Ramsey Clark was U.S. Attorney General in the late 1960's. I found an interesting paper by Col. Joseph P. Martino, USAF (Ret) called "Vietnam and Desert Storm: Learning the Right Lessons from Vietnam for the Post-Cold War Era. He interviews Col. Bui Tin, who received the surrender of South Vietnam in 1975, for his perspective on, among other things, the rather successful U.S. anti-war movement during the Vietnam "military incursion". The paper, in general, goes over lessons to be learned from the mistakes made in these "military incursions". http://www.ttu.edu/~vietnam/96papers/lesson.htm. Incidentally, I said the President is allowed to "start wars", not that he is allowed to "declare war". Apparently, war does not need to be declared any more for war to take place. In the minds of most people, a war is when you send a whole bunch of people over to someone else's fiefdom with a whole bunch of weapons and try to slaughter all of the people over there. While war may be legally an official act of Congress, this inaccurate definition is a vain and futile attempt at convincing the citizens that we're really not at war when we're burying Iraqi soldiers live with bulldozers and brute force bombing domestic sectors of Baghdad (the weapons accuracy reports released after the Gulf "military excursion" were verified 5 years later to be way off the mark). Clark's foreign affairs mission seems consistently concerned with the prevention of human rights abuses and adherance to Geneva convention treaties on human rights, including when inflicted by United States military forces. In regards to the Middle East, he argues that sanctions against Iraq violate the Geneva conventions against genocide, because they do not obtain the objective of deposing Hussein, and instead kill Iraqi citizens by the hundreds of thousands by starvation, malnutrition, and lack of medical supplies. Clark's argument is that Hussein doesn't care about his people and the sanctions are not effective against him, and asks why we target the peasants and lower class Iraqi citizens. The sanctions against the citizens serve only to calicify the people of Iraq against the UN/US and in favor of Hussein, thereby increasing the risk of future conflict and giving the UNSC/USNSC an excuse to wage war. His letters to the UN Security Council may be found at the International Action Center web pages at http://www.iacenter.org/rcsanct.htm, and further information regarding the Iraqi sanctions at http://www.iacenter.org/iraq.htm. Information on the use of depleted uranium weapons used by the US in the gulf war is available from iacenter.org in a separate section. The IAC site contains a great deal of links to external fact sources including, for example, many depositions and testimonies before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. To remain a healthy skeptic, I did not explore all of these documents to verify the facts used in the IAC editorial and political opinion papers. A particularly interesting item in the Iraq section is "Clinton ready to violate nuclear nonproliferation treaty -- plans to use nuclear weapons against Iraq in place since November 1997", in which IAC comments on the 1 Feb 1997 Newsday story detailing the changes in the U.S. nuclear weapons policy allowing a "First Strike" option. Supporters of scheduled demonstrations include Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and the Catholic Worker organization, among others. Mark Hedges WW wrote: >Mark: >COncerning your recent message commenting on MER, there are a couple of >releted comments that I would like to submit. The first is that I have no >knowledge of the character of Mr. Chomsky, but I appreciate your coming to >his defense. Interesting, though that you made no comment concerning >Ramsey Clark, who together with Jane Fonda Turner would have been guilty of >treason against the country they claim to be their own when they appeared >in Hanoi during the Viet Nam confrontation to cause untold suffering to out >prisoners being held in various camps throughtout that country. > >The reason the were not charged with treason, as I understand it, is >because that military action was not a declared war, a war declared by >Congress. Contrary to you comment of yesterday, the President does NOT >have the authority to declare war, only the Congress can do that. The >President can and has, started military incursions, but factually they are >not wars until Congress so designates. > >Getting back to Mr. Clark, I have no knowledge concerning the accuracy of >his statements, written or oral, but if he declared that the sun was >shining, I would quickly move to the nearest window to see what kind of >weather was out there. > >WW
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