sources of contemporary genocide

1 WHEN THE WAR ON TERROR BECOMES GENOCIDE (2010)

The Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide stresses the prevention of genocide more than prescribing its exact manner of punishment. Genocide does not have to be committed for the Convention to have effect. By defining genocide it seeks to avert agendas which will confirm the crime. Physical manifestations of genocide are preceded by psychological preparation and the resulting psychological damage to entire victim groups. There is no way not to apply this awareness to current pressures on Islamic communities in North America, so this is an obvious and rather late notation of a genocide warning for Islamic peoples in the U.S. and in Canada, late in that one could sense the program over twenty years ago without knowing the scope of its intentions. The threat of whole or partial destruction of this religious group is exacerbated by Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people, bombing of civilian Lebanon, invasion of Gaza, which placed essentially Islamic civilian populations without human value, in a manner politically acceptable to U.S. and Canadian governments. The heavy media campaign and foreign policy agenda targeting Muslim fundamentalism opened with the 1988 publication of Salmon Rushdie's Satanic Verses. The book became a global event as a bestseller. It teased portions of Islam with enough disrespect to provoke extreme reactions. Used tactically, it enlisted the West's entire intellectual media establishments in defense of Rushdie's freedom of expression and his life. It was as though social engineers had found a flaw line to sever the common ground of reason which allowed populations of religious difference to coexist. Western Civilization's attack on Islamic fundamentalism extended to the religion as a whole. The 1990-91 Gulf War, the initial crime in what has become a genocide of the Iraqi people, followed, and it is difficult to understand the Viking-Penguin campaign for Satanic Verses apart from its uses as a psywar program preparing a global public for massive bombings of Muslim civilians. The difficulty that remains is, the program is no longer cultural warfare or specific wars for corporate profit, but relentlessly proceeds with a process that historically leads to attempted genocide of the group. It would be a strange bent of thinking to expect the destruction of Muslim peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries slated for takeover by U.S. expansionism, not to devolve on North American Muslims as well. Because there is evidence of further US. expansion (Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Somalia) exclusively against Muslim peoples, there is no way to avoid placing a genocide warning for Islamic peoples in the United States. Some current notes are symptomatic of where we all find ourselves in 2010.

On February 3rd, 2010, in a New York City Court, a Muslim woman doctor was convicted of two attempted murders and armed assault. There were no victims, no wounded except for the woman doctor who was shot by U.S. forces while she was held in detention under armed guard. There was no valid evidence of the bullets she was said to have fired from a rifle in a small room. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT graduate and mother of three believes two of her children dead after her disappearance for five years and detention by Pakistani and U.S officials (see enforced disappearances). Amid reasonable doubt, the obvious injustices of the verdict suggest a New York City jury pool terrorized and propagandized by the war on terror. U.S. military credibility remains problematic. In the Omar Khadr case the prisoner may have been charged to cover a war crime against him by the aggressor forces. During a U.S. forces action in Afghanistan, Canadian Omar Khadr, was shot in the back while severely wounded, then tortured, and subsequently charged with murder. Three Muslim detainees at Guantanamo, initially declared suicides were apparently executed in torture sessions. Etc. The outrage to justice in each case, intentionally avoided by government, becomes a psychological warfare threat against all people.¹

Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah was reported gunned down after firing on officers as the FBI raided a Dearborn warehouse (FBI kills leader of radical Muslims; 12 charged, Ben Schmitt, Niraj Warikoo, Robin Erb, Oct. 26, 2009, Pan-African News Wire), while the autopsy reveals he was shot in the back and genitals, receiving 20 to 21 gunshots in all. The chief medical examiner told reporters his investigator found the body handcuffed. There is possible evidence of wounding by a dog. The imam's mosque hosted mostly American converts to Islam; several news stories mention a community affinity with Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, deeply religious and provably persecuted, currently held in solitary confinement at a maximum security facility in Colorado.²

There is no retraction of a government policy to grossly abuse Muslim suspects and prisoners within the U.S.A. common theme to many of the cases is the attempt to destroy the detainee's self-respect and reason.

Guantanamo prison camp remains open and those responsible for breaking Geneva Conventions, unprosecuted.³

In Canada the War on Terror initially provoked police raids on Muslim families, targeting and entrapment of the young, an illegal application of Canadian Security Certificates against five Muslim men without adequate evidence, and Canadian officials breaking Canadian and international law to comply with U.S. policies. Basic human rights of some Muslim Canadians had to be defended by the Supreme Court. Government policy was bent to support criminal actions of Israel during flagrant violations of international law. A genocide warning.

