Re: The Real Louise Arbour Story

I agree....
They should give a copy of the newspaper to Sodem Insane....(they killed
Milosovich but show that ignorant muslim murderer on the news.


"John Wood" <jwood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:CigVf.4325$B_1.1589@xxxxxxxxxxx
This lovein biography-fest for extremists has to stop. These extremists
that are messing with society's checks and balances and are being lauded
as heroes. The one-sided trial of of Milosevic would has returned a "not
guilty" on all counts and been a major embarrassment, so they had him
killed by giving him the wrong medication. The timing of his death was a
little too convenient, and as always the media played along with
transparent charade.

Loiuse Arbour is part of this BS. If you look at the civil war that took
place in Yugoslavia - yes it was brutal, yes lots of people died, and
there were massacres. But 1) The main one they talk about: Srebinica took
place under the auspices of Dutch UN soldiers. 2) NATO bombings killed
innocent civilians too.

No one player was more vicious than the other - this was a civil war. They
unilaterally called Milosevic the bad guy and somehow the others were good
guys. That was BS. The Bosnian leader sabotaged a peace deal by backing
out of it at the last minute, Croatians did alot of damage too but their
war was bloody and quick. This is completely one sided crap that somehow
casts violations of UN law namely that other nations not interfere in the
affairs of others. The only lesson learned here is that people with a
random sense of who is a criminal and who is not can make it into power
and prosecute whoever they like.


Louise Arbour:
Unindicted War Criminal
by Christopher Black and Edward S. Herman (6-14-00)

Among the many ironies of the NATO war against Yugoslavia was the role of
the International Criminal Tribunal and its chief prosecutor, Louise
Arbour, elevated by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to Canada's
highest court in 1999. It will be argued here that as Arbour and her
Tribunal played a key role in EXPEDITING war crimes, an excellent case can
be made that in a just world she would be in the dock rather than in
judicial robes.

Arbour To NATO's Rescue

In the midst of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, Arbour
participated in an April 20 press conference with British Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook to receive from him documentation on Serb war crimes.
Then on May 27, Arbour announced the indictment of Serb President Slobodan
Milosevic and four of his associates for war crimes. The inappropriateness
of a supposedly judicial body doing this when Germany, Russia and other
powers were trying to find a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, was
staggering.

At the April 20 appearance with Cook, Arbour stated that

* "It is inconceivable...that we would agree to be guided by the
political will of those who may want to advance an agenda."

But her appearance with Cook and the followup indictments fitted perfectly
the needs of the NATO leadership. There had been growing criticism of
NATO's increasingly civilian infrastructure-oriented bombing of Serbia.
Arbour's and the Tribunal's intervention declaring the Serb leadership to
be guilty of war crimes was a public relations coup that justified the
NATO policies and helped permit the bombing to continue and escalate. This
was pointed out repeatedly by NATO leaders and propagandists: for example,
Madeleine Albright noted that the indictments

* "make very clear to the world and the publics in our countries that
this [NATO policy] is justified because of the crimes committed, and I
think also will enable us to keep moving all these processes [i.e.,
bombing] forward" (CNN, May 27).

Arbour herself noted that "I am mindful of the impact that this indictment
may have on the peace process," and although indicted individuals are
"entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are convicted, the
evidence upon which this indictment was confirmed raises serious questions
about their suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace
agreement." (CNN, May 27). So Arbour not only understood the political
significance of her indictment, she suggested that interference with
diplomatic efforts was justified because the indicted individuals, though
not yet found guilty, were not suitable to negotiate. This hugely
unjudicial political judgment, along with the convenient timing of the
indictments, points up Arbour's and the Tribunal's highly political role.

The Tribunal's Politicization

Arbour's service to NATO in indicting Milosevic was the logical outcome of
the Tribunal's de facto control and purpose. Established by the Security
Council in the early 1990s to serve the Balkan policy ends of its dominant
members, the Tribunal's funding and interlocking functional relationship
with the leading NATO powers have made it NATO's instrument. (1)

Although Article 32 of the Tribunal's Charter declares that its expenses
shall be provided in the general budget of the United Nations, this
proviso has been regularly violated. In 1994-1995 the U.S. government
provided it with $700,000 in cash and $2.3 million in equipment, and
numerous other U.S.-based governmental and non- governmental agencies have
provided the Tribunal with resources.

