7 May 2021 — The Electronic Intifada
Israeli police detain a Palestinian protester in Sheikh Jarrah on 4 May. – Ammar Awad Reuters
The state’s authorities said they were investigating the death of Said Yousef Muhammad Odeh, a Palestinian boy who was shot in the back by Israeli soldiers earlier this week.
5 May 2021 — Drone Wars
The Overseas Operations Act, which recently became law, aims to limit the exposure of members of the armed forces to prosecution for crimes committed in the course of armed conflict. Unsurprisingly its passage through Parliament was fraught with controversy. In addition, the Parliamentary debate surrounding the Act highlighted that government thinking around the use of armed drones continues to rely on problematic presumptions and tropes. In its response to questions raised in Parliament, the government has betrayed its underlying view that drone warfare is inherently lawful and clean.
1 October 2016 — FAIR
The editorial boards of the US’s four most influential newspapers joined President Barack Obama in opposition to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, a bill that makes suing Saudi Arabia for the 9/11 attacks markedly easier:
31 May 2014 — Dissident Voice
On April 15, 2014, when the story broke on the world that the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert program of assassination by remotely controlled drones is not distinct from the drone program of the U.S. Air Force as we had been told, I was on the “Sacred Peace Walk,” an event sponsored each spring by the Nevada Desert Experience, a 70 mile trek from Las Vegas to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Creech Air Force Base is along the way and we had already made plans for a protest there the next morning. While the CIA’s drone program is shrouded in secrecy, the Air Force supposedly has been using drones strictly as a weapon for waging war against combatants in recognized areas of conflict such as Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq, under a chain of command that is accountable to elected officials. Some who condemn the CIA’s assassinations by drones as illegal give a pass to or even laud the Air Force use of drones as a more restrained way to fight war.
13 May 2014 — The Guardian
This article is about the UK awarding ‘special mission’ status to Tzipi Livni, Israel’s justice minister, and thus a diplomatic immunity to protect her against prosecution ahead of a planned visit to the UK.
20 March 2014 — The Hampton Institute
Suggested by William Hathaway
“President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon…”– Malcolm X, December 1, 1963
9 August 2013 — Open Democracy
26 March, 2013 — Global Research
This month marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq, one of the most egregious expressions of naked power and imperial ambition since the Second World War.
21 November, 2012 — The People’s Record
European Parliament votes to protect WikiLeaks. In a landmark decision today the European Parliament initiated the drafting of legislation that would stop the arbitrary banking blockades against WikiLeaks and other organizations facing economic censorship. This is an important signal from the European lawmakers. It is a recognition of the seriousness of the precedents set in December 2010, still in force, when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and Bank of America launched a unilateral, extrajudicial banking blockade against donations to WikiLeaks.
29 February 2012
A fellow writer tells me that she feels overwhelmed by events and I feel the same way. An awful sense of deja vu that we have as much chance of stopping the march to total war as they had in the 1930s. Except that this time it will not be us citizens of Empire who are on the receiving end of Western industrial-scale murder and pillage. The world’s first colonial world war, with the haves pitted against the have-nots. As I have remarked before, without a non-capitalist alternative to not only reign in some of the ‘excesses’ of capitalism but also curtail its relentless expansion, the world is essentially defenceless.
21 December 2011 — CCR
This week, CCR and co-counsel filed briefs in our cases on behalf of dozens of Iraqis challenging private military contractor impunity for war crimes and torture at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq. Continue reading
21 December 2011
Well 2011 has been nothing if not eventful but frankly, in spite of all the #Occupy this and #Occupy that, it’s not been a good year for us progresssives or the planet. The Empire acts with increasing, not decreasing impunity, desperate now to try and keep ahead of events lest events take control of it.