Religion News Service reports that although there is little prejudice against other religious minorities in the U.S. nearly half of Americans admit to having negative feelings about Islam.⁴

The laws against torture were broken by the Bush administration, and contravene the U.S. military code of justice and field manual. Overt exception to its own and humanity's laws were made by the Bush administration specifically to deal with Muslims. Previously the torture taught by the School of the Americas and practiced by U.S. client governments in Central and South America was with U.S. participation, covert. The public humiliation of Muslim suspects, by torture, by lack of rights, by enforced helplessness, by lack of redress, becomes a destruction of the individuals but also of their families. Because U.S. courts have not stopped it, and seem helpless to bring under law U.S. secret detention and torture sites throughout the world, a necessary portion of law safeguarding humanity is not functioning. U.S. society proceeds under law but having sacrificed a group of Muslims, denied common humanity by torture. Again and again the victims are found to be innocent of any crime. Conclusion: they were allowed to be tortured because of their faith. Where does this process once it has started, end?

Wars against the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan are proving to be genocide in their effects on the people. Despite increasing suppression of news concerning the effects of depleted uranium the destruction of civilian populations and cultures are terrible enough to show intention by the aggressors, and justify prosecution of administration officials pursuing either war. The Convention on Genocide has adequate legal standing within the U.S. for the law to be applied. It is not being applied.

Muslim charities in the US. have been targeted and largely closed. For an example see the case of Dr. Rafil Dhafir a humanitarian Muslim doctor who is in prison for showing compassion to Muslims.

There is a pattern of discrimination against Islam which can't be explained by the supposed faith of those accused in the World Trade Center destruction. Many people understand the September 11th catastrophe as a 'false flag' operation. While there aren't attempts to physically harm entire Muslim communities there is evidence of a campaign to psychologically imbalance, terrorize and impair and control the functioning of an entire religious group. There's evidence of extreme degradation and humiliation of Muslim detainees within the U.S.. The very high profile cases of torture at Guantanamo, at Bagram, at secret facilities, with token prosecution of the torturers and without redress for the victims, has as effect a public dehumanization of Muslim peoples. Torture is a profound symptom of dehumanization and if allowed, puts others of the victim group at risk. Then it puts us all at risk.

Historically this inevitably leads to greater violations of human rights. The U.S. government was able to launch criminal wars of aggression against civilian populations and infrastructures of Afghanistan and Iraq. Profiled and threatened Islamic peoples in North America are under pressure to show their loyalty to the aggressors, and lack the freedom to protest crimes against foreign Muslim populations, or defend themselves against the outrageous. Islamic communities are psychologically at the mercy of the U.S. government's agenda. While the physical appearance of genocide is currently avoided within North America, there's a clear threat against an entire group to assure cooperation with criminal foreign policies. The false equation of Islamic faith with terrorism (and this rises from the guilt of killing hundreds of thousands of Islamic civilians), the clarity of injustices without accountability or redress, the relentlessness of a propaganda which denies human rights to its victims, are establishing a pattern which history recognizes as a crime.

2 DESTROYING THE SAVANNAH RIVER

U.S. Supports New Nuclear Reactors in Georgia 

- The New York Times, Feb. 16, 2010

The Savannah River forms the border between South Carolina and Georgia.

In South Carolina, Friends of the Earth is challenging at State Supreme Court the federal loan guarantee attempt to expand the nuclear industry. South Carolina Public Service approved a plan for two additional nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer nuclear plant site near Columbia and about a hundred miles from the South Carolina Savannah River Site. Among Friends of the Earth objections: costs of new nuclear projects will be tacked on to electric bills; the loan-guarantee mechanism forces U.S. taxpayers to underwrite the projects' corporate investors and hides fiscal account-ability. The new reactors (AP- 1000s) are to be supplied by Westinghouse (Toshiba owned ~ Japan); the Wall Street Journal notes four AP1000's are being built by the Chinese, with the design not yet approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission due to uneasiness about the reactor's ability to withstand earthquakes. Other reactors considered for loan guarantees contingent on NRC licenses, are in Maryland (Unistar, Calvert Cliffs); Texas (2 at NRG's South Texas Project), and the two new Georgia reactors as announced by the U.S.

