OMNI
US LAWLESSNESS ANTHOLOGY #2
September 11, 2022
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND
ECOLOGY
(#1, 4-24-17)
LAWLESSNESS ANTHOLOGY #2
CONTENTS
United Nations
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "’Suicidal’
war on nature.”
Samuel Totten (Editor). Dirty Hands and
Vicious Deeds: The US Government’s Complicity in Crimes against Humanity
and Genocide.
World Beyond War. “Enough is Enough. BDS the US.”
Dick. Lawlessness and Lying.
US Presidents
Richard Painter, Peter Golenbock. American Nero: The
History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst
Offender.
Dahlia Lithwick. “Defending
the Rule of Law in the Trump Era.”
US
WARS
Brett Wilkins. “Jimmy Carter. US 'Most Warlike Nation in History of the
World'.”
Bob
Fantina. Lies, Propaganda, and
False Flags: How the U.S. Justifies its Wars.
Vincent
Bevins. The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist
Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World.
Jordan J. Paust. Beyond
the Law – The Bush Administration's Unlawful Responses in the "War"
on Terror.
TEXTS
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Samuel Totten (Editor). Dirty
Hands and Vicious Deeds: The US Government’s Complicity in Crimes against
Humanity and Genocide. Univ. of Toronto P, 2018
Reviews
"How
can this happen in our time? These chilling accounts of how a democratically
elected government gets away with aiding and abetting the mass murder of
foreigners should outrage every decent citizen. What is our duty when our
rulers betray the moral basis of the consent we give them to govern us?" (Mukesh Kapila, former United Nations
resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sudan and author of Against
a Tide of Evil)
"I
know of no other work like Dirty Hands and Vicious Deeds. The book
includes a series of compelling essays that examine US complicity in the
genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by other nations' governments.
This is a book I shall definitely require in my course on international
humanitarianism and human rights." (John
Hubbel Weiss, Cornell University)
"Totten
and his co-authors confront an issue long present in genocide studies
literature but rarely addressed on its own: the role of the US in some of the
worst atrocities of the twentieth century. In cogent analytical essays followed
by illustrative, sometimes shocking, primary documents, Dirty Hands and
Vicious Deeds lays bare the ways in which America's geopolitical and
ideological self-interest led the world's superpower to support or simply turn
a blind eye to the murderous plans of some of the worst regimes in recent
history." (Maureen S. Hiebert,
University of Calgary)
Available online at
UAF’s Mullins Library
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“Enough is Enough. BDS the US.” World Beyond War, 5-11-18.
Boycott, Divest, and Sanction. BDS. People, organizations, and governments around
the world, and people and organizations in the United States, need to stand up
at long last and nonviolently resist the lawless behavior of the rogue U.S. government. Learn more, join this new campaign,
put your name on the petition.
The recent U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran is
not an aberration. It parallels the
U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and numerous other
disarmament agreements, the U.S. opposition to the International Criminal
Court, its record-setting use of the veto in the United Nations Security
Council, and its unique status outside the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, the Paris Climate Agreement (which it withdrew from) and other
fundamental treaties. Of the United Nations' 18 major human rights treaties, the United States is party to 5, fewer than
any other nation on earth, except Bhutan (4), and tied with Malaysia, Myanmar,
and South Sudan, a country torn by warfare since its creation in 2011.
There is a reason that most countries polled in December 2013 by
Gallup called the United States the greatest threat
to peace in the world, and why Pew found that viewpoint increased in 2017. Since
World War II, the United States military has killed or helped kill some 20 million
people, overthrown at least 36 governments, interfered in at least 84 foreign
elections, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs
on people in over 30 countries.
In military spending (over $1,200 billion per year) and weapons dealing, the U.S.
government has no peer. Only 19 other nations on earth spend more than $10
billion per year. Seventeen of them are U.S. allies and weapons customers.
The U.S. government is directly responsible for policies that make
the United States, by various measures, the worst destroyer of the world's natural environment.
The United States government is out of control, and the force
needed to resist it successfully is not a military one. It is the nonviolent
organized support for the rule of law that can be mobilized among the people of
the world, including the people of the United States.
I commit to supporting strategic targeted
efforts to boycott, divest from, and sanction the U.S. government until it
supports the rule of law, peace, and justice on earth. For people,
organizations, and governments outside of the United States, this means such
actions as seeking to hold the U.S. government and its officials to the rule of
law, formally sanctioning the U.S. government and its officials, avoiding
travel to the United States, assuring that online purchases made don't
originate in the United States, and any other means available to avoid
supporting the U.S. government and military, including canceling all purchases
of U.S.-made weapons (not to be replaced with any other weapons). For U.S.
residents and organizations, this means such actions as purchasing goods from
locally owned, small, community businesses, boycotting large corporations and
military contractors, choosing goods and services provided by foreign nations
that do not promote militarism, and refusing to pay war taxes, as well as
seeking the unelection, impeachment, removal, and prosecution of U.S. officials
guilty of lawless abuses of power.
