The British sheds light on the need for the prosecution of AWOL Bush, et al.

Dick McManus

The British sheds light on the need for the prosecution of AWOL Bush, et al. A senior Welsh MP said last night he knew "for certain" Tony Blair and George Bush struck a deal to invade Iraq at their notorious Crawford Ranch meeting in 2002 - a year before war was declared. Elfyn Llwyd, Plaid Cymru's parliamentary leader, said he had seen a confidential memo to that effect, although he would not divulge its exact contents. The Meirionnydd Nant Conwy MP said: "I think other things should have been pursued [at the inquiry], in particular the detailed conversation at the ranch in Crawford in April 2002. I do know that the deal was struck, I know for certain it was struck at that stage so just to pretend months down the road that no deal had been struck I think is unforgivable. MP Llwyd refers here to the infamous Downing Street Memos, a collection of British government documents that lay out George W. Bush's intent to invade and occupy Iraq whether or not there was any WMD/terrorism evidence to support the action. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. These documents, along with testimony from the likes of MP Llwyd, offer a vivid portrait of a Bush administration more than willing to break laws and deceive the public to achieve the ends they sought. It was a nest of criminals that occupied the White House for those eight long years, proof of this continues to pile up in vast drifts, and nothing comes of it. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Rice, and a dozen other members of the Bush administration, including Yoo and Bybee, are directly responsible for this carnage. They lied through their teeth and broke any number of laws to see it done. They are guilty of much more than the war crimes they committed in both Iraq and the United States. They are guilty of bankrupting this nation with two wars begun on false pretenses and perpetuated to enrich the few, while further cementing the stranglehold "defense spending" has on our growth as a civilized nation. http://www.truthout.org/the-great-escape56669 Commentary: I agree. And America needs to look at its past and charge dead people with war crimes. Maybe we need to charge the teachers and school boards and the faith based/church leaders in America for their failure to learn the true history of the United States and teach it. Last night on the public TV show NOVA a history of the air war and bombing of German cities prior to D-Day, giving the Allies air superiority and later during the war , fire-bombing of German cities. The military targets were railroad car marshalling yards to destroy the German economy and military factories, but civilian casualties were expected in large numbers because they lived all around these targets. In late July 1943, the city of Hamburg was bombed by combined RAF and USAAF strategic bomber forces. Four major raids were carried out in the span of 10 days, of which the most notable, on 27-28 July, created a devastating firestorm, killing at least 45,000 civilians. The use of firebombing was encouraged by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and carried out by Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command. Harris even hoped that the Germans would depose Hitler, or that the Nazi leadership would simply give up. He failed to realize that Hitler and his cronies were as little affected by the deaths of civilians as he. Harris refused to put all his resources into bombing oil facilities once it was shown to be The Third Reich's Achilles Heel. http://everything2.com/title/Was+the+Allied+Bombing+in+WW2+a+success%253F On the evening of February 13 - 15, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, and killing as many as 135,000 people. It was the single most destructive bombing of the war, that is, non- atomic bombing. During the war Dresden had never been a site of war-production or major industry and the Germans were already on the verge of surrender. The firestorm created by the two days of bombing set the city burning for many more days, littering the streets with charred corpses, including many children. Eight square miles of the city was ruined, and the total body count was between 35,000 and 135,000. The US Air Force did day light bombings of these cities. The main firebombing, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on 2 March 1945. When news of the destruction of Dresden reached Britain, there was considerable public outcry over the destruction of such a beautiful city when the war seemed to be virtually won. A SHAEF briefing officer inspired such nationwide newspaper headlines as "Terror Bombing Gets Allied Approval as Step to Speed Victory." Secretary of War Henry Stimson ordered an investigation of the "unnecessary" destruction. On 23 February 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities. In four bombing raids also occurred with incendiary devices on the city of Baroque, German with an estimated a death toll between 24,000 and 40,000. The Czech city of Prague, Brux and Pilsen were bombed. At the Yalta Conference on 4 February 1945, the Soviets asked for Allied air attacks on communication centers to prevent the shifting of German troops to the Eastern Front. They specifically mentioned Berlin and Leipzig, but Allied planners also identified Dresden and Chemnitz as appropriate objectives to meet Soviet needs. The bombing of Berlin, targeted the city of Berlin, the civilians. At that point, the US for sure had committed a war crime and lost its ethical standing in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II The attack on Berlin (Operation Thunderclap) was conducted on 3 February 1945 over the protests of U.S. Eighth Air Force Commander, Lt-General James. He was against designation a whole city as the TARGET, as being not what we as American stand for. He was overruled by the USAAF commander, General Carl Spaatz, who was supported by the Allied commander General Dwight Eisenhower. Doolittle did not refuse to do give his pilots the orders to bomb Berlin, Operation Thunderclap. You can add the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marshall and President Truman to the list of war criminals. There was another big raid on 26 February 1945 which left another 80,000 people homeless. Up to the end of March 1945 there had been a total of 314 air raids on Berlin, with 85 of those coming in the last twelve months. Half of all houses were damaged and around a third uninhabitable, as much as 16 km² of the city was simply rubble. The estimates of the total number of dead in Berlin from air raids range from 20,000 to 50,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Berlin_in_World_War_II Don’t let anyone tell you that the US never used suicide pilots like the Kamahis pilots used by Japan. They did. Something like 60% of the bombers made (I guess) at the Boeing company (B-29s, B-17s)were shot out of the sky, with a chance of dying in a raid of one in four, 25% you would die. In the beginning of these bombing raids, the US Air force used no fighter protection of bombers. Flying long distances of Germany (enemy territory) allowed the Germans to determine the direction the American bombers were flying and send up their fighters planes. These German fighters could land, re-fuel and re-arm, and intercept the American bombers in-bound and out of Germany. The US Eighth Air Force was the primary strategic bombing force of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) over Hitler's Europe. A total of 26,000 American airmen of the 8th were killed (one-tenth of all Americans killed in WWII) and 18,000 were wounded. Over 28,000 became POWs after being shot down. British Bomber Command, the counterpart to the American 8th, lost 89,000 men killed, captured, or wounded. The first bombing raid on Tokyo using incendiary devices was on the night of 24–25 February 1945 and destroyed around one square mile of the city. On 9–10 March, approximately 16 square miles of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died, some 41,000 to injuries at a million were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. in the resulting firestorm. Over 50% of Tokyo was destroyed by the end of World War II. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo The atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurred on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki three days later, slaughtering more than 200,000 Japanese and over a million from radiation sickness and cancers years later. (source: Google it and NOVA program) NOTICE: Material posted to this mailing list is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and/or educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of the US Copyright Law. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml