How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against (Paperback)

~ (Author) "America's war on Iraq in 2003 was its third illegal war in just under four years..." (more)
Key Phrases: pace intrattabile, criminal law movement, supreme international crime, Security Council, United Nations, The Hague (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Exciting, original, and completely convincing ... This book is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand how the law really works in international affairs, and it throws a great deal of light on those international affairs themselves." --Edward S. Herman  "This closely reasoned and carefully documented study is sad and grim, and necessary. Unless its lessons are heeded by citizens of the rich and powerful states, the fate of the world will be left to the whim of those with the guns and the faith to enforce their will." --Noam Chomsky

Product Description

The US has claimed the moral high ground in its recent wars. But how is this position tenable if those wars were in fact illegal?

Through a thorough exploration of the recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, and the attempts of the US to legitimise them, Michael Mandel casts a critical eye on the claims the US makes for its wars – "humanitarian intervention" and "self-defence" – and unpacks the complex moral and legal issues underpinning recent US military action. Michael Mandel shows how international law is a malleable entity which the US can bend in its favour, but even then there are many times when it goes against the law and fights wars illegally.

Mandel also explores the recent war crimes trials of those who lose their battle with the US, and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in particular. Mandel argues that the trials are not actually about ending war crimes, or impunity for war crimes, but about selectively punishing "the usual suspects" as part of the imperial strategy of the great powers – primarily the United States. Mandel also highlights how hypocritical such trials are – Milosevic is tried with great ceremony for his crimes, while America is not. In fact, Mandel shows how these tribunals shield America and its allies from responsibility for what is termed "collateral damage", but what is in reality murder on a vast scale.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (July 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745321518
• ISBN-13: 978-0745321516
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #586,657 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb study of current state of international law, September 16, 2004

By	William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Michael Mandel, Professor of Law at York University, Toronto, has written an important book on current international law. In Part One, he shows that the US wars on Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of aggression, and reminds us of the Nuremberg verdict, "To initiate a war of aggression ... is the supreme international crime." The UN Charter rightly upholds this: aggressive war is the worst of crimes, because from it flow all other crimes: murder, rape, torture, terrorism.

In 1999, the US attacked Serbia, on the pretext of stopping ethnic cleansing, but without UN authority. The US used the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to portray its aggression as law enforcement, although the ICTY's first President admitted that the war was illegal. Intervention, whatever the signboard, violates international law and state sovereignty.

Bush has perverted the just, self-defensive war against Al Qa'ida into unjust, aggressive wars against nations: the attack on Afghanistan has killed 20,000 Afghanis so far, about half of them civilians. Afghanis now say, "We were better off under the Russians."

Only four of the 15 Security Council members voted for Bush and Blair's war against Iraq. They went ahead anyway, unauthorised, illegally. Warmonger Richard Perle wrote, `Thank God for the death of the UN'.

In a brilliant discussion of `collateral damage', Mandel reminds us that in law a defendant is equally guilty of murder whether he desired the death, or merely knew that his act was likely to cause death. Part IV of Protocol One to the Geneva Conventions forbids all attacks "which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects." So NATO's perennial excuse, that it does not target civilians, fails.

Part Two studies how international criminal law works. The ICTY from its start worked with NATO, refusing even to consider whether NATO's attack on Yugoslavia was a war of aggression. The new International Criminal Court's Statute omits the crime of starting a war, thus encouraging new aggressions. The ICC judges only acts in war, putting aggressor and non-aggressor on an equal footing.

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars U.S. humanitarianism is (...), August 6, 2005

