Opinion:

The hypocrisy of the 'civilised' world

by Shenali D. Waduge

The ‘civilised’ world is shamelessly showing us how uncivilised it is by the extent of hypocrisies they commit and the lies they tell without even batting an eyelid. To cap it off, they think they are God’s gift to mankind and that they are doing the world a favour.

Drone attacks have killed many innocent civilians

US forces in Iraq

Their lies have led to millions of people ending up either dead, displaced, without the likelihood of ever returning to their homes, sick with ailments that have no cure, fertile grounds made infertile and now they are even targeting their own citizens. The world needs to finally wake up and say 'enough is enough'. The immoral levels in which these lies are being formulated, framed and executed in a bid to reign supreme over nations and people by a handful must now stop.

National governments and their leaders are forced to run with the hounds, but are earmarked to be hunted in the end. It is not that national governments have not been warned, but by courting these nations, they innocently thought they would be let off the hook. Now, with Rapp in town, the game plan is all too clear, but Sri Lanka has been fooled to signing off investments that would next target the nation and its people, starting with the leaders.

Their mantras across international media are the prostituted words of ‘credible’ ‘accountable’ and ‘transparent’, but none of their crimes ever get near even a local court.

They have found their illicit partners in handfuls of local traitors, ever ready to hand over the nation and commit an entire populace to either foreign invasion or foreign interference - a thin line separates the two.

Sections of the minority or majority are clueless as to what happens to countries that are militarily invaded or run by puppet governments, the pockets of locals which include religious entities paid to lie by foreign organisations are taking Sri Lanka on a dangerous road that would lead the island to a scenario no different to the sufferings of the people in Kosovo, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti and East Timor.

The puppets that the US or UK and others handled in nations eventually were all eliminated because they were witnesses to their lies. Those that think that by aligning with these treacherous Western nations, they can ‘belong’ to their inner circles are daydreaming. They will be paid for their role and then kicked out. People are just used, as long as they can deliver.

Defeating terrorists

Sri Lanka’s is being held accountable for defeating terrorists (defined by themselves).

Sri Lanka’s statistics, arguments and facts presented have landed up only in the waste paper basket, without a single line being read because the US, UK, EU and UN cares not whether we killed terrorists, did not kill civilians or whatever they are putting on the table as allegations or accusations. These are all sham coverups that have been time-tested to frame charges and these nations with their corrupt officials are now veterans at framing charges. They don’t need to even visit the places, view the analysis, go through the forensics - just like the doctor paid by C4 who looks at a picture and says the Sri Lankan Armed Forces killed the person lying on the floor. They have already arrived at their conclusions - the visits are just a mockery to rub salt into the already wounded nation.

Yet, we are stupid enough to grant them VIP entrance, garland them with flowers, provide whatever comforts they want, when all they are ordered to do from wherever they come from is to pick up bits and pieces that would take Sri Lanka to the gallows.

Rapp is doing just that, meeting Church leaders who were part of the LTTE, meeting people who were very much the LTTE, going to graveyards and hospitals. Do not be surprised if the same lies used in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya are also used in Sri Lanka…

Lies of US, UK, EU and UN

Rayappu Joseph has set the ball rolling, with the allegation of cluster bombs being used, 15 ex-combatants were spoken to in a case of terrorists taking a democratic government to court.

Just for the record, for the people who are brainwashed into thinking that these foreign delegates, their visits and their reports are a work of honest and credible investigations, these lies should put to rest the level of perversity these officials representing these bully nations and the UN have gone to by using the media which they own to spread lies and completely humiliate nations.

Now these very entities are turning their guns on their own citizens and a closer look at the new laws, regulations, cameras, spying scandals, even firing honest military personnel and drugging the rest as well as poisoning the citizens with chemicals will show.

