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.American
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VI..#31.
July 31, 2006....americanfreepress.net |
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AFP AT INTERNATIONAL
PEACE CONFAB
PIPER ACCEPTS INVITATION TO ATTEND GLOBAL CONFERENCE
Dr. MAHATHIR MOHAMAD |
Back
from his three-week visit to Malaysia as an honored guest of the
highly respected former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, correspondent
and author Michael Collins Piper is filing his report this week
on the international peace conference for which Piper extended his
stay in Kuala Lumpur.
See INSIDE THE MALAYSIA,
Page 10
P. 10, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS * July 31, 2006 Behind
the Scenes at the Global Peace Conference with
Michael Collins Piper
INTRODUCTION
AMERICAN
FREE PRESS
correspondent Michael Collins Piper recently returned from
a threeweek visit to Malaysia, during which time he was
a special guest of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime
minister of Malaysia, at the second formal session of the
Perdana Global Peace Organization.
Chaired by Dr. Mahathir, the peace forum, which was first
launched in December 2005, formulated and endorsed the Kuala
Lumpur Initiative urging a global campaign to have the conduct
of war formally criminalized under international law and
to make leaders who perpetrate wars, along with the organizations
and businesses that support them, recognized as criminals
by international law.
The special June 22, 2006, session of the peace forum focused
on the theme: “The Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar
Hegemony & Islam” and featured a diverse group
of distinguished diplomats, scholars and others from around
the globe who not only addressed the subject of the ongoing
role of the United States and Britain and Israel in the
problems of the Middle East — in particular the drive
for war against Iran — but also the dangers of nuclear
proliferation. The moderator of the forum was Mukhriz Mahathir,
coordinator of Peace Malaysia and also the son of Dr. Mahathir.
Last week, in its July 17 and 24 issue, AFP published a
transcript of a specially recorded message Dr. Mahathir
gave to Michael Collins Piper to pass on to the readers
of AFP, urging them to support and publicize the Kuala Lumpur
Initiative and the aims of the Perdana peace forum.
In this and subsequent issues of AFP, Piper’s summaries
of the remarks of the speakers will be published. What follows
is Michael Collins Piper’s on-the-scene report of
comments made by Dr. Mahathir and Francis Boyle to the peace
forum.
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Inside the
Malaysia Conference
By Michael Collins Piper
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KUALA
LUMPUR, Malaysia — “We cannot underestimate the neo-conservatives
in the Bush administration,” said Dr. Francis Boyle, who was
educated at the University of Chicago alongside a number of the
key
“neo-cons” who are influential in the Bush administration
today. They are aiming “for control and domination of the
world’s economy.”
Boyle spoke before the 2006 special forum of the Perdana Global
Peace Organization. According to the group’s web site, the
Perdana Global Peace Organization was established in 2005 “to
spearhead the worldwide initiatives of the Perdana Global Peace
Forum . . . Led by Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Tun Dr.
Mahathir Mohamad, and supported by a panel of leading Malaysian
and international peace activists, the Perdana Global Peace Forum
2005 culminated in a declaration to criminalize war and to make
leaders who perpetrate wars, along with the organizations and businesses
that support them, duly recognized as criminals by international
law.”
Their attitude, Boyle said, is “You do what we tell you to
do, or else.” Allied with the hard-line Likud elements in
Israel, the neo-conservatives have “no problem with attacking
Iran and exterminating hundreds of thousands if not millions of
Iranians.” Israel itself, he said, would be happy to break
the taboo — in place since the attack on Hiroshima —
of using nuclear weapons.
An attack on Iran would be a war crime, said Boyle, a noted authority
on international law. And although the neo-conservatives know such
an attack would be a war crime, said Boyle, “they don’t
care.” They see the use of nuclear weapons against Iran as
a way of stealing petroleum supplies in Iran and as also doing a
favor to Israel by eliminating one of its perceived enemies.
In addition, in the event of an attack on Iran, Boyle said that
Israel itself may use the opportunity to wage war against Syria
and Lebanon as a chance to move against Hezbollah, the Palestinian
force based in Lebanon.
In the meantime, Israel is “starving the Palestinians to death,”
with the support of the United States, “because the Palestinians
had the audacity to select Muslims [in
Hamas] as their leaders.”
The use of nuclear weapons “is in the plan,” and “it’s
in the public record” and most of the governments of Europe
“are in on it,” said Boyle. War is not easily localized,
he noted, pointing out that after the “local” conflict
that erupted after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
at Sarajevo, World War I erupted and 20 million people died as a
consequence.
PROFILE: FRANCIS BOYLE, Ph.D.
........Francis Boyle
is a scholar in the areas of international law and human
rights, is an attorney and political scientist who is a
professor of law at the University of Illinois. The author
of eight books, including his most recent, Destroying World
Order, Boyle has served as legal advisor to the Palestinian
delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991-1992
and is an internationally recognized authority in the arenas
of war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy and bio-warfare.
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In reality, the policies of the neo-conservatives are hardly different,
Boyle said, than traditional U.S. policy. Since the days when the
United States waged imperial policies to take control of Hawaii,
Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, for example, “nothing
has changed regarding the operational dynamics of American imperial
policy.” Using the pretexts of “stopping the development
of weapons of mass destruction, waging a wear on terrorism and promoting
democracy,” the United States is, he said bluntly, “trying
to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and the people
of the Middle East.”
In 1967, he said, Israel waged an illegal preventive war and seized
land from the Arab states and the United States and Europe came
to the support of Israel when the Arabs responded in self-defense.
When the Arabs responded with an oil embargo, then-Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger declared that “This will never happen
again” and the United States assembled its Central Command
to “steal, conquer and dominate” the oil and gas of
the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.
Boyle asserted that Israel is a “failed state” and acts
as a “cat’s paw” for the United States and could
not even survive without the military and economic aid that the
United States provides it.
The first Iraq war in 1991 was, in reality, the first expedition
of the Central Command and its so-called Rapid Deployment Force,
one of 15 years in the making, “one of unprecedented dimensions.”
The intent was to divide up Iraq between the warring Kurds, Sunnis
and Shiites since, Boyle noted, Iraq was — according to anti-Muslim
propagandist Samuel Huntington — the only Arab state with
the capacity to challenge the United States and Israel.
The result of the sanctions, which followed the first war, was the
death of 1.5 million Iraqis. Former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright said that “the price was worth it.” Since 1990
there has been “outright genocide of the Muslim and Christian
people of Iraq.”
Boyle believes that the United States was complicit in the 9-11
terrorist attacks in the sense that top-level U.S. officials knew
the attack was coming and allowed it to happen, wanting a pretext
for a long war. He asserted that the United States had long-standing
plans for an invasion of Afghanistan in order to grab its oil and
natural gas and, after 9-11, “They told whatever lies they
had to tell and broke whatever laws they had to break in order to
launch the war.”
Now, he said, “Iran is going to be the next victim of these
outright criminals unless people work to stop it.”
(Issue #23, June 5, 2006, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS)
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