Portreti më origjinal dhe më dramatik i Vladimir Putinit është krijuar nga një fotograf bjellorus. Pavlo Krychko përdori 1500 screenshot dhe fotografi të marra gjatë luftës 57-ditore të Rusisë kundër Ukrainës.
Imazhe të papërpunuara, të pamëshirshme që shkrihen për të formuar tiparet e tij dhe bëhen materializimi i barbarizmit të atyre që urdhëruan bombardimin e civilëve.
Shihen aty ndërtesat e djegura, kryqet në oborret e Buçës ku varroseshin të vdekurit me nxitim, ikja nga spitali i fëmijëve në Mariupol, kufomat e braktisura në rrugë nga rusët.
“Tmerri, dhimbja, vuajtja, vdekja, fatet e shkatërruara, krimet, çnjerëzorja, e keqja janë të gjitha në këtë foto.
Duke parë të gjitha këto foto ende e kam të vështirë të kuptoj njerëzit që mbështesin Putinin”, – ka shkruar Krychko në profilin e tij në Facebook. ©LAPSI.al
portreti i bushit del ma i modh me krimet ne lindjen e mesme
George W. Bush confronted: ‘A million Iraqis are dead because you lied’
When George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, he did so with full knowledge that Iraq possessed none of the weapons of mass destruction he told the country he knew existed. He did so with full knowledge that Iraq posed no threat to the people of the United States, despite his assuring the country that it did. He did so with full knowledge that the Iraqi government had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, but he sold the lie that such a connection could exist. Bush manufactured consent, based on deliberate and malicious lies, to convince the nation we must go to war. And when that war, which he promised would be quick, easy and painless, blew up in the Pentagon’s face, Bush did not end it; he stop-lossed the military and ordered the disastrous “troop surge” which took death and destruction to new heights. In his own words, he said “bring ‘em on” as casualty numbers skyrocketed. As for the non-existent WMDs, Bush — instead of apologizing or admitting what he did — he instead performed a comedic skit for the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, where he “searched” for the weapons in the Oval Office.
Bush’s litany of crimes — from his direct authorization of illegal torture to bombing of civilians in Afghanistan — the nightmare he brought to Iraq should be considered the greatest atrocity of the modern era. Not only a flagrant violation of international law, which the Nuremberg Trials deemed the greatest crime against humanity — the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation — but senselessly led to the death, displacement and misery of millions upon millions of people. While the Iraqi people, and every American touched by the war, are still reeling and suffering from his decisions, Bush is enjoying a revival, selling books of his paintings and receiving lavish speaking fees for events like the one I attended tonight.
When I saw Bush was speaking just a few miles from where I live, I felt I had no choice but to find a way to do what is right by those who perished at his command.
I brought with me a list of Iraqi civilians who were killed by American forces, from the victims seen in the “Collateral Murder” video to the Nisour Square massacre. That list also included the names of U.S. soldiers — half of them soldiers killed in Iraq, whose family and friends then became antiwar leaders and founders of Gold Star Families For Peace; the other half, Iraq war veterans who came home and joined the antiwar struggle before succumbing to their wounds, either from injuries in Iraq that killed them years later, or who died by suicide from the scars of the war. Many of them were my friends. I did what I felt they would want me to do.
The very least of what George W. Bush can do is finally confess to what he did, apologize to everyone whose life he destroyed, especially the Iraqi people, and beg for their forgiveness. They have not known a day of peace since March 2003, and neither should he.
Western War Criminals – McNamara, Kissinger,
Bush and Blair
Robert McNamara, who was President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defence
and, after his assassination, President Lyndon Johnson’s, described himself later in life as a “war criminal”. This came after years of mea culpas when he denounced both himself and the war in Vietnam that he had helped initiate. It was
he who invented the term “body count” as a measuring rod of how well US forces
were doing in eliminating the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. For him helicopter gunships flaming out napalm that set alight everything in its path – villages, men, women and children – were de rigueur, a necessary tool in the fight
to hold back communism. If South Vietnam fell so, like dominoes, would one
Southeast Asian country after another. A ridiculous assumption as time showed.
