Page 3 of 3 CHINA AND THE
US PART 8: Bush's bellicose policy on
N Korea By Henry C K Liu
other people in the administration are
saying, they're really not talking about a
negotiation; they're talking about a court
proceeding, a trial in which North Korea is the
defendant at the bar and, you know, the United
States is the judge, the jury and the executioner
all wrapped up into one and the verdict is already
in: they're bad guys."
In Iraq, this was
exactly what happened to Saddam Hussein, a
former head of a sovereign
state who had been captured as a prisoner of war
by US invasion forces, then tried for crimes
against humanity not by an international tribunal
according to the Geneva Conventions, but by a
biased tribunal, a special court operating outside
the normal judiciary of the US-installed puppet
regime that enjoys no unified national
recognition. Saddam was handed over by US
occupation authorities from his cell in a US
military detention facility on the morning of his
execution to a sectarian Iraqi authority and
promptly hanged within hours despite wide
condemnation worldwide, even by US allies, of the
procedure as a travesty of justice. The first
chief judge in the case, who had been dismissed
for trying to conduct a fair trial, declared the
execution by the Iraqi government illegal. The
video of the savage hanging, widely posted on the
Internet, confirmed the execution as a vile act of
sectarian vengeance, carried out under official US
sanction.
Caught up in the intense
emotions of the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks, the US Congress on October 2, 2002,
passed the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use
of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq to
grant President Bush authority to "use any means
necessary" against Iraq (which theoretically
included the nuclear option), based on Bush
administration classified testimony to Congress
and open statements to the public that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction, which
turned out to be incorrect if not outright
disinformation. Only 23 Democrat senators, led by
Robert Byrd of West Virginia and joined by Ted
Kennedy, out of 44 in the 100-member Senate voted
against the resolution. Hillary Clinton, junior
Democratic senator from New York, was not among
them.
Three years later, Senator Clinton,
now a soon-to-declare presidential candidate,
wrote in a November 29, 2005, "Letter to
Constituents on Iraq Policy" posted on her
website:
In October 2002, I voted for the
resolution to authorize the administration to
use force in Iraq. I voted for it on the basis
of the evidence presented by the administration,
assurances they gave that they would first seek
to resolve the issue of weapons of mass
destruction peacefully through United
Nations-sponsored inspections, and the argument
that the resolution was needed because Saddam
Hussein never did anything to comply with his
obligations that he was not forced to do. Their
assurances turned out to be empty ones, as the
administration refused repeated requests from
the UN inspectors to finish their work. And the
"evidence" of weapons of mass destruction and
links to al-Qaeda turned out to be false ... The
Bush administration short-circuited the UN
inspectors - the last line of defense against
the possibility that our intelligence was false.
The administration also abandoned securing a
larger international coalition, alienating many
of those who had joined us in Afghanistan ...
I take responsibility for my vote, and
I, along with a majority of Americans, expect
the president and his administration to take
responsibility for the false assurances, faulty
evidence and mismanagement of the
war.
Yet 23 of her colleagues in the
Senate and millions around the US and still more
around the world were not taken in by such "false
assurances". She could have asked her own husband,
the former president, who was in an authoritative
position to know the facts.
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