By	Chris (Washington state, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Michael Mandel writes that former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance and former British foreign secretary David Owen presided over a peace process for Bosnia in the early 1990's attempting to make all the ethnic groups in the country feel that they had all their rights and safety. An agreement was reached in early 1992. Everybody supported the deal except the Bosnian Muslims, who were encouraged by the Bush Sr. administration to hold out for more. Almost four years of horrific civil war followed. The U.S. succeeded in convincing its allies at long last in 1995 to bomb the Bosnian Serbs and pressured the Bosnian Muslims to the negotiating table at Dayton and an agreement was signed. Bhoutros Bhoutros Ghali noted later that the old Vance-Owen plans were more or less the same as the 1995 Dayton accords. The whole point of the exercise from the U.S. point of view was to undermine the leadership of its West European allies in reaching a peaceful settlement, maneuvering them to playing second fiddle,, while U.S. military power eventually solved the problem. In 1992 Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, undermining attempts to get the Bosnian Serbs to compromise, announced suddenly his belief that the Serbs in Bosnian and Belgrade should be treated as war criminals.. This is the same man Mandel notes, who was a key state dept. planner while such Nuremberg style offenses took place as the U.S. slaughter of 600,000 Cambodians in 1969-75, U.S. support for the slaughter of 200,000 in East Timor,U.S. support for the terrorist contras and the death squads which slaughtered tens of thousands in Central America in the 80's, the deliberate destruction of Iraq's vital civilian infrastructure by U.S. bombing during the first Gulf War, etc. etc. .Journalists were full of dubious atrocity stories, circulated by the PR firm Rudder Finn, in the pay of the Izetbegobic govt. For instance Roy Gutman wrote in Newsday about a supposed Bosnian Serb Death camp at Brcko. He claimed that 3000 people were slaughtered there, many by having their throats slit. However, years later, the commander of this death camp was only convicted at the Hague of 12 counts of murder and only 66 bodies were found, almost all with pistol shots. Similarly Omarska was claimed to be a death camp reminiscent of the Nazis, but its commander, Dusko Tadic, ended up being charged with only 9 counts of murder. Srebrencia, everybody's favorite Serb massacre could only yield about 2000 bodies. The tribunal investigators conceded that some of the bodies showed signs of having been engaged in combat before death. Mandel estimates about 4000 dead in this case when estimating the alleged "missing" bodies. He notes that these are all terrible atrocities, but hardly the Nazi-style acts that liberals and leftists sobbed over. Bosnian Muslims were convicted by the Hague tribunal too for running the sort of torture and rape camps accused of the Serbs. In August 1995,under cover of U.S. air strikes on the Bosnian Serbs, and with U.S. air and logistical support, the Croatian army murdered and looted and raped, as hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed from its province of Krajina. The Croatian commander of this operation was indicted by the tribunal in 2001 but of course, no U.S. officials will ever be.

In the Kosovo situation, the author portrays the real motives of the U.S. as being about asserting its military hegemony in solving European problems. Richard Perle praised the war because it was launched without UN approval.The U.S. called Kosovo Liberation Army actions terrorist in early 1998 but denounced the Serbs as engaging in "state terrorism" in their "retaliation" against the KLA. UN and other reports during 1998, as the author shows, are full of citations of KLA atrocities and less those of Serbs. Michael Ignatiev while traveling with his hero Holbrooke wrote that the KLA seemed to be attempting to provoke Serb atrocities and thus to give the U.S. led NATO an excuse to intervene.

At Racak in Jan 1999, William Walker proclaimed a Serb massacre. This is the same guy, Mandel notes, who was U.S. ambassador to the death squad regime in El Salvador who had played down the murder by a U.S. trained battalion in that country in November 1989 of six Jesuits, their cook and her daughter.. The leader of the Finnish forensics team, under heavy pressure from Walker, claimed that a particular pathological test had been done which discredited Serb claims that the dead Albanians had been engaged in combat. However, the author says that this pathologist later admitted to him that that test had not actually been done at Racak. Members of the team broke off from the leader and conducted their own investigation which rebutted U.S. claims. Only twenty two bodies were found, all but one of them adult male and all but one of them shot from far away, not the 45 bodies of men, women and children Clinton claimed had been machined gunned in a ditch

He goes on to show how the U.S., when the Serbs accepted the principle of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo, tried to raise the bar higher to avoid a peaceful settlement by demanding that the Serbs accept an all NATO occupation force that would have access to all of Yugoslavia-obviously as a sovereign govt. they would not accept this. He notes that despite the wild claims such as William Cohen's 100,000 killed after March 24th (when the bombing began and the escalation in Serb violence and refugee flight not coincidently occurred), only 2,250 or so Albanian bodies were actually found afterwards. The Hague tribunal eventually gave up trying to prove Milosevic committed genocide in Kosovo.

The bulk of this book is about the Balkans but he has other interesting stuff. He shows that U.S. effort to block UN action in Rwanda in 1994 was motivated by a desire to block an action in which it had no imperial interest. He shows clearly that U.S. has committed the supreme international crime of aggression many times and has an interesting discussion about the concept of wars of self-defense. He notes in Eastern Europe, most of the people strongly opposed their govt's support for the Iraq war. He shows how the U.S. sabotaged any possibility of getting Bin Laden in its demands on the Taliban after 9-11 and how the cutoff of medical and food aid during the bombing of Afghanistan seems to have killed as much as 20,000; he quotes the NYT as reporting that 600 people in three particular villages died because of such a situation.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chilling, brilliant..., February 7, 2009

By	The Philosopher Stoned (A Humane Corner, Earth) - See all my reviews

Brilliantly analyzed, argued and presented, this book is chilling in its implication. Despite the horrific events leading up to WWII, it seems the world is back to the dark days of accepting and supporting the worst crimes of aggression as long as the population can be lulled into a sense "moral superiority" and justification based on media propaganda, and the truth of the victims' suffering can be kept off the front pages of our complicit mass media. Goebbels would be ecstatic at this level of global acquiescience. History will render a harsh judgment - we're all good Germans now.