President. Meanwhile South Carolina's Duke Energy has applied to build 2 new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors for its William States Lee Site II, Cherokee County. In early February Duke noted excessive tritium levels in two of the monitoring wells at its Oconee Nuclear Station, a three reactor station at the headwaters of the Savannah River. Oconee's forty year licenses have been renewed another twenty years.

The watershed of the Savannah River is already at severe risk through contamination by the U.S. owned Savannah River Site, Barnwell County on the South Carolina side of the river. The Gerald and Maas website, nightslantern.ca, on its environment page December 17th, noted U.S. Department of Energy plans for two new plants to process weapons grade plutonium at the Savannah River Site. Production of MOX fuels from weapons grade plutonium increases risk of alpha particle radiation through large amounts of liquid waste. The U.S. has reclassified drinking water standards: residual high-level waste is renamed incidental waste multiplying by a hundred the risk of alpha radiation in drinking water. Savannah River Site facilities started in the 1950's produced 40% of the U.S. nuclear warheads arsenal; the Site is increasingly used for nuclear waste storage after the most recent 1.6 billion dollar contamination reduction operation; nightslantern.ca noted a nuclear waste warning for the Savannah River watershed, March 24, 2008, due to extended 'temporary' storage of nuclear waste. Utah recently refused two new trainloads of nuclear waste from the facility. Barnwell County also receives low level radioactive waste from eight Southern states in the Southeast Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Compact. An expanding U.S. nuclear program has no humane answer to the nuclear waste storage problem. This strongly suggests terminal contamination of some portion of the land mass; nightslantern.ca continues to note an early warning for ecocide in Canada and particularly northern Ontario currently being prepared for nuclear storage by Canadian government information programs targeting First Nations peoples of the area. Envisioning the increased use of local nuclear facilities for long term storage of radioactive wastes, the Attorney General of South Carolina has stated plans to take the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to court.

On the Georgia side, threatening the Savannah River watershed with finality, the Obama administration has approved a loan guarantee for Southern Company's two new nuclear plants to accompany Southern's two reactors at its Vogtle Plant Site in Burke County (25 miles downriver from Augusta). Reuters notes a division of Southern runs the plants for - Georgia Power (another division of Southern), Oglethorpe Power, Georgia's Municipal Electrical Authority, among less heavily invested partners. In Georgia electric bills carry costs of the current energy projects. The Savannah River already carries a terrible overload of nuclear facilities yet supplies drinking water for the City of Savannah (Wikipedia demographics: 57.08% African American). Georgia's Environmental Protection Division's Environmental Radiation Surveillance Report 2000 - 2002 (subsequent information is not available - the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew funding for Georgia's radiation monitoring of the U.S. owned Savannah River Site) revealed excessive levels of radiation in fish, animals, milk, vegetation and fauna, drinking water, and air samples, all along the river.

