INDEPENDENT NEWS

Rosalea Barker: Post 47

Published: Mon 1 Jun 2009 12:50 PM
Stateside with Rosalea Barker
Post 47
A bounty on their heads! One million dollars was offered on May 30 at 2:58 pm PST by Dr Jurgen Todenhofer, former member of the German parliament, former judge and honorary Colonel of the US Army, to the one:
who brings George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair in a fair and legal procedure before an American or an international court on the grounds:
of the wounding and killing of thousands of American GIs and
of the torture, dismemberment and killing of hundreds of thousands innocent Iraqi civilians.
As the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal stated: “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime - differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within it the accumulated evil of all crimes of war.” The chief U.S. prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today constitutes the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” Or as the famous British writer and actor Peter Ustinov once noted: “Wars are the terrorism of the rich.”
A true democrat and a firm believer in the rule of law cannot hang the little thieves and let the great ones escape.
Todenhofer made the offer in post # 47 in response to a question about how he managed to cope with the human tragedy he witnessed while interviewing people for his book about the Iraqi resistance, Why Do You Kill? The website for the book (which is called “Why Do You Kill, Zaid?” in Germany) is here.
In a later post in the FDL salon, Todenhofer urged people to buy three copies—“one for you, one for your best friend, and one for your senator. Those people who have read this book can no longer vote for war.” He donates all the royalties to injured Iraqi children and to an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation project in Jerusalem.
Among the Ten Theses that form the epilogue of the book, is this one:
10. What is needed now is the art of statesmanship, not the art of war - in the Iran conflict, in the Iraq conflict and in the Palestine conflict.
In his elaboration of that point, Todenhofer says that a solution to the Iraq conflict “will only be found if the United States negotiates - as it did in the Vietnam War - with the leaders of the resistance, though of course not with Al-Qaeda. The leaders of the patriotic and moderate Islamist resistance are almost all prepared to take part in such talks.”
Firedolake’s book salon with Dr. Todenhofer is online here.
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rosalea.barker@gmail.com
--PEACE—

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