished I had the power to smite them for their dastardly work," she wrote of Nanjing's captors.

"How ashamed women of Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror."

History and human nature proves her wrong-- not about Japan or about women but about the impact of war on civilians back in the homeland. How ashamed were most Americans about similar atrocities in Vietnam? How ashamed are we about what our military is doing today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? The people there have been dehumanized by the mass media, just like the Chinese were in the Japanese media. Who cares about ridding the earth of vermin? And Lu told the story of Nanking from a more universal perspective than just bashing the Japanese. Maybe he'd listened to Donovan's Universal Soldier when he was growing up.

"In China," he said, we are educated to see one very basic and simple truth-- from the time that they're young, everyone in China is educated to hate the Japanese. Japanese troops were very brutal, so Japanese people are very brutal and we have to hate the Japanese, It's textbook, you know? They're not human beings; they raped women; they raped very young girls; they even raped their own women. But two years of research and writing some ideas changed in my heart. I found the basic truth that the massacre is not a special talent of the Japanese people. It's a talent of human beings, you know? All kinds of people kill all kinds of people. The devil is always in everyone's heart, so as human beings we need to be very careful. It's not just a tragedy for the Chinese killed in Nanjing, it's a tragedy for the Japanese soldiers who killed them. The Japanese are normal, ordinary people just like us. War is the thing that makes people transform into animals."

I guess this could be a good time to start talking about Republican insistence on American exceptionalism... but it's too ugly in light of the film. Here's the trailer:

RE-WRITING THE HISTORY OF NANKING-- IT CERTAINLY COULD HAPPEN HERE AND PROBABLY WILL

When I lived in Europe I couldn't afford the International Herald-Tribune, the ex-pat paper for Americans abroad put out by the NY Times and Washington Post but I often managed to get my hands on second-hand copies, especially when American tourists left them in the restaurant I worked in. These were pre-Internet times, of course, so getting even a semi-American paper-- it is published in Paris-- was a big deal to me. These days when I travel I never even glance at it. Today I did-- and I'm only in Montreal!-- because a headline caught my eye: 'No massacre in Nanking,' Japanese lawmakers say.

Do you remember the little discussion we had a couple months back about the need for national redemption in the form of facing up to what we allowed Bush and his cronies-- in the widest sense-- to get away with? Without a serious-- albeit difficult-- confrontation of what actually happened in the past 7 years, one day Republicans will be saying Abu Gharaib never happened and Bush never even stole one election, let alone two!

After World War II ended, the Japanese got away with murder-- unlike the Germans (primarily because of the Soviets who were adamant about their pound of flesh). But the Soviets were right. Germany is a real democracy. Japan is... God knows.

About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting Chinese claims that Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of people after seizing the Chinese city in 1937.

The members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party said there was no evidence to prove mass killings by Japanese soldiers in the captured Nationalist capital, then known as Nanking. They accused Beijing of using the alleged incident as a "political advertisement."

...Historians generally agree that the Japanese Army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women.

Wikipedia has the conventional wisdom the Japanese don't want to face up to. A few years ago I read Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking, which led me to look into the wealth of historical evidence the Japanese have done all they could to distort the truth of one of the most hideous atrocities on the 20th century.

Take a look at this little film on YouTube. Obviously the Japanese political elites won't:



That's why Nancy Pelosi, for all her political astuteness, is woefully wrong-- tragically wrong-- about not impeaching Bush and Cheney. America needs to not bury what we've done. And, don't be fooled-- we is not just Bush and Cheney. And now the Japanese militarists and fascists are our friends.