COMMISSION MEMBERS: François Houtart (Chairman) | Jean Bricmont (co-chairman) | Pierre Klein (secretary) | Samir Amin | Denis Halliday | Sabah Al Mukhtar | Nawal El Saadawi | Ludo Abicht |
PROSECUTION TEAM: Felicity Arbuthnot | Karen Parker |
WITNESSES: Amy Bartholomew | Ramsey Clark | Armand Clesse | Michel Collon | Jacques Derrida | Sara Flounders | Geoffrey Geuens | Amal Al-Khedairy | Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar | Michael Parenti | John Saxe Fernandez | Hans Von Sponeck | Immanuel Wallerstein | Haïfa Zangana |
Written testimonies by: Michel Chossudovsky | William Clark | Emman Ahmed Khammas | Saul Landau | Neil MacKay | Jacques Pauwels | Glen Rangwala | Scott Ritter | Ed Blanche | Jeffrey Blankfort | Issa G. Shivji | Michael C.Ruppert |
François
Houtart (Chairman) - Belgium
Director of the Tricontinental Center (Cetri), which purpose is to «bring to
knowledge the point of view of the South in the actual context of globalization, to diffuse alternative
proposals, elaborated by the South, and to contribute to an in depth thinking on social movements ».
After graduating in Philosophy and Theology, he was ordored priest in 1949. Licensed in Political and Social
Sciences as well as from the Higher International Applied Urbanism Institute of Brussels, he is the author of
numerous publications concerning socio-religious researches, and participated as an expert to the works of
Concile Vatican II (1962-1965). He participated in the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal on US Crimes in
Vietnam in 1967. He is a spiritual father and a member of the International Committee of the World Social
Forum of Porto Alegre, Executive Secretary of the Alternative World Forum, and President of the International
League for rights and liberation of people.
Currently Houtart is senior
adviser to the President of the United Nations General Assembly,
Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann.
Unavoidable character of the alter-globalization movements, he participated to numerous works on
globalization, social stuggles, and regularly collaborates with Le Monde Diplomatique. More...
Pierre
Klein (Secretary) - Belgium
Professeur de droit international à l'Université libre de Bruxelles et directeur du
Centre de droit international de cette Université. Il a dispensé divers enseignements de droit
international public à l'Université d'Ottawa, à l'Université McGill, à l'Université du Québec à
Montréal, à l'Université catholique de Louvain, à l’Université d’Abomey-Calavi (Bénin) et à l’Université
nationale du Vietnam à Hanoï. Il est l’auteur ou le co-auteur de trois ouvrages (Droit d'ingérence ou
obligation de réaction ? - Les possibilités d'action visant à assurer le respect des droits de la personne
face au principe de non-intervention, La responsabilité des organisations internationales dans les ordres
juridiques internes et en droit international et Bowett's Law of International Institutions et de plus de
trente-cinq études de droit international publiées dans la Revue belge de droit international, l'Annuaire
français de droit international, le Journal européen de droit international/European Journal of
International Law, la Revue québécoise de droit international, la Revue de droit de l'U.L.B., ainsi que
dans des ouvrages collectifs. Parallèlement à ses activités académiques, il intervient également en
qualité de conseil dans plusieurs affaires portées devant la Cour internationale de Justice. More...
Amy Bartholomew (Witness)
- Canada
Amy Bartholomew is an associate professor at Carleton university, Ottawa, Canada. She has a B.A.
(Colorado), an M.A. from Carleton University, an LL.B. from the University of Ottawa and a Ph.D. in progress
(New School for Social Research).
Her research interests include postfoundational legal and social theory from Habermas to postmodernism, theories of justice and injustice, theories and practices of human rights, the implication of multiculturalism and globalization for human rights, justice and constitutionalism, and feminist theories of law. More...
Jacques Derrida (+ 2024) (Witness / video testimony / written testimony) - France
Jacques Derrida, the French thinker once described as the most influential philosopher in the world, has died at the age of 74 in a Paris hospital. The controversial theorist was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer last year.
Derrida has been credited with the invention of three philosophical concepts which dominated late 20th century thinking: 'postmodernism', 'poststructuralism' and 'deconstruction', though in later years he showed growing irritation as the words passed into daily use.
Derrida grew up in El-Biar, Algeria, moving to France at the age of 19. From 1952 he studied at Paris's Ecole Normale Superieur under two French philosophical greats, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. More...
John Saxe-Fernandez (Witness)
- Mexico
Chercheur et professeur à la Faculté de sciences politiques et sociales de l’Université
nationale autonome de México (UNAM).
John
Saxe es investigador y profesor de la UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, en la Facultad de
Ciencias Políticas y Sociales. Autor de libros como El mundo actual (1999, con Pablo González
Casanova), Globalización, imperialismo y clase (2001, con James Petras), Globalización del terror
y amenaza bioterrorista (2001, con Gian Carlo Delgado), coautor y compilador de Globalización:
crítica a un paradigma (Plaza & Janés/UNAM 1999).
Geoffrey Geuens (Witness)
- Belgium
Assistant at the Communication and Information Section of the University of Liège
(Belgium). He is the author of l’Information sous contrôle (Information under control), Médias et
pouvoirs économiques en Belgique (The Media and economical power in Belgium) Labor/Espace de Libertés,
2024, and Tous pouvoirs confondus-Etat, Capital et Médias à l’heure de la mondialisation (All powers
confounded - State, Capital and Media at the time of Globalization), EPO, 2024.
