www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

War and Terrorism

Although I believe (strongly) in peace I also recognize the importance of defending oneself. Unfortunately, portions of the human population aren't interested in peace and feel political and economic ambitions should be realized through force. So, while working for peace I feel it's equally important to remain vigilant and defensive. The utility of violence as an instrument of state craft is pretty limited but always present - history has shown us, countless times, how important it is to remain strong regardless our desire for peace. - Roger J. Wendell, July 2001       The Sanskrit word for war is "yuddha" - Loosely translated as a "desire for more cattle..."       "Sicthis pacum parabellum" Latin for, "If you want peace, prepare for war."

War Crimes

A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.   The formal concept of war crimes emerged from the codification of the customary international law that applied to warfare between sovereign states, such as the Lieber Code (1863) of the Union Army in the American Civil War and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 for international war. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the war-crime trials of the leaders of the Axis powers established the Nuremberg principles of law, such as that international criminal law defines what is a war crime. In 1949, the Geneva Conventions legally defined new war crimes and established that states could exercise universal jurisdiction over war criminals. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, international courts extrapolated and defined additional categories of war crimes applicable to a civil war.

"LET'S BE CLEAR: War is about killing. It's not about glory and duty and saving small children and acts of heroism. It's about killing another living human being before he can do the same to you - in order to achieve some goal established by a political entity. If you are directly attacked you will defend yourself in a moment of desperation. On the other hand, premeditated murder is considered to be the most heinous crime and carries the heaviest punishment. Yet was is politically organized premeditated mass murder. Condoned killing is what separates war from all other human social activities. Although individuals are punished and taken out of society for murder, political entities are usually not delegitimized for waging war."

Click Here for my page on Military Madness...

Click Here for my page on Spooks, Spies, Thugs and Bureaucrats...

Click Here for my page about Nukes...

Göring

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country"   - Hermann Göring, April 18, 1946 (in conversations with psychologist Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg)

CNN.com
February 11, 2008:

"I can not support anybody with the foreign policy he [John McCain] advocates - you know, perpetual war... I think it's un-American, unconstitutional, immoral, and not Republican," - Texas Congressman Ron Paul (Republican)

CNN.com
May 29, 2007:

"Paper: 94 Senators didn't read pre-Iraqi war report"

"The [90-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq] report did contain passages that raised questions about the weapons conclusions, said John McLaughlin, then deputy director of the CIA."

"I think if someone read the entire report, they would walk away thinking the intelligence community generally thinks he has weapons of mass destruction, but there are quite a bit of differences," he said."

"For members of Congress to read the report, they had to go to a secure location on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post reported in 2004 that no more than six senators and a handful of House members were logged as reading the document."

Anthropology:

"Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Like lions, wolves and our own species Homo sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters. Other predators, sitting atop the food chain, have few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds. Neanderthals faced the same problem – if other species didn’t control their numbers, conflict would have.   "This territoriality has deep roots in humans. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behaviour strikingly like human warfare. This implies that cooperative aggression evolved in a common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, at least seven million years ago. If so, Neanderthals will have inherited these same tendencies towards cooperative aggression.   "Warfare is an intrinsic part of being human. War isn’t a modern invention, but an ancient, fundamental part of our humanity. Historically, all peoples warred. Our oldest writings are filled with war stories. Archaeology reveals ancient fortresses and battles, and sites of prehistoric massacres going back millennia."

by Nicholas R Longrich, BBC Future, 2nd November 2020

"The human evolutionary career has produced a highly unusual animal - an animal which has an ability arbitrarily to manipulate the environment unequaled by any other; an animal whose life is centered on the products of its own inventive mind; an animal which, like no other, wages organized murder on its own kind - warfare - which is totally foreign to the rest of the animal kingdom. Why?"

"Before we can start to try to answer this question it has to be admitted that war is an outrageously successful activity. History demonstrates this over and over again. In a world dominated by material possessions - whether of goods, land, or natural resources - a population of people may win for themselves enormous advantage through military victory over another group; the benefits gained must, of course, outweigh the costs of combat (time, resources, and lives). A materially based world undoubtedly provides a favorable environment in which warfare can flourish. And it has flourished more and more with the steady rise in the complexity of social structure. As American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins points out, 'War increases in intensity, bloodiness and duration... through the evolution of culture, reaching its culmination in modern civilization.'"

The 9-11 Commission Report

Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01 "The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq."

Click Here for the 2003 ad Dan Poresky placed in the Allentown Morning Call. Dan published his prophetic piece just a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. My signature, also in protest of the war, is down there with the 700 others in Dan's ad...

It is with great sadness that I would hear, almost daily, about the deaths of our young soldiers in Iraq throughout 2003, 2004, 2005, and much of 2006. Here is that famous 2004 Seattle Times photo of flag drapped coffins being prepared for return to our country...

"Since September 11, we've heard a lot about the 'intelligence failures' that left the United States unprepared for the atttacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon. These failures were not simply the result of poor espionage or of bureacratic incomptetence. They reflected a deeper failure to understand a region and its hitorical wounds, a number of which - though not all - were inflicted by Western powers. The future of America's profoundly stained relations with the Arab and Muslim world depends, to a great extent, on educating the public. Yet the very people who are in a position to perform this vital task have instead found themselves under siege from extremist pressure groups and craven politicians. Their crime? Challenging the nostrums of those formidalble authorities on the Arab world, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon."

In 1846 the war with Mexico had barely begun when writer Henry David Thoreau, in protest, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax. Thoreau was jailed, but released the next day when his friends paid the tax without his consent. Friend and fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed with Thoreau but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Throeau in jail he asked, "What are you doing in there?" Reportedly Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?"

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people" - Howard Zinn "All weapons that kill human beings and destroy environments are weapons of mass destruction" - Ralph Nader, June 2003

McNamera:

"Proportionality should be a guideline to war.

"Killing 50 to 90 percent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.

"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The US/Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all human history.

"What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time, and today, has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it the rules of war. Was there a rule, then that said, you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in a night?

"Lemay [General Curtis Emerson Lemay] said if we had lost the war we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals and I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. That Lemay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral, if his side had lost, but what makes it immoral if you lose or if you win?

"If we can't persuade nations with comparable values, of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.

"What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment?"

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamera
from the 2004 Errol Morris film documentary, The Fog of War
"Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war"
(transcribed by me and Tami)

Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington
By DAVID FIRESTONE
New York Times, Online, Sunday, September 14, 2003

"WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents."

Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be borrowed, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the next generation of taxpayers and the generation after that. The $166 billion cost of the work so far in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known."

Did you know?

Despite "smart" bombs, and other sophisticaed weaponry, millions of innocent civilians have died in military conflicts! As of November 2025, the U.N. estimated that Russia had killed over 14,000 Ukranian civilians. Independent researchers and historians like Patrick French estimate that over a half million Tibetans have died due to repression and famine under Chinese rule.

Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.

Part III : Status and treatment of protected persons #Section III : Occupied territories

ARTICLE 49

Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. Nevertheless, the Occupying Power may undertake total or partial evacuation of a given area if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. Such evacuations may not involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement. Persons thus evacuated shall be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased. The Occupying Power undertaking such transfers or evacuations shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to receive the protected persons, that the removals are effected in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that members of the same family are not separated. The Protecting Power shall be informed of any transfers and evacuations as soon as they have taken place. The Occupying Power shall not detain protected persons in an area particularly exposed to the dangers of war unless the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

(Click on this thumnail image for a larger view of my Cold War Certificate from Donal Rumsfeld)

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