The doubts came to him whilst he was still secretary. He saw that US policy
was built on an illusion, that he and his fellow policy makers were deluded. The
US could never win, and the cost in human terms was outrageously high. His
son, an anti-war activist, got at his conscience. Finally an act of self-immolation
by a protester outside his office managed to get under his thick, amoral skin.
He resigned with no explanation and as a reward for his going quietly Johnson
made him president of the World Bank.
He satiated himself in the task of turning the massive resources of the Bank
in the direction of the poorest. He told a confidante, the economist and writer
Barbara Ward, that “he bled inside for Vietnam”. She passed this on to me, but in
a postcard she sent me said she was cross that had I used her words, based on a
personal and confidential conversation with McNamara, in my foreign affairs column in the International Herald Tribune. This was the first indication available to
newspaper readers that he regretted what he had done. He said nothing in public.
Only after his term of office at the Bank ended did he turn again to the
unfinished business of the Vietnam War. He went to thoughtful seminars with
historians. He opened up discussions with the victorious Vietnamese so that
their former political and military high command could sit down with their
American counterparts and talk frankly.
At the same time he campaigned ardently against the possession of nuclear
weapons whose possession in large numbers he had so valued whilst secretary of
defence. Some said he had effectively become a peacenik. Then came his bombshell when he described himself as a war criminal – not just because of Vietnam
but also, he said, for his time as a young strategic planner during World War 2
when he helped formulate the need for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan.
What would have happened if the International Criminal Court had existed and the US had become a ratified party to it? Would a sinner who so publicly
denounced himself and worked so hard to rid the world of war been arrested and
tried? Perhaps he would have wanted it. Towards the end of his life he became
so determined to do everything within his power to redeem his earlier mistakes
that to become a public martyr in a court where he would have a platform to
speak and be heard like in no other place might well have appealed to his deep
sense of humility, helping redeem a life in which he had spent a good part of it in
two dreadful acts of destruction.
Henry Kissinger was a totally different kettle of fish. First, read my chapter on
Pinochet that tells the story of how Kissinger helped engineer a coup d’état in
democratic Chile that led to a great deal of torture and suffering. Second, turn
to the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, America’s biggest war since World
War 2 that ended in an ignominious US retreat and defeat after the country and
its people had been ravaged beyond description.
Johnson, exhausted by the Vietnam War and the divisions it produced at
home, decided not to run again. The right-wing hawk Richard Nixon won the
election. He chose Kissinger as his national security advisor. Later Kissinger
added the portfolio of secretary of state. Nixon had campaigned on the promise that he could end the war. In fact once in power he and Kissinger decided
that the way to end the war was to win it. Thus they unleashed one bombing
campaign after another, using quantities of bombs that would have made even
McNamara blanch when he was in office – far more than were used in World
War 2. This went on until right into Nixon’s second term. Kissinger led the US
team attending the long drawn out peace negotiations and in the end the White
House settled for terms that could have been reached years before.
There are many scholars, well-informed journalists and diplomats who argue that Nixon in 1968 privately assured – an illegal move in US law – their ally,
the South Vietnamese, that if victorious in the election he would give them a
better deal than the Democrats’ candidate Hubert Humphrey would give. All
that South Vietnam had to do to tip the electoral scales in Nixon’s favour was to
withdraw from the peace talks. By doing this they undercut Humphrey’s “peace
plank”. Kissinger himself was implicated as the source of this information as he
was then working for Johnson but at the same time feeding information to Nixon
on what the Democrats’ war strategy was.
In January 1971 General Telford Taylor, who had been the chief prosecutor
at the Nuremberg trials, said that if the standards of Nuremberg were applied
evenly and applied to the American statesmen and bureaucrats who designed
the Vietnam War, “then there would be a very strong possibility that they would
come to the same end” as the Nazi (and Japanese) leaders. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, “[i]t is not every day that a
senior American soldier and jurist delivers the opinion that a large proportion
of his country’s political class should probably be hooded and blindfolded and
dropped through a trap door at the end of a rope”.
There were many causes for alarm that war crimes were being committed.
Melvin Laird who was secretary of defence during the first Nixon administration, was queasy enough about the early bombings of Cambodia, and dubious
enough about the legality or prudence of the intervention, to send a memo to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff asking: “Are steps being taken, on a continuing basis,
to minimize the risk of striking Cambodian peoples and structures. If so, what
are the steps? Are we reasonable sure such steps are being effective?” There is
no record of Henry Kissinger who called the shots ever seeking such assurances.