Discover the members of the biggest elitist circles and the principle lobbies acting from the backstage to
confront the actual confi guration of “globalization”: The trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Bilderberg Group, Aspen France,… You were never invited? Of Course! Top secret and reserved
to industrials, fi nancers, ministers, European commissioners, famous journalists and top graded militaries…
2024 : Cyril Berneron, administrateur de l’ Association les Amis du Monde Diplomatique annonce que le
livre "Tous pouvoirs confondus" de l'auteur belge Geoffrey Geuens est retenu parmi les cinq
finalistes qui concourent pour le Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique. More...
Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar (Witness) - Iraq
Ghazwan is an Iraqi who lives his ironies: a denouncer of Saddam regime inequities who continues to
live in Iraq; a man who worked hard to provide for his family and his retirement, only to have his assets
frozen in foreign banks as a result of U.N. Resolution 687; a well spoken professional who peppers his
gravel-voiced diatribes with pungent American profanities. He’s been
asked to join the Voices in the Wilderness Writers Project, a unique attempt to give Iraqis an
Internet forum. VitW is the Chicago-based group that has been working since ’96 to end the economic
sanctions against Iraq. Ghazwan studied geophysics at Cal Berkley, and graduated with an engineering degree
from Marquette in ‘67. For most of his career, he sold medical supplies to hospitals. He says he has too
scientific a mind to be a writer, yet he has written dozens of articles over the years, critical not only of
the U.N. sanctions against his country, but also the former regime in Baghdad. More...
Witnesses who confirmed, were scheduled, but couldn't make it.
Scott Ritter (Witness) - USA
Scott Ritter was born in 1960 to a military family.
During the Gulf War he served as a ballistic missile expert under General Norman Schwarzkopf, and joined Unscom in late 1991.
He took part in more than 30 inspection missions and 14 as team leader. Initially, his relationship with Iraq was bad. His unannounced visits were said to have surprised Iraqi officials, who in 1997 accused him of being a US spy.
In early 1998 an inspection by Mr Ritter's team led to the most serious confrontation between Baghdad and the UN since the Gulf War, and eventually to Unscom leaving Iraq. In August 1998, Mr Ritter resigned from his job, accusing the Security Council and the United States of caving in to the Iraqis.
Soon after his high-profile resignation, Mr Ritter was back in the headlines with further criticism of Washington and the UN. Only this time he accused Western powers of being too tough, rather than too soft, on the Iraqis.
In late 1998, Mr Ritter called US and British military strikes against Iraq a "horrible mistake". He forced UN chief inspector Richard Butler to apologise to him after Mr Butler accused Mr Ritter of breaking the law by speaking publicly about his work in Iraq.
In 1999 he published a book, Endgame, where he argued that Unscom's mission had been compromised by Washington's use of inspections to spy on the Iraqis. Last year he produced a documentary entitled Shifting Sands: The Truth about Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq. He said that his team was satisfied that Iraq had destroyed 98% of its weapons by 1995. Mr Ritter accused the US Government of deliberately setting new standards of disarmament criteria to maintain UN sanctions and justify continued bombing raids. He also said Iraq "did co-operate to a very significant degree with the UN inspection process" and blamed the US and the UK for the breakdown. Mr Ritter essentially repeated those views during his trip to Baghdad last year.
More...
William Rivers Pitt (Prosecution) - USA
William Rivers Pitt is an internationally best-selling author of three books: 'War on Iraq - What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' (By William Rivers Pitt and Scott Ritter 2002), 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence' (June 2003), and 'Our Flag, Too - The Paradox of Patriotism' (June 200). He is the Managing Editor and Senior Writer for truthout.org.
Mr. Pitt is a political analyst for the Institute for Public Accuracy. He spent several years as a high school teacher of English Literature, Writing, Grammar, Journalism and History, and was a Dean. Mr.Pitt currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts . He is 31 years old. Pitt, co-author of "War on Iraq : What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know", is an angry leftist. He is angry with the president and his administration for dismantling the Bill of Rights, distorting our national purpose and placing environmental policy, tax policy and our military power in the hands of corporate oil interests. He is angry with the media for ineptly reporting on important policy issues while endlessly chasing Gary Condit. He is angry at the Supreme Court for giving Bush the presidency. And he is angry with the American public because they "have not been minding the store." More...
Neil MacKay (Witness) - UK
Neil Mackay is the Sunday Herald's multi-award winning Home Affairs and Investigations Editor. Beginning his career in Northern Ireland before moving to Scotland in the mid-90s, Neil has been with the newspaper since its launch in February 1999. He is a regular guest on current affairs programmes on TV & radio both nationally and internationally. More...
Jacques Pauwels (Witness) - Belgium/Canada
Jacques Pauwels holds a history degree from the University of Ghent in Belgium (1969), a PhD in history from York University in Toronto (1976), and an MA (1984) as well as a PhD (1995) in political science from the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War (James Lorimer, Toronto, 2024), a book in which he questions the orthodox view of America’s participation in that war. Pauwels argues that the social-economic and political elite of America had nothing against fascism, that Washington merely stumbled into the war, and that even in a war which would go down in history as America’s “good war”, the American leaders were not really interested in the triumph of democracy and justice but in business, money, profits. This book is particularly relevant today, when America is supposedly fighting yet another “good war” for purely idealistic reasons, and comparisons between the “War against Terrorism” and the Second World War are invoked ad nauseam by President Bush and duly echoed