A historical note on the Savannah River watershed: history reveals a region currently at risk where people have been sacrificed to economic interest since the 16th century. In 1540 the Spaniard Hernando deSoto reached what is now Augusta Georgia. Spain's claim to the area lasted about a century. Spanish called the Savannah river, Rio Dulce. Paleo-Indian remains and artifacts in the area trace back to 12,000 B.C. or earlier. At deSoto's incursion the first peoples were the Apalache, mound builders from the Mississippian culture, muskogean-speaking and to the east, called Coosa. DeSoto's account shows native community patterns similar to an early Icelandic account, c.1000 AD, carried in the Bjorn Asbrandson saga. The mound building culture disappeared about 1560. Portions may have survived as fragmented smaller southern tribes of the Creek confederacy. First Nations people called the river Isondega. When the French traded in the area - Jean Ribault named the river La Grande. With the founding of Charleston South Carolina about 1670, the English colonists (Carolinians) worked the Indian trade aggressively. The Indian trade was for animal skins and in return for guns, Indians as slaves, often exported to Caribbean Island plantations. Guns and the commercialization of slavery were the first formative European cultural contributions to the region. The Westo tribe of Indians pushed from the north by Iroquois (with Dutch arms) settled in the Savannah river area from 1600 to 1680, and were used by the English to fight the Spanish, allowing points north of the Savannah (called the Westobou river for a while) to develop an English based culture. The colonists double-crossed the Westos for control of the Indian slave and deerskin trade: in 1680 the Savanna (Shawnee / Algonquin also from the north) were set against the Westos and won the river's current name. At English founding of Savannah Georgia in 1733, a peace was made with Indian tribes who controlled the interior of Georgia and the 18th century witnessed a conflict of basically English and usually Creek (including Appalachias) cultures. French Huguenot influx into Charleston was absorbed by the English. To note: early fragmentation of the mound-building culture into place and river-named tribes allowed some portions of the primary culture to make peace with European incursions / colonization but piecemeal, while other portions made war. As Georgia made peace with the Indians, Indian wars continued in the Carolinas. On the Carolina side of the river the Yamassee revolt of 1715 was a war against the English as well as a gathered First Nations rebellion against the selling of their peoples. Europeans encouraged classification and fragmentation of tribes to set one group against another and legitimize through treaties, the takeover of hunting, trading, land and human rights. There isn't much new to say of English Colonial controls. The commercial slave trade of Africans is well known and documented. The ownership of people, their lives and their deaths, was slow to be considered a crime, with its parallel to today as the fate of the region's people and generations rests with a nuclear industry. The context of white slavery for a majority of early immigrants is less well-known and remains essentially suppressed. The coining of individual liberty for economic units of indentured servitude extended from the slavery of indenture to all in poverty. Indenture maintained the principle that people could be bought and sold. Manifests of the ships from England note the wealthy, tradespeople, convicts under sentences of indenture, and indentured servants who were effectively without rights until their terms of indebtedness were complete. American control after a war for Independence, transferred use of the land from one wealthy European group to another in North America. It did not free slaves, black, white or Indian. Eurocentrically it did not break the economically imposed slavery of the poor who sold themselves or were sold or sentenced into slavery. The richness of Colonial and American history finds its way back to initial purposes of colonization, coining the land for profit to a few, requiring some form of slavery for others. Shared cultural and economic patterns of slavery prepared the region's people for continuing an unacceptable injustice. Poverty was enforced by the region's defeat in the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction. Black slaves were free until they were forced back into a slavery of common poverty. A racism quite apart from the commonality of servants and slaves, was encouraged in the post Civil War South, setting the poor against each other. When maximum profits necessary to colonization could no longer be taken from the region it was used as a non-unionized low wage labor pool by government / northern capital, and for soldiers, where one of the largest influxes of investment became in the 20th century... the nuclear industry. Six of the seven new plants under consideration for NRC loan guarantee approval are in former slave states, each with a history of accepting subjugation.

What a nuclear overload of the Savannah River means to all the region's people is that in less than 300 years since the founding of Savannah and Augusta, the entire environment (and all creatures within) is now risked to terminal use.

The Savannah River watershed is simply one example of a region at risk and where the people are historically prepared to accept eventual loss of their future.

To the credit of Vermont, on February 24th the State Legislature successfully voted to shut down Vermont Yankee nuclear plant which has been leaking tritium, endangering the Connecticut River. After forty years of use the plant license will not be renewed. Nuclear consultant Arnie Gunderson, who has previously found the Nuclear Regulatory Commission susceptible to payoffs, was able to reveal the company's purposeful misrepresentation of facts about the leak.

But in New York on the Hudson, the nuclear plant at Indian Point, run by the same company as Vermont Yankee (Entergy), is up for review this Spring. Indian Point is about 24 miles north of NYC on the river. Two of its three reactors (Unit 2 -1974, Unit 3 - 1976) remain in operation. Unit 1 had to be shut down in 1974. The national cancer rate in the area around Indian Point is 66% higher than the national average. The rate of hypothyroidism in newborns is 109.3% higher in Westchester County on the plant side of the river, and 115% higher in Rockland County on the other side (Newborn Hypothyroidism Near the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, Joseph Mangano, Nov. 25, 2009, Radiation and Public Health Project). Despite aging and a history of events its operating license application is for another twenty years. The Indian Point location amidst a massive population base clarifies the differing interests of its investors and the people.