Indeed in his memoirs he shows a degree of disgust for Laird.
Nixon’s top general in Vietnam, Maxwell Taylor, wrote later that the practice
of air strikes against hamlets in Cambodia suspected of harbouring Vietnamese
guerrillas were “fragrant violations” of the Geneva Convention on Civilian Protection which prohibits “collective penalties” and “reprisals against protected
persons”. What happened was bad enough but what Kissinger sometimes considered doing was beyond comprehension, for example he contemplated using
nuclear weapons to obliterate the pass through which ran the railway link from
North Vietnam to China.
Nixon and Kissinger not only extended the war into Cambodia, they also
took it into Laos. It has been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos
and 600,000 in Cambodia lost their lives. (These are not the highest estimates.)
Figures for the wounded and refugees are several multiples of that. In addition,
the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants (now banned by the US military) created a massive health crisis which fell most heavily on children, nursing mothers, the aged and infirm. Even today the residue of these chemicals
is claiming victims. But all that pales beside what the US did in Vietnam in its
hopeless pursuit of victory against a stubborn, resilient people who had more
right than wrong on their side.
Kissinger’s 90th birthday was celebrated in a glittering affair, attended by
Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry (now Obama’s secretary of state who as a
young man led protests against the Vietnam War), James Baker (George W.H.
Bush’s secretary of state), John McCain (presidential race opponent of Obama),
Condoleezza Rice (George W. Bush’s secretary of state), George Shultz (Ronald
Reagan’s secretary of state), Susan Rice (now Obama’s national security advisor),
Tina Brown and Harold Evans (British high-flying journalists). “The bullets that
would fell a lesser man appear to simply bounce off him and he remains courted
The crime of aggression (planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a
war of aggression) was described by the Nuremberg Tribunal as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within
itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.
President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been
accused by many as war criminals for first starting the war against Iraq and, second, for not watching carefully enough to make sure that war crimes carried out
by individual soldiers were not covered up and for the torture that Bush initiated
and Blair appeared to tolerate.
Did Blair lie over the reason for going to war with Iraq – the supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It depends how you define lie. If you define lie as saying this cat is black when in fact it is white he did
not on the big issues. But what he did do was to give the impression the cat was
assuredly white when in fact it was a sort of greyish white. As far as the public
could tell from what he told them the intelligence services did seem to have the
goods on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
But as the later independent reports made by a distinguished judge and former civil servant have made clear, the caveats were left out and the presentation
was polished by Downing Street. We in the public did not have the pre-polished
version but Blair did and he must have known in his mind, if not his heart, he
was taking a gamble with the evidence. Why he was not prepared to persuade
George Bush to wait a few more weeks until the evidence that Hans Blix, the
chief UN arms inspector, was in the midst of collecting on the ground inside
Iraq, was available was gravely irresponsible. Moreover, sanctions had Saddam
boxed in. He was, as was obvious to many outside the White House and Downing Street, able to harm no one outside his country. The UN policing and inspecting, imposed after the first Gulf War, had led to ridding Iraq of all the weapons
of mass destruction. The war itself had effectively wiped out Saddam’s air force
and navy and broken the back of his army. Evidence has come to light that Bush,
with Blair’s knowledge, had given the green light for going to war long before
Blix got to work. Blair covered this up.
Yet the word “lie” cannot quite be used, although it was pretty near it. The
Conservative Party, then in opposition, banded the word around. But in a related
matter it can. It concerns the controversy over the naming of the Ministry of
Defence’s weapons expert, David Kelly, who shortly after he was ousted in the
press as the source of reports claiming the government’s public dossier on Iraq’s
weapons had been “sexed up”, committed suicide. Although an inquiry exonerated Blair of any blame for precipitating the suicide, a BBC interview much later
When George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, he did so with full knowledge that Iraq possessed none of the weapons of mass destruction he told the country he knew existed. He did so with full knowledge that Iraq posed no threat to the people of the United States, despite his assuring the country that it did. He did so with full knowledge that the Iraqi government had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, but he sold the lie that such a connection could exist. Bush manufactured consent, based on deliberate and malicious lies, to convince the nation we must go to war. And when that war, which he promised would be quick, easy and painless, blew up in the Pentagon’s face, Bush did not end it; he stop-lossed the military and ordered the disastrous “troop surge” which took death and destruction to new heights. In his own words, he said “bring ‘em on” as casualty numbers skyrocketed. As for the non-existent WMDs, Bush — instead of apologizing or admitting what he did — he instead performed a comedic skit for the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, where he “searched” for the weapons in the Oval Office.
