State Green Party Press Release

Pacific Greens Consider Call for Withdrawal From Iraq.

PACIFIC GREEN PARTY OF OREGON
PGP: http://www.pacificgreens.org

May 13, 2004

Contacts: Joanne Cvar, Co-Chair and Media Coordinator, 541-563-3615 cvar@oregonvos.net
Christopher Edgar, PGP Media Team, cedgar@willamette.edu

The Pacific Green Party of Oregon will consider a resolution at its June convention calling for immediate withdrawal of all US military forces from Iraq. Due to recent revelations about rape, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees conducted by American soldiers, intelligence officers and private contractors at Saddam Hussein's former torture facility, the Abu Ghraib prison, Greens will also call for holding the Bush administration and other government leaders responsible for crimes against humanity.

"These are war crimes worthy of the worst regimes in the twentieth century, including that of Saddam Hussein," said Christopher Edgar, law student, Marine veteran and member of the Oregon Greens. "During the war crimes tribunal in Japan after World War II, Japanese leaders were condemned to hanging for less. Such atrocities committed against helpless detainees, as historians and war scholars have amply noted, are the inevitable result of wars of aggression and military occupations, and the administration not only should have expected them, but did indeed have notice of them months ago. It's not enough for the administration to say that mere descriptions, without pictures released to the public, were uncompelling."

Additionally, Pacific Greens join the Vermont Green Party in calling for "the voiding of all contracts that non-Iraqi corporations have received from the illegitimate US occupation regime and the withdrawal of all other US government organizations from Iraq." They call upon U.S. leaders, and Americans in general, not to let the administration and its senior military leaders blame the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram and other extra-judicial internment camps on "the actions of a few." Not only had the poorly-trained, war-weary troops used as prison guards and interrogators become tainted by the moral and emotional degradation that military occupations always bring, but they were ordered to produce results by any means available and tacitly encouraged in their efforts to "break" detainees. "Some of these military personnel are scarcely older than my own grandchildren," said Joanne Cvar, PGP Co-Chair. "What are we teaching our young soldiers about the use of violence, cruelty and perversion against the innocent? According to reports, seventy to ninety percent of their prisoners were randomly detained civilians who had never been charged with anything and had nothing to divulge."

"The Bush administration's foreign policy," Edgar points out, "is a massive expansion of a post-World War II U.S. stance that has, through both direct military action and indirect subversion via the Central Intelligence Agency, continuously subjected South America, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the rest of the Third World to oppressive, murderous pro-U.S. regimes, forcing the bulk of Third World populations into deplorable poverty and naked fear.

"This sordid history of bloody deeds done in the name of America is exemplified by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, the covertly-U.S.-backed coup against populist leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, and consistent military and political support for the Israeli occupation and repression of the people of Palestine," said Edgar. "We have subjected the civilian population of Iraq to near-genocidal sanctions, war, depleted uranium poisoning, and now torture and shame. Just as our troops who have committed atrocities have been brutalized by their brutalization of prisoners, so are we all shamed by our shaming of the Iraqi people."