While the dangers of conventional nuclear weapons are well known, military uses of depleted uranium clarify the risks of radiation exposure from low level radioactive waste in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Current information on this area of concern is increasingly suppressed.⁵

3 CAPITAL PUNISHMENT WITHOUT A TRIAL

 You delight in laying down laws

Yet you delight more in breaking them

Khalil Gibran

First

The CIA Hit List is a media term for selected Muslim men to be murdered as threats to the United States. As President, Bush used the phrase for his list of terrorist suspects when the policy was first made public mid- December 2002. Names on the hit list surface, then recede so it is hard to be sure who is current.⁶

The Bush announcement, aware of prohibitions against assassinations in the executive orders of former presidents, designated the suspects as enemy combatants to avoid a direct confrontation with the laws of war (LOW) aka laws of armed conflicts (LOAC), which are binding on the U.S..⁷ Media reports of Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, in testimony to the House Intelligence Committee February 3, 2010, make no mention of enemy combatants when he reserves the right to include American citizens as targets for murder.⁸ Then on April 6, 2010 a spokesman for the intelligence community announced that Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Muslim cleric and American citizen is added to the CIA hit list.⁹ The imam is known for his statements of faith on the internet. Because he is an American citizen Presidential approval was required for the death command. But more importantly, al- Aulaqi is a civilian.

To quote the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, signed and ratified by the U.S. and now part of the Laws of War:¹⁰

In countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes in accordance with the law in force at the time of the commission of the crime and not contrary to the provisions of the present Covenant and to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This penalty can only be carried out pursuant to a final judgment rendered by a competent court.

When deprivation of life constitutes the crime of genocide, it is understood that nothing in this article shall authorize any State Party to the present Covenant to derogate in any way from any obligation assumed under the provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. (ICCPR, Part III Article 6, #2, & 3).

Assassination of anyone is expressly forbidden in the Laws of War (Law of Land Warfare, Section 2, #31). Because this addresses State policies so clearly, both Presidents Ford and Reagan issued executive orders forbidding assassination. President Reagan's Executive Order 12333 (Dec. 4, 1981) states: "Prohibition on Assassination. No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination (Section 2.11). Indirect participation is forbidden as well" (Section 2.12).¹¹ An attempt to counter the Executive order was proposed through legislation (H.R. 19: Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001) which failed and again in 2003 which failed. This order remains in effect. As customary law it can't be superseded as law for executive convenience. Germany's Third Reich, for example, evolved convenient laws to strip Jews of the right to own property or work. At liberation those laws were recognized as simply tactics of the genocide.

It is the declared policy of the Department of Defense to comply with the law of war.

Anwar al-Aulaqi

Al-Aulaqi is a devout Muslim, born in and educated in the U.S.. He and his father, a former Minister of Agriculture in Yemen, say he isn't connected to al-Qaeda. Imam successively of three mosques in the U.S. he was arrested by the FBI in 2006 and released after they found no ties to al-Qaeda. He was on the Army's targeted list and target of a Yemeni / U.S. intelligence air strike on the house where he was supposed to be, killing thirty people.¹² It was against the law to target him, either as a civilian, or as an imam (chaplains are considered medical personnel).¹³ It is a war crime to target a non-combatant under any circumstances. It was also against the law to kill thirty more Muslim civilians in a non-war zone.¹⁴

The U.S. considers al-Aulaqi an inspirational threat, dangerous since both Major Hassan, the Army psychiatrist who killed personnel at his station, and an alleged Nigerian attempted bomber of a Detroit bound plane, are said to have been influenced by his thinking. There are others. While there is extreme carelessness in assuming al-Aulaqi ordered crimes of violence, Dennis Blair, U.S. director of National Intelligence, has insisted that the intelligence community is not careless in killing Americans abroad.¹⁵

Al-Aulaqi is said to believe in a jihad against the U.S. in response to its war against Islam and Muslim people. There is evidence that the U.S. really is conducting a war against Islam. News sources quote al-Aulaqi as saying I have come to the conclusion that jihad against America is a duty for me, as for every Muslim who can do it. A broad term, jihad does not specify violence or armed action, financial war as Libyan president Gaddafi recently announced against the Swiss, or a battle of cultures. Is it a crime for an imam to approve of jihad? Was the U.S. Civil Rights Movement song You gotta do what the spirit say do a death penalty offense? If al-Aulaqi bears arms or counsels others to bear arms against the U.S., then under U.S. law he has committed a serious crime. There is little specific evidence presented the public that al-Aulaqi has. He is a civilian entitled to a fair trial in civilian court. Within a military context, as a cleric he is a non-combatant. It is in all cases against the laws of war to target a non- combatant.¹⁶

