Whether or not General Pinochet is sent for trial, the question looms: who is next? Henry Kissinger and George Bush come to mind. Their terrorism is documented from Chile to South-east Asia.
The reluctance of the US administration to support the prosecution of Pinochet, America’s man, is understandable; in many ways, he was only taking orders.
And what of those in this country whose actions have caused the death and suffering of innocent people? Day after day, British warplanes bomb Iraq, largely ignored by a media whose historic role has been to minimise the culpability of western adventures. Each bomb dropped is the equivalent of the Omagh bomb many times over. Yet Britain is not at war with nor threatened by Iraq. The actions of the Blair government are clearly illegal. That is, they are a crime.
Moreover, the crime is compounded by economic sanctions which, by the narrowest definition of the applicable UN Convention, are genocidal in their consequence. (Although implemented under a UN flag of convenience, they are Anglo-American designed and controlled.) The death of 6,000 Iraqi children of all ages each month, as a direct result, is a conservative estimate by the major humanitarian agencies and by Dennis Halliday, the UN’s assistant secretary-general, who resigned “because I did not join the UN to wage war on children”.
Try sending baby food, or bandages, or stethoscopes, or school books, or toys, or shrouds for the dead to Iraq, and you will encounter a Kafkaesque system of delay and
— source johnpilger.com | John Pilger | 19 Mar 1999