Share this on Facebook and Twitter.
Please forward this to anyone who might be interested. World BEYOND War is a global network of volunteers, activists, and
allied organizations advocating for the abolition
of the very institution of war. Our success is driven by a people-powered
movement –
support our work for a culture of peace.
World BEYOND War PO Box 1484
Charlottesville, VA 22902 USA
A major connection of lawlessness,
corporations, US presidents, Trump, US wars, and climate change is massive lying. Before the decade-long disinformation
campaign by the fossil fuel industry, our nation had begun planning an energy
future based upon nuclear and sustainable energy. The chief officers and stockholders of the
fossil fuel companies, like those of the tobacco companies regarding smoking’s
lethality, by systematic deception prevented the public from facing the causes
of the climate catastrophe. They knew
the truth but covered it up and kept the public from acknowledging it. But gig
and dark money closed that alternative down, and thirty years later we are
faced not with mere climate change but with a climate emergency. OMNI: Fossil
Fuels Crimes and Criminals https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2020/08/fossil-fuels-crimes-and-criminals.html -D
US Presidents
Richard Painter, Peter Golenbock. American Nero: The
History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst
Offender. BenBella Books, 2020. Senate candidate Richard Painter examines
Trump's policies through an historical lens in American Nero, showcasing how he is eroding the rule of law. Outlook
Review
“Defending
the rule of law in the Trump era.”
By Dahlia Lithwick.
Washington Post.
Dahlia Lithwick is senior legal correspondent at Slate and host
of its Amicus podcast.
March 20, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. CDT
There are, to vastly
overgeneralize, two basic types of books written by critics of the Trump
presidency: One class of books tells us things we never knew, such as how
tyrannies arise or how Deutsche Bank operates outside meaningful scrutiny or
control. The other tells us what we already know and seem to have forgotten. “American Nero,” by Richard W. Painter and Peter Golenbock,
is very much in that latter category and serves to remind us, in icy, granular
detail, of what has happened to constitutional democracy in three short years,
and all that we have absorbed, integrated and somehow moved beyond. In some
sense, then, it stands less as a unified argument than as a scrapbook of things
that no longer horrify us.
The fact that it went to press just before the Senate
impeachment trial, and thus cannot account for the near-collapse of an
independent Justice Department, the capitulation of Senate Republicans who
believed that President Trump had inappropriately sought Ukrainian election
interference but who felt somehow helpless to hold him to account, and recent
lawsuits against opinion journalists in major newspapers, actually only
highlights the fact that even when one believes the situation cannot get worse,
it always gets worse, and often in the span of mere weeks. MORE
Biden’s Assassination Of
al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri Was Illegal By
Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. Popular
Resistance.org (8-8-22). President Joe
Biden’s assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan was
illegal under both U.S. and international law. After the CIA drone strike
killed Zawahiri on August 2, Biden declared, “People around the world no
longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.” What we should fear
instead is the dangerous precedent set by Biden’s
unlawful extrajudicial execution. In addition to being illegal, the killing
of Zawahiri also occurred in a moment when the United Nations had already
determined that people in the U.S. had little to fear from him. -more-
US WARS
Brett Wilkins. “Jimmy Carter. US 'Most Warlike
Nation in History of the World'.” Common Dreams. Thursday, April 18,
2019.
Most countries
surveyed in a 2013 WIN/Gallup poll identified the United States as the greatest
threat to world peace. (Photo: CD/CC BY 2.0)
Carter, who normalized
diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979, said he told Trump
that much of China’s success was due to its peaceful foreign policy. Carter then referred to the US as “the most warlike nation in
the history of the world,” a result, he said, of the US forcing other countries
to “adopt our American principles.”
Bob Fantina.
Lies, Propaganda, and False Flags:
How the U.S. Justifies its Wars.
Exposing US Propaganda And Lies about Its
Never-ending ...
https://crescent.icit-digital.org ›
articles › exposing-us-p...
Robert Fantina meticulously documents the long-list
of US crimes ...
“Don't Fall for the
Lies, Propaganda, and False Flags of Empire.”
Cindy Sheehan’s The Soapbox. Lies, Propaganda, and False Flags: How the
U.S. Justifies its Wars. Guest Bob
Fantina.
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ANTICOMMUNIST CRUSADE
Vincent Bevins. "How 'Jakarta' Became the
Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing." NYR [New York Review of Books] Daily, posted May 18, 2020.
A long article on the
US-encouraged mass murders of up to a million Indonesians in 1965-66, excerpted
from the author's book, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist
Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs Press). H-PAD
Notes 5/27/20: Jim O'Brien via H-PAD <h-pad@lists.historiansforpeace.org>
Jordan
J. Paust, Beyond the Law – The Bush Administration's Unlawful Responses in the
"War" on Terror. Cambridge University Press, 2007, xiv+311 pp. Also Published by De Gruyter ,February
8, 2017.