* Lies that led to the invasion and occupation of IRAQ

· Accusing Iraq of 9/11
· Accusing Iraq of links with Al-Qaeda (Al-Qaeda was created by the US, Osama was created by the US)

· Accusing Iraq of seeking Uranium for nuclear programs
· Accusing Iraq of importing Aluminium tubes to develop nuclear weapons
· Accusing Iraq of possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)

· Accusing Saddam of developing smallpox (Colin Powell even lied to the UN Security Council)

· UN weapons inspector Hans Blix saying Iraq had 10,000 litres of anthrax (UK MP Jack Straw) - UN conducted 400 inspections over 300 sites (These were not for WMDs - the officers were no weapons inspectors, but secret service agents.)

These lies led to:

· 29,200 bombs and missiles in the first month killing tens of thousands of civilians

· 650,000 Iraqis had died by 2006 (epidemiologists); that figure is said to have reached one million by 2008 (Were these all insurgents? No they were Iraqi civilians and Iraqi children)

· Brainwashing US troops into linking Iraq with 9/11 to take revenge on Iraq

· US rules of engagement were ‘360 degree rotational fire’ on streets packed with civilians

· Systematic torture in US prisons included excruciating, deadly forms of hanging; extreme heat and cold; sleep deprivation; starvation and thirst; withholding medical treatment; electric shocks; rape and sodomy; beatings with all kinds of weapons; burning; cutting with knives; injurious use of flexi-cuffs; suffocation; sensory assault and/or deprivation; and psychological torture such as sexual humiliation and threats against family members.

· Article 54 of the Geneva Convention prohibits attacks on “drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.” US and NATO did exactly this. They destroyed Iraq’s drinking water and sanitation facilities because the US knew that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding and epidemics would lead to death.

Aggression was called the ‘Supreme International Crime’ and the US, UK, EU and all other NATO nations should stand trial, adapting the Nuremberg Laws for their crimes.

Is it not an aggression to falsely invade, occupy and kill the citizens of the countries that have been invaded?

The Iraq Inquiry in the UK has declassified documents showing that Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were warned consistently and repeatedly that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which their legal advisers called “one of the most serious offences under international law.”

If the UN Charter expressly prohibited the use of military force by any country against another, that prohibition has not been repealed. Aggression still remains a crime so what is the UN doing about the drone strikes which are acts of aggression on countries that have not declared any threat to the US?

If anyone has doubts about America’s Crimes Against Humanity, just read Nick Turse’s book, Kill Anything That Moves, that documents America’s systematic slaughter in Vietnam where the orders were to ‘kill everything and anything that moved’. Former US President Nixon promised to pay $3.3 billion in reparation - that has been completely forgotten and not a cent has been paid to Vietnam.

* Panama’s leader General Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset since the 1960s. Then, the US decided to bring ‘democracy’ and defend ‘human rights’ to Panama using 27,000 US troops and invaded it in 1989. Noriega was released from US prison in 2007, was extradited to France and was returned to Panama in 2011 where he remains in prison.

“From the 1940s to the 1990s, the United States used various parts of Panama as a testing ground for chemical weapons, including mustard gas, VX, sarin, hydrogen cyanide and other nerve agents in … mines, rockets and shells; perhaps tens of thousands of chemical munitions.” (William Blum: Rogue State, 2002.)

* Lies on Yugoslavia:

The lie to liberate Kosovo with false civilian deaths was to tap into the 10 trillion worth of “inexhaustible” minerals in the Trebca mines. Kosovo’s mines containing 77,302,000 tons of coal, copper, zinc, lead, nickel, gold, silver, marble, manganese, iron ore, asbestos and limestone “to name a few” all went to private foreign groups.

The Kosovo ‘liberation’ took 87 days of non-stop bombardment that systematically destroyed communication centres, fuel depots, airports, traffic communications, trains, markets and even the Chinese Embassy (NATO claimed it had the wrong map), the media centre was destroyed, killing the journalists inside.

The US State Department also lied, alleging that the Yugoslav army had two kinds of poisonous gases while the US and NATO had been training the Kosovo Liberation Army for years and the world falsely told it was a ‘civil war’.

* Lies on Libya

Libya under Gaddafi came on top of the Human Development Index for Africa, but US/NATO alleged that his people wanted to be liberated from Gaddafi. There was not one rape committed by Gaddafi's forces - the Viagra mass rape stories were all lies. Reports of Libyans fleeing their homes were all fabrications.