The SITE Intelligence Group which monitors Islamic web sites and provides information to field forces and U.S. Defense agencies, brought to the public's attention al-Aulaqi's anti-American and pro jihadist statements on March 19, 2010. SITE's co-founder was the primary Canadian government witness, web-expert and translator at the recent Quebec trial of Said Namouh,¹⁷ a Muslim from Morocco, arrested and sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to plant bombs in Austria. Namouh committed no act of violence. His computer hard drive, emails and web postings were culled by the witness, for jihadist materials which transformed him into an al-Qaeda propagandist. SITE is an activist company with an agenda. The co-founder is an Israeli who has served in the IDF, and is a Zionist, with a parent hung by Iraq as an Israeli spy. Blackwater, infamous for its murder of civilians, lists SITE as an invaluable resource, and this private company-for-profit / intelligence group receives half a million dollars a year from the U.S. tax free. By selecting for its web site¹⁸ instances of violent resistance from among the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, with statements of imams who protest the slaughters that other moral people don't dare protest openly, SITE offers, I think, something other than an impartial witnessing or presentation. Instances of 'web-terrorism' by extremists, are used for the political purposes of those who would wage war on Islam.

Al-Aulaqi is faulted for his associations with known terrorists and he is faulted for honest religious statements. The first implies guilt by association while it is the duty of clerics and chaplains to be open to those who seek them out. As for the honesty of al-Aulaqi's religious statements, the freedom to express these is guaranteed under U.S. law. Both the Constitution and American culture historically affirm both al-Aulaqi's religious freedom and his freedom of speech. It is extreme to sacrifice these for any government agenda, particularly a war on terrorism. His freedom to think, believe, express thoughts / beliefs is furthered by international covenants, treaties, the laws of all advancing countries. Because a cleric states moral truths common to Judaism, Christianity, and ethics, a criminal U.S. policy finds itself threatened tactically as well as morally. If U.S. policy asks the American public and people of the world to accept rule by murder it should listen more closely to the morality of others. With no comfortable reason to arrest and try him, Anwar al-Aulaqi is to be murdered as an inspirational threat. In the case of each target on the CIA Hit List, extra judicial murder is a crime against humanity with no statute of limitations.

Public acceptance

It is an inappropriate response to murder people for hating America, especially as U.S. policy continues illegal massacres of civilians by drone attacks, aggressive military actions in civilian sectors, destruction of the infra-structures and the entire cultural fabric of victim societies. Current President Obama was elected to end the U.S. aggressive wars. It would be an appropriate response to change the policy.

Public understanding of what it means to murder people because they inspire others, is thoroughly buffered by context: since 1990 in Iraq millions of Iraqi Muslim civilians have been killed, mothers, fathers, children, who showed no ill will against America. That is partly what an illegal war means. Thousands of combatants and civilians were arrested in both Iraq and Afghanistan, clearly deprived of Geneva Convention rights in the instance of Guantanamo, tortured and detained under such extreme conditions their captors are liable for judgment under the laws of war and covenants for peace. Stripping a religiously defined enemy of human rights was a step toward this public call for murder by command. The order seems media-normal amidst a policy of war crimes against peoples who are Muslim.

Americans are aware that the CIA hit list has been there a long time. Usually the crimes of power are covert. Evidence of CIA sponsored or executed extra judicial killing was apparent in U.S. policy operations against Lumumba, Castro, Allende,¹⁹ among others. The operations of death squads throughout the Americas, a mode of operation consistently traced to the US School of the Americas, simply covered military operations. The threat behind CIA gathering the thousands of names of radicals, leftists, communists, dissidents, union leaders and organizers in every country where U.S. has corporate interests surfaced in Indonesia of 1965, as one example, with the military murder of over half a million Communists from lists provided the Indonesian military by the CIA.²⁰

