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February 28th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Press TV has interviewed Paul Wolf, human rights and international lawyer in Washington about the clear pattern of non-punishment over US crimes occurring in US-led wars throughout the Middle East. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: Keeping in mind the human cost of the highly criticized Qur’an burning in Afghanistan, has the US done enough to restore calm given the fact that this might just be the icing on a decade of violence and violations in the country?
Wolf: I think you’re right. This is really an outburst of public anger and this has really been a catalyst for something that’s been brewing for a long period of time. I don’t think that the apology that President Obama gave is sufficient and the Afghan people are calling for someone to be punished for what happened. And that is entirely reasonable for them to be demanding that.
You know, this is not an isolated incident. Just looking at the issue of desecrating the Qur’an I can cite two examples: one is Camp Bucca, a large prison camp in Iraq. Press TV reported a few months ago about a prison riot that occurred in 2005 or 2006, which resulted from the desecration of the Qur’an and when prisoners found out about it they rioted and a number of them were killed by the guards for rioting and I believe Press TV was the only station that actually reported that story with the detail about desecrating the Qur’an.
A second incident occurred at Guantanamo Bay and this one appeared to be deliberate in which copies of the Qur’an were put in toilets apparently to aggravate or upset the prisoners. I’m not sure quite what they were doing.
So we see a pattern of this and it means that someone is not taking the responsibility to punish these kinds of offenses. And the Afghan people are not entirely ignorant of what the US troops are doing not only in their country, but in the international press.
We had the Haditha massacre, the people who perpetrated the worst massacre of civilians in Iraq, were not punished. We also have things floating around on the internet – trophy photos of US soldiers posing with dead bodies. There’s one case in which the soldiers were collecting body parts. Now, these happened in Iraq, but there’s a growing body of these kinds of horror stories and the common theme in all of them is that no one is ever punished.
So, for President Obama to simply apologize it doesn’t go far enough and I believe that the situation in Afghanistan has gotten beyond America’s control and now it’s just a matter of how to get out of that country with the minimum loss of life.
Press TV: Looking beyond that at this Human Rights Council session, the US ranked fourth as the most condemned country due to its human rights record. With over a decade of Guantanamo-style indefinite detentions without trials; trials in military courts that are not compatible with international law including human rights law – Does it come as a surprise to you at all?
Wolf: Well, I think we have to remember that the UN is really another government. It’s not a court; it’s not a judge that can be perfectly impartial; and they have their own politics and they obey the same laws of politics that every national government does. So to expect them to be fair and to be impartial may be asking a little but too much.
But I think that it does provide a forum and it does provide an authority – moral authority anyway – for the people of the world to focus their attention on things like you pointed out at Guantanamo Bay. These kinds of things that are going on basically to result in every conflict, the US has gone beyond what most countries would do, but whenever you have these wars you can expect to have war crimes committed.
So, I hope the pressure that UN Human Rights bodies and other countries in general put on the US is to stop starting these wars in the first place. Obviously, there’s not that much that anyone can do about it because the US does what it’s going to do and in the case of Libya, for example, it used a very small limited mandate to enforce a no fly zone over Libya as a reason to engage in regime change.
So I’m not sure that the UN is really effective in reigning in the US at this period of time, but I think it is very useful and certainly useful for countries of the world to express their opposition to what the US is doing.
Press TV: What was not debated was the passage of the National Defense Authorization Bill passed early this year in the US. For how long can the US continue to infringe on basic human and civil rights in the name of national security?
Wolf: That’s another good question you know it’s been ten years now since the war on terror officially began with the attack on the World Trade Center and I think most people at that time thought that the laws that were being enacted – The Patriot Act, and some other things were a temporary measure and people were willing to overlook constitutional rights or human rights to say well we just have to do this for safety reasons in the short term.
But you see now these laws have become permanent and with the law that you’ve sited, the provision of the National Defense Authorization Act; that goes beyond anything that happened even right in the heart of hysteria about the attack in 9/11.
So, the US is continuing to move in that direction and I think that surprises me, but even at this point in time when there’s so much public dissatisfaction about the wars, there hasn’t been a terrorist attack in many, many years now, but the government is still passing harsher and harsher laws.
So it seems to be something of an unstoppable trend and I don’t really know what anyone – you mentioned Human Rights – there really is no court that is capable of judging the US if it doesn’t consent to be judged. All countries are sovereign and the US is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and really doesn’t like to have other countries comment on what it does.
I think as you mentioned with Guantanamo that this Act, which goes against… all the way back to the Magna Cata a thousand years ago – you can’t hold someone without having a reason and if someone has a legal challenge you have to address the challenge of why you are holding this person, it’s called Habeas Corpus.
Although no one can tell the US you must do this you must do that, I think it’s very important to keep these issues alive in the news media and for other countries where it’s easier for you to criticize than the US, criticize your own government to put pressure on the US and I think that that’s very helpful to us.
SC/MB
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