Though it has no police powers or police force, the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, has just issued an arrest warrant for Libyan strongman/dictator Muammar Qadaffi. Presumably, any individual, military force, nation or group apprehending Qadaffi must turn him over to the Court so he can be tried on the charge “crimes against humanity for killing civilians who rose up against his rule,” according to the Associated Press, 28 June. Presently, Qaddafi is more or less hunkered down and dodging bombs and missiles being rained upon him by the U.S. and NATO, though obviously not in its usual “peace-keeping” mode.
Similar “crimes” have been the order of the day in the Middle East since time immemorial, with a few others also in motion now in places such as Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and, of course, Iran. The word from Libya is that hundreds have been arrested, injured or killed, with reasonable grounds that Qaddafi and his son were responsible. Of course, the figures are without verification (always hundreds or thousands in these dustups – no one knows). The current figures in Syria in that ongoing bloodletting is something like 1,400, but where do the figures come from? Only recently has strongman Assad allowed any reporters in.
So…Qaddafi is in trouble with the Court because he allegedly has killed Libyans, his own people. He probably has…probably quite a few of them, and he promised to maintain his methods, like all the other dictators, until the insurgency is stopped. There probably is proof of this, though it has never been brought forward. Perhaps – if it had either the authority or the funds – the Court should offer a $25 million reward for the capture of Qaddafi (but not for killing him – that would be un-Courtly). After all, the U.S. offered that reward to anyone leading to the capture or killing of bin Laden, about which the president crows on a daily basis. Bounty-hunters would crawl out of the woodwork all over the world, especially in Somalia, where flesh-trading and kidnapping are a way of life.
Beyond a shadow of doubt and with abundant proof, however, the president of the United States has ordered his military to kill Libyans, beginning last March and continuing until now, with no end of the killing in sight and with some $750 million invested in the project already. His claim to have handed the killing operation off to NATO is, as Veep Biden would have it, FLUFFERNUTTER, the appellation he ascribed to John Edwards’ speeches in 2008. The U.S. owns NATO lock, stock and barrel and finances its operations as well as kicks in with human resources. At a word from Obama, the killing would stop immediately. Virtually all, or at least a huge part, of the killing was done by the U.S. in the first ten days of Obama’s massacre, while NATO was deciding whether or not to do as told by Obama and continue the carnage.
Since it is abundantly demonstrable that Libya had not attacked the U.S. and had made no threats to do so, as well as it being a public record that Obama did not consult Congress as required Constitutionally
for the act of war he committed, there is an extreme irony. Under current law and the manual for courts-martial, “An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”
Since the president was not acting in defense of the nation in attacking Libya and therefore willfully committing warfare, he was committing a criminal act (murder), thus violating his responsibility as commander-in-chief and citizen. Since the president was guilty of committing the same crimes as the Court accused Qaddafi of committing, i.e., killing Libyans, he was (or should be judged) just as guilty as Qaddafi under the aegis of the Court in the Netherlands. In other words, if Qaddafi is a war criminal, so is Obama.
The further irony lies in the fact that a service-member might well have been absolved of any order-disobedience because of being ordered to commit a criminal act (murder of innocent civilians). Indeed, both Defense Secretary Gates and Joint-Chiefs Chairman Mullen had publicly advised against Obama’s off-the-wall, totally wacky action, apparently taken on a mere whim without even sufficient military or post-war planning, as evidenced by Gates’ further description of the action during his trip to Russia as the hostilities began: "We haven't done something like this, kind of on the fly before." He obviously was out-of-the-loop.
There can be no greater arrogance or infamy than willful killing. The president will not be hailed into Court in the Netherlands, though he for no reason has attacked a weak nation with a population two million less than that of New York City…sort of like a lion attacking a mouse, except that the lion has a reason. One wonders if Obama has a reason for continuing the massacre, and if it might have something to do with NATO members Britain, France, Spain and Italy vis-à-vis Libyan oil. One hopes not.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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