REVIEW
Tobias T. Molander. From the ICL Journal
https://doi.org/10.1515/icl-2009-0109
www.icl-journal.com Vol 3
1/2009, 59 „ BOOK REVIEW Tobias T. Molander ,Jordan J. Paust, Beyond the Law – The Bush Administration's Unlawful
Responses in the "War" on
Terror, Cambridge University Press, 2007, xiv+311 pp. Jordan J.
Paust, a former
Fulbright Professor at
the University of
Salzburg, takes a closer look at
the Bush administration's so-dubbed "war on terrorism" in which the
United States embarked
after 9-11 and
tries to expose
violations of international
and domestic law
that occurred in
this conduct. Not only
does he intend to highlight alleged violations of
law, but he also provides ample pieces of evidence to prove the authorization
and acknowledgement of this "dirty war" by the President
and his staff
(166 out of
299 pages are
dedicated to footnotes!).
After a short
introduction dealing with
the general appreciation
of the Bush
administration concerning international law,
Paust focuses on
particular problematic areas,
such as treatment and detention of prisoners, enemy status, judicial power
concerning detainees, constraints on presidential power by the rule of law
and the role
of military commissions.
Summarizing his deeply
critical judgement of
Mr. Bush's legacy,
Paust counters the
currently prevailing "unconstitutional and autocratic
commander-above-the-law theory" unprecedented in US
history by providing
a basis of
lawful responses to
terrorism and highlighting the role of the judiciary in
times of peril. According to the
author, a common
plan to circumvent
international law (especially
customary humanitarian law as reflected
in the 1949
Geneva Conventions) and
deny protection to
certain enemies captured
– especially members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban – emerged
early in the Afghan war against the
Taliban regime in
2002. This concept,
which in Paust's
view stems from
the idea that the President
should stand above the law, forms a formidable contrast to the
international and constitutional legal
order. Regardless of the legal
categorization of the conflict and the status of the enemy, customary
laws of war provide a nonderogable minimum degree of protection to every person
that is to be applied in every situation of conflict (especially Common Art 3
of the Geneva Conventions). In addition,
human rights law
continues to be
applicable during times of conflict; many of those rights being
peremptory and nonderogable even during
times of emergency.
All these provisions
intend to ensure
"humane treatment" of
all persons at all times. Despite
the warnings of
many people within
and without the
administration who pointed to the
absolute applicability of the relevant norms, the US President and his
staff intentionally embarked
on their plan
to circumvent the
Geneva Conventions, the
violation of which
leads to criminal
responsibility under domestic and international law.
Lawlessness Anthology #1
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/04/us-lawlessness.html
Contents
of US Lawlessness Anthology #1: Books
9 Books
Harms (vs. Democracy and Liberty) of the Two-Tiered System
of Justice, Massive Unprosecuted Economic Crimes, US National Security State,
Empire, Surveillance, Secrecy, Homeland
Security, War on Terrorists
Domestic
These four books discuss the assault on democracy by elites
immune from prosecution.
Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and Justice for Some: How
Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful
Summary and
Excerpt
Ramirez and Ramirez, Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street (subtitle)
on the Economic Crisis of 2007-09,
Massive, Unprosecuted Wall Street
Crimes
Noam Chomsky, Requiem
for the American Dream: The Ten
Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power. 7 Stories P, 2017.
David Swanson, Review (11
Principles)
Dick, Principle #6: Deregulation,
Repealing Glass-Steagall, Lobbying,
Revolving Door
Charles Ferguson, Inside
Job. Film about the global
financial meltdown of the economic crisis of 2008, at a cost of over $20
trillion.
Selected related OMNI newsletters: Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporations,
Inequality, Mainstream Media, Nuclear Weapons, Wall Street
International
(listed in chronological order of each book’s subject)
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America. .
. . By Greg Grandin. 200 years of
aggression. (Related: Harvest of Empire: A
History of Latinos in America
by Juan Gonzalez.
2012).
Bacevich, America’s
War for the Greater Middle East (1980 to present)
Glass, Rev.
“Andrew Bacevich and America’s Long Misguided War to Control the Greater Middle
East”
Dick, Summary of Chapter One
on Jimmy Carter
Gordon, American
Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial
for Post- 9/11 War Crimes (2001
to present): US War Against/Of
“Terrorism”
Davies,
Nicholas. Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and
Destruction of Iraq.
Rev. by David
Swanson
No Place to Hide by Glenn
Greenwald (Snowden’s revelations of massive spying by NSA)
Review by
Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
Selected related OMNI newsletters: Anti-War, Bullying, Exceptionalism,
Imperialism, Militarism, Torture, Violence, War and Environment, War Crimes,
Vietnam War
END LAWLESSNESS ANTHOLOGY #2
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