Renewable Revolution

Thursday, March 29, 2018

By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch | News Analysis

SNIPPET:

Indeed, Secretary of Defense James ("Mad Dog") Mattis has said that the president has the right to lock up anyone identified as a "combatant" in our forever wars, well, forever. In 2016, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that any detainee who "has signed up with this enemy" -- no matter where "the president, the commander-in-chief, sends us" to fight -- should know that he will be a "prisoner until the war is over." In other words, since the war on terror will never end, anyone the US captures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, or elsewhere will face the possibility of spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo.

Recycling War Criminals 🐍

Speaking of Mattis and war crimes, there's already plenty of blood on his hands. He earned that "Mad Dog" sobriquet while commanding the US Marines who twice in 2004 laid siege to Fallujah. During those sieges, American forces sealed that Iraqi city off so no one could leave, attacked marked ambulances and aid workers, shot women, children, and an ambulance driver, killed almost 6,000 civilians outright, displaced 200,000 more, and destroyed 75% of the city with bombs and other munitions. The civilian toll was vastly disproportionate to any possible military objective -- itself the definition of a war crime.

One of the uglier aspects of that battle was the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary munition. Phosphorus ignites spontaneously when exposed to air. If bits of that substance attach to human beings, as long as there's oxygen to combine with the phosphorus, skin and flesh burn away, sometimes right into the bone. Use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon is forbidden under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the US has signed.

In Iraq, Mattis also saw to it that charges would be dropped against soldiers responsible for murdering civilians in the city of Haditha. In a well-documented 2005 massacre -- a reprisal for a roadside bomb -- American soldiers shot 24 unarmed men, women, and children at close range. As the convening authority for the subsequent judicial hearing, Mattis dismissed the murder charges against all the soldiers accused of that atrocity.

Mattis is hardly the only slightly used war criminal in the Trump administration.

Full article:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/44006-trump-is-running-a-war-crime-recycling-program