Article 16 of the Tribunal's charter states that the Prosecutor shall act
independently and shall not seek or receive instruction from any
government. This section also has been systematically violated. NATO
sources have regularly made claims suggesting their authority over the
Tribunal: "We will make a decision on whether Yugoslav actions against
ethnic Albanians constitute genocide," states a USIA Fact ***, and Cook
asserted at his April 20 press conference with Arbour that "we are going
to focus on the war crimes being committed in Kosovo and our determination
to bring those responsible to justice, " as if he and Arbour were a team
jointly deciding on who should be charged for war crimes.

Tribunal officials have even bragged about "the strong support of
concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
Albright," further referred to as "mother of the Tribunal" (by Judge
Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, president of the Tribunal). In 1996 Arbour met
with the Secretary-General of NATO and its supreme commander to "establish
contacts and begin discussing modalities of cooperation and assistance."
Numerous other meetings have occurred between prosecutor and NATO, which
was given the function of Tribunal gendarme.

Arbour acknowleged (April 20) that "the real danger is whether we would
fall into [following somebody's political agenda] inadvertently by being
in the hands of information-providers who might have an agenda that we
would not be able to discern." But even an imbecile could discern that
NATO had an agenda and that simply accepting the flood of documents
offered by Cook and Albright entailed ADVERTENTLY following that agenda.
Arbour's April 20 reference to the "morality of the [NATO] enterprise" and
her remarks on Milosevic's possible lack of character disqualifying him
from negotiations, as well as her rush to help NATO with an indictment,
point to quite clearly understood political service.

The Arbour-Tribunal bias was dramatically illustrated by the disposition
of an internal Tribunal report on Operation Storm, which described war
crimes committed by the Croatian armed forces in their expulsion of more
than 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995. (6) In only four days "at
least 150 Serbs were summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared,"
totals that exceeded the 241 victims of the Serbs named in the indictment
of Milosevic. But as the United States supported the Croat's ethnic
cleansing of Serbs in Krajina, and refused to provide requested
information, no indictment of any Croat officer named in the report, or
head of state Tudjman, was ever brought by the Tribunal.

Tribunal's Kangaroo Court Processes

According to Arbour, the Tribunal was "subject to extremely stringent
rules of evidence with respect to the admissibility and the credibility of
the product that we will tender in court," thus precluding
"unsubstantiated, unverifiable, uncorroborated allegations" (April 20).
This is a gross misrepresentation of what John Laughland described in the
Times (London) as "a rogue court with rigged rules" (June 17, 1999). The
Tribunal violates virtually every standard of due process: among others,
it fails to separate prosecution and judge; witnesses can testify
anonymously; confessions are presumed free and voluntary unless the
contrary can be established by the prisoner; and "rules against hearsay,
deeply entrenched in Common Law, are not observed and the Prosecutor's
office has even suggested not calling witnesses to give evidence but only
the tribunal's own 'war crimes investigators'" (Laughland).

As noted, Arbour presumes guilt before trial; the concept of "innocent
till convicted" is rejected, and she can declare that people linked with
Arkan "will be tainted by their association with an indicted war criminal"
(March 31). Arbour clearly does not believe in the basic rules of Western
jurisprudence. And within a month of her elevation to the Canadian Supreme
Court she joined a court majority that grafted onto Canadian law the
dangerous Tribunal practice of permitting a more liberal use of hearsay
evidence in trials. (2) The consequent corruption of the Canadian justice
system, both by her appointment and her impact, mirrors that in the
Canadian political system, whose leading members supported the NATO war
without question.

NATO's Crimes

In bombing Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 8 1999, NATO violated the UN
Charter requirement that it not use force without UN Security Council
sanction. (3) It was also guilty of aggression in attacking a sovereign
state that was not going beyond its borders. In its defense, NATO claimed
that "humanitarian" concerns demanded these actions and justified
seemingly serious law violations. (4) This reply sanctions law violations
on the basis of self-serving judgments that contradict the rule of law,
but it is also dubious on its own grounds. The NATO bombing made "an
internal humanitarian problem into a disaster" in the words of Rollie
Keith, the returned Canadian OSCE human rights monitor in Kosovo.
Furthermore, NATO refused to negotiate a settlement in Kosovo and insisted
on a violent solution; in the words of one State Department official, NATO
deliberately "raised the bar" and precluded a compromise resolution
because Serbia "needed to be bombed." These counter- facts suggest that
the alleged humanitarian basis of the law violations was a cover for
starkly political and geopolitical objectives.