22 August 2011 — Global Research
NATO attacks in Libya have escalated to unprecedented levels and mainstream news reports are rife with disinformation. Here’s what’s been falling through the cracks of corporate media this past week:
“War propaganda has entered a new phase, involving the coordinated action of satellite TV stations. CNN, France24, the BBC and Al Jazeera have become instruments of disinformation used to demonize governments and justify armed aggressions. These practices are illegal under international law and the impunity of the perpetrators must be stopped.” — Thierry Meyssan, Journalists who engage in war propaganda must be held accountable Continue reading
1 August, 2010 — PCHR Ref: 66/2010
PCHR and Hickman & Rose Oppose Proposed Changes to Universal Jurisdiction in the UK; Political Considerations Must Not Be Allowed to Triumph over the Rule of Law
On Thursday, 22 July 2010, UK Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced that the British government intends to give the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) the power to veto the issue of arrest warrants for universal jurisdiction offences in the UK. The proposal is the direct result of political pressure applied by the government of Israel, following the issue of warrants for the arrest of Doron Almog in 2005, and Tzipi Livni, in 2009. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and Hickman & Rose Solicitors (UK) have been involved in numerous universal jurisdiction cases, both in the UK and elsewhere, beginning with a case brought against Shaoul Mofaz in the UK in 2002.
The proposed change is a purely political move designed to block the arrest of war criminals, from ‘friendly countries’ in the UK. It is an effort intended to grant immunity under the veil of the law. The proposed change sends out the wrong message to perpetrators, and will lead to the UK being seen as a ‘safe haven’ for international criminals.
Currently, victims can act quickly and ask the court to issue a warrant for the arrest of a suspect. They must submit evidence that the suspect is present in, or intending to travel to, the UK. The court would only issue an arrest warrant if credible admissible evidence had been submitted which is to a very high threshold, capable of proving all elements of the offence, and the personal criminal liability of the suspect.
Ms. Livni, suspected of having committed war crimes in Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, and others, have alleged that the current system for arrest warrants is open to “cynical exploitation” by those wishing to make political points. However, this claim cannot be substantiated. The current system has not been abused and no single example has been put forward to show that British judges have failed in their duty to screen out baseless or poorly evidenced cases, when issuing arrest warrants.
In 1978, Lord Wilberforce stated that the right to bring private prosecutions is “a valuable constitutional safeguard against inertia or partiality on the part of authority”. Lord Diplock described this right as “a useful constitutional safeguard against capricious, corrupt or biased failure or refusal of those authorities to prosecute offenders against the criminal law.” These words are equally pertinent today and in this context.
The UK is subject to a duty to apply the criminal law uniformly: the proposed amendment could breach both that obligation, and the UK’s legal obligations arising from the ratification of, inter alia, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the UN Convention against Torture.
The rule of law must be respected and enforced equally across the board. As legal representatives of victims of international crimes, we expect the British Parliament to reject this attempt to promote the triumph of politics over the law and individuals’ fundamental human rights.
For more information on universal jurisdiction, see ‘The Principle and Practice of Universal Jurisdiction: PCHR’s work in the occupied Palestinian territory’ released by PCHR in 2010.
Anti-Empire Report, August 5, 2008
Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life
August 5, 2008
by William Blum
http://www.killinghope.org
Obama and the Empire
The New Yorker magazine in its July 14 issue ran a cover cartoon that achieved instant fame. It showed Barack Obama wearing Muslim garb in the Oval Office with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. Obama is delivering a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who has an Afro hairdo and an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. An American flag lies burning in the fireplace. The magazine says it’s all satire, a parody of the crazy right-wing fears, rumors, and scare tactics about Obama‘s past and ideology.
The cartoon makes fun of the idea that Barack and Michelle Obama are some kind of mixture of Black Panther, Islamist jihadist, and Marxist revolutionary. But how much more educational for the American public and the world it would be to make fun of the idea that Obama is even some kind of progressive.
1 August 2008
Book Review: International Justice and Impunity – The Case of the United States, edited by Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer and Diana G. Collier. Clarity Press, 2008.
Impunity: N. Nonliability, exemption, let-out, immunity, special treatment.
Impunity: Vb. Exempt, set apart, absolve, grant immunity, are just some of the descriptions my Roget’s Thesaurus lists for the word impunity.
Other descriptions listed by the Thesaurus are perhaps even more apt:
Owe no responsibility, be free from, have no liability, spare oneself the necessity, exempt oneself, excuse oneself, the list goes on…
“The American ambassador to the United Nations in the middle of the 1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has thus congratulated himself in his memoirs, for having rendered “totally ineffective, on the instructions of the State Department, all measures taken by the United Nations [with regard to the 40-plus UN resolutions on Palestine]”. — ‘Rudolph El-Kareh, The American Politic in the Middle East, Force, Impunity, Lawlessness.’ (p.64)
The New Dark Age 