Openly marking al-Aulaqi for death because he is an inspirational threat, clarifies the deaths of other religious or inspirational leaders who faulted U.S. policies. El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero (I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God, to stop the repression !) was murdered by an intelligence operation on March 24, 1980 while he was celebrating mass at a hospital. The murder is traced to Roberto D'Aubuisson, trained by the U.S. in security and intelligence (New York and Virginia 1971) and in communications (the School of the Americas, 1972). On December 2, 1980, two Maryknoll sisters and two Ursuline sisters, were raped and murdered by the Salvadoran military covered by U.S. officials. The Sisters were Americans working for the Catholic Relief Services. Their names were Dorothy Kazel, Ita Ford, Jean Donovan, Maura Clarke.²¹ On Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, a cook and her daughter, were murdered by a death squad, a euphemism for regular operations of ANSESAL and the military. Ignacio Ellacuria was rector of the university, Ignacio Martin-Baró vice rector, Segundo Montes a professor, Arnando López a professor, Juan Ramón Moreno a program director, - all five born in Spain, and Joaquin López y López director of a humanitarian assistance program, Julia Elba Ramos a cook, her 15 year old daughter Cecilia Ramos were shot between two and three in the morning.²² El Salvador's Truth Commission found responsibility lay with named upper level officers of El Salvador's U.S. supported military, and businessmen.²³ The victims' inspirational crime was supporting the poor. The murders of those well known are moments in a sea of blood. From death squad and overt military rule in the Americas since the Sixties, the perpetrators of the crimes have been identified and in some cases prosecuted, often not, but the CIA programs remain unmentioned, the context of US policy and agenda protected. The US operatives, the diplomats, the conduits of funding to the death squads and client governments effecting the policy remain untouched even when names and responsibility are known.²⁴

The covert claim to absolute power over citizens of other countries, is now familiar enough for the CIA to allow surfacing of its hit list, not a new policy but the overt continuation of an old policy. It is publicly claiming the right of the American government to murder anyone.

U.S. Military Law

The words capture or killing puts the crime in the language of war, although military law is in fact particularly careful about who can be targeted.²⁵

Military law is also entirely aware of Nuremberg and the uselessness of I was just obeying orders defense. Military law is codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice which is federal U.S. law for those in the service or working with the military.

The US Military Uniform Code of Justice states it is the soldier's duty to obey a lawful order. Refusal in wartime can mean the death penalty.²⁶ But repeatedly the UCMJ reads, a lawful order must be obeyed. Which means to a rational mind that an unlawful order does not. The UCMJ itself offers little guidance about where to draw the line between an unlawful order and a lawful one, other than the obvious. Because the obvious is not spelled out it is no less obvious. Recent military law attempts to place determination of the lawfulness of the order, with a military court judge.²⁷ It is not likely to end there. The military court is increasingly responsible to the Law of War, and the War Crimes Act of 1996 allows military personnel to be charged in federal (civilian) court for "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions" among other crimes.²⁸ And in areas under its domain the International Criminal Court doesn't require accession to the ICC court, to prosecute.

Because the U.S. military now serves in regions which involve crimes of command such as aggression, the judicial arm of the military is increasingly concerned with international law. Current Department of Defense manuals on the law of war, advise judge advocates of not only the Geneva Conventions signed by the U.S. but the Optional Protocols, unsigned but which have become customary law,and applicable.²⁹ While disobeying an unlawful order is a dangerous decision, it is a recognized alternative, there because it is necessary.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice steers questions of right and wrong to its Punative Articles dealing with crimes against the military system, including crimes one finds in civilian courts - drunken driving, rape, manslaughter, etc.. The UCMJ avoids direct interface from within with the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of War / Laws of Armed Conflict (LOW & LOAC), except notably in Article 18 which gives court martial the right to try war crimes. This would include breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other Laws of War.³⁰ By application of Geneva Conventions and the other instruments of international law which military courts must consider, a war crime (or crime against humanity if part of an agenda or series of war crimes), is prosecutable. Anyone ordering a war crime is issuing a patently unlawfulorder.

Ordering extra-judicial killing of possibly eight or nine Muslim men, and in particular the cleric Al-Aulaqi, the U.S. finds itself using a mechanism of the German Nazis in preparing Germany's home front for war: the dehumanization of a religious and ethnic group. Extreme deprivations of human rights is dehumanization. Dehumanization is always a requisite for mass murder and genocide, and reveals its premeditated intention.³¹

What is unacceptable about ordering the killing or capture of al-Aulaqi is not simply that he is an American citizen but that he is a Muslim of a group suffering a series of war crimes. More profoundly he's an innocent human being until proven guilty. The repetitiveness of war crimes against so many Muslim people moves the entire area of individual crimes against Muslims into a crime against humanity. It