NATO was also guilty of more traditional war crimes, including some that
the Tribunal had found indictable when allegeldy carried out by Serbs.
Thus on March 8, 1996, the Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted for
allegeldy launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets in
Zagreb in May 1995, on the ground that the rocket was "not designed to hit
military targets but to terrorize the civilians of Zagreb." But the same
case could be made for numerous NATO bombing raids, as in the
cluster-bombing of Nis on May 7, 1999, in which a market and hospital far
from any military target were hit in separate strikes--but no indictment
has yet been handed down against NATO.

But NATO was also guilty of bombing non-military targets as systematic
policy. On March 26, 1999, General Wesley Clark said that "We are going to
very systematically and progressively work on his military forces...[to
see] how much pain he is willing to suffer." But this focus on "military
forces" wasn't effective, so NATO quickly turned to "taking down...the
economic apparatus supporting" Serb military forces (Clinton's words);
targets were gradually extended to factories of all kinds, electric power
stations, water and sewage processing facilities, transport, public
buildings, and even schools and hospitals. In effect, it was NATO's
strategy to bring Serbia to its knees by gradually escalating its attacks
on the civil society.

But international law makes civilian targets off limits; the "wanton
destruction of cities, towns or villages or devastation not justified by
military necessity" is prohibited (Sixth Principle of Nuremberg,
formulated in 1950 by a UN-sponsored international law commission).
"Military necessity" does not allow the destruction of a civil society to
make it more difficult for the country to support its armed forces, any
more than civilians can be killed directly because they pay taxes
supporting the war machine or might some day become soldiers. Making an
entire population a hostage is a blatant violation of international law
and its implementing acts are war crimes.

In December 1999, it was finally reported that post-Arbour prosecutor
Carla Del Ponte was reviewing the conduct of NATO, at the urging of Russia
and several other "interested parties" ("U.N. Court Examines NATO's
Yugoslavia War," NYT, Dec. 29, 1999). But the news report indicates that
the focus is on the conduct of NATO pilots and their commanders, not the
NATO decision-makers who decided to target the civilian infrastructure. It
also suggests the public relations nature of the inquiry, which would "go
far in dispelling the belief...that the tribunal is a tool used by Western
leaders to escape accountability." The report also indicates the delicate
matter that the tribunal "depends on the military alliance to arrest and
hand over suspects." It also quotes Del Ponte saying that "It's not my
priority, because I have inquiries about genocide, about bodies in mass
graves." We may rest assured that no indictments will result from this
inquiry.

Beyond Orwell

NATO's leaders, frustrated in attacking the Serb military machine, quite
openly turned to smashing the civil society of Serbia as their means of
attaining the desired quick victory. Arbour and the Tribunal helped NATO
by indicting Milosevic, thereby giving NATO the moral cover needed for
escalated attacks on the hostage population.

Arbour and the Tribunal thus present us with the amazing spectacle of an
institution supposedly organized to contain, prevent, and prosecute for
war crimes actually knowingly facilitating them. Furthermore, petitions
submitted to the Tribunal during Arbour's tenure had called for
prosecution of the leaders of NATO, including Canadian Prime Minister Jean
Chretien, for the commission of war crimes. If she had been a prosecutor
in Canada, Britain or the United States, she would have been subject to
disbarment for considering and then accepting a job from a person she had
been asked to charge. But Arbour was elevated to the Supreme Court of
Canada by Chretien with hardly a mention of this conflict of interest and
immorality. **

About the authors...

Christopher Black (5) is part of the team of Canadian lawyers who have
attempted to bring war crimes charges against NATO before the War Crimes
Tribunal. At present, Mr. Black is serving as the attorney for one of the
defendant at the Rwandan war crimes hearings. He believes that Western
meddling is in large measure responsible for the horrendous killing in
Rwanda. He plans to write an article for Emperors-Clothes on the subject.

Edward S. Herman is the author of many books including 'Real Terror
Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda' (June 1998) and 'Triumph of the
Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the Media' (October 1995).


.