Bush’s litany of crimes — from his direct authorization of illegal torture to bombing of civilians in Afghanistan — the nightmare he brought to Iraq should be considered the greatest atrocity of the modern era. Not only a flagrant violation of international law, which the Nuremberg Trials deemed the greatest crime against humanity — the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation — but senselessly led to the death, displacement and misery of millions upon millions of people. While the Iraqi people, and every American touched by the war, are still reeling and suffering from his decisions, Bush is enjoying a revival, selling books of his paintings and receiving lavish speaking fees for events like the one I attended tonight.
When I saw Bush was speaking just a few miles from where I live, I felt I had no choice but to find a way to do what is right by those who perished at his command.
I brought with me a list of Iraqi civilians who were killed by American forces, from the victims seen in the “Collateral Murder” video to the Nisour Square massacre. That list also included the names of U.S. soldiers — half of them soldiers killed in Iraq, whose family and friends then became antiwar leaders and founders of Gold Star Families For Peace; the other half, Iraq war veterans who came home and joined the antiwar struggle before succumbing to their wounds, either from injuries in Iraq that killed them years later, or who died by suicide from the scars of the war. Many of them were my friends. I did what I felt they would want me to do.
The very least of what George W. Bush can do is finally confess to what he did, apologize to everyone whose life he destroyed, especially the Iraqi people, and beg for their forgiveness. They have not known a day of peace since March 2003, and neither should he.
When George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, he did so with full knowledge that Iraq possessed none of the weapons of mass destruction he told the country he knew existed. He did so with full knowledge that Iraq posed no threat to the people of the United States, despite his assuring the country that it did. He did so with full knowledge that the Iraqi government had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, but he sold the lie that such a connection could exist. Bush manufactured consent, based on deliberate and malicious lies, to convince the nation we must go to war. And when that war, which he promised would be quick, easy and painless, blew up in the Pentagon’s face, Bush did not end it; he stop-lossed the military and ordered the disastrous “troop surge” which took death and destruction to new heights. In his own words, he said “bring ‘em on” as casualty numbers skyrocketed. As for the non-existent WMDs, Bush — instead of apologizing or admitting what he did — he instead performed a comedic skit for the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, where he “searched” for the weapons in the Oval Office.
Bush’s litany of crimes — from his direct authorization of illegal torture to bombing of civilians in Afghanistan — the nightmare he brought to Iraq should be considered the greatest atrocity of the modern era. Not only a flagrant violation of international law, which the Nuremberg Trials deemed the greatest crime against humanity — the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation — but senselessly led to the death, displacement and misery of millions upon millions of people. While the Iraqi people, and every American touched by the war, are still reeling and suffering from his decisions, Bush is enjoying a revival, selling books of his paintings and receiving lavish speaking fees for events like the one I attended tonight.
When I saw Bush was speaking just a few miles from where I live, I felt I had no choice but to find a way to do what is right by those who perished at his command.
I brought with me a list of Iraqi civilians who were killed by American forces, from the victims seen in the “Collateral Murder” video to the Nisour Square massacre. That list also included the names of U.S. soldiers — half of them soldiers killed in Iraq, whose family and friends then became antiwar leaders and founders of Gold Star Families For Peace; the other half, Iraq war veterans who came home and joined the antiwar struggle before succumbing to their wounds, either from injuries in Iraq that killed them years later, or who died by suicide from the scars of the war. Many of them were my friends. I did what I felt they would want me to do.
The very least of what George W. Bush can do is finally confess to what he did, apologize to everyone whose life he destroyed, especially the Iraqi people, and beg for their forgiveness. They have not known a day of peace since March 2003, and neither should he.