The '10,000 deaths in Benghazi by Gaddafi forces were lies. There were no rapes, no African mercenaries, no helicopter gun ships or bombers, and only 110 ten deaths prior to the launch of the NATO bombing campaign.

According to the Libyan Red Crescent Society, over 1,100 civilians have been killed by NATO bombs including over 400 women and children. Over 6,000 Libyan civilians have been injured or wounded by the bombing. Gaddafi foolishly thought he could win the West’s approval, thereby losing his friends - Russia and China.

*Lies on Afghanistan

Afghanistan is where the US now makes its profits through drugs! The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was planned long before 9/11 and minerals and the gas pipeline is why the US/NATO forces are stationed there. The liars have broken every rule in the book.

*The UN Charter

· The Charter specifically prohibits the use of force to topple foreign governments

· All national and international laws forbid the killing of non-combatants (i.e. arguably all Afghans)

- In December 17, 1984, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution “that all States take no actions aimed at military intervention and occupation, forcible change in or undermining of the socio-political system of States, destabilization and overthrow of their Governments and, in particular, initiate no military action to that end under any pretext whatsoever and cease forthwith any such action already in progress.”

- “The Charter is based on the belief that international law should not be enforced at the expense of international peace.”

- Article 52 of the UN Charter restricts regional agencies, including NATO, to activities consistent with the purposes and principles of the United Nations. So the NATO resolutions cannot override the provision of the UN Charter.

US bombing qualifies as terrorism

The Convention to Suppress Terrorist Bombings (58 signatories, 29 parties) has been signed and ratified by the UK. Canada and the US have signed it on January 12, 1998, but have not ratified it. The Convention to Suppress Terrorist Bombings defines in Article 24 a terrorist bomber as a person who:

“...unlawfully and intentionally delivers, places, discharges or detonates a bomb, explosive, lethal or incendiary device in, into or against a place of public use, a state or government facility, a public transportation system or an infrastructure facility with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury or the destruction of such a place resulting in major economic loss.”

This definition would appear to include the person(s) bombing Afghanistan.

The US-led attacks on Afghanistan highlight one of the critical reasons for defining terrorism; to preclude the use of war to combat terrorism.

The International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (February 25, 2000) by Article 2 makes it an offence to directly or indirectly provide funds to be used to carry out:

“... any other act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

Every time US/NATO kills civilians, it is brushed aside as ‘collateral damage’ however the law is The Law: Cannot use weapons that hit civilians by mistake.

The various laws forbid “excessive force.” What is “excessive force”? In its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or use of Nuclear Weapons (1996), the International Court of Justice held in Paragraph 78: “States must never make civilians the object of attack and consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets.”

Vague interpretation

NATO Law cannot be used to go beyond UN Law. Articles 5 and 6 of NATO's Washington Treaty are more war-friendly, They allow for a vague interpretation of an enemy, and allow other nations to join in. However, Article 52 of the UN Charter restricts regional agencies, including NATO, to activities consistent with the purposes and principles of the United Nations. So the NATO resolutions cannot override the provision of the UN Charter.

There is little point in telling these liars what the Government has been doing during the conflict or even after. They have a plan just like all their plans to invade or occupy nations through a new concept called R2P and they are well on track. The visits of foreign delegates and UN officials are just smokescreens and the handful of 'pats on our back' are just to keep the country fooled until they go in for the kill.

We have fallen lock, stock and barrel for these lies without using our time at these international fora to question the duplicity, the lies and the hypocrisies. Why have we not asked the US, UK, EU and the UN about their crimes against humanity over centuries and the crimes that are being committed without any regret or remorse, in knowing that they are planning to kill, maim, injure and totally ruin nations and their people, simply to amass wealth?

These entities may have fooled the government, but the people of Sri Lanka are not fooled.

The leaders must now wonder whether they are walking into the same traps that Saddam, Noriega and Gaddafi fell to, in trusting these liars.

Karmic justice must prevail for these liars and all those locals who are party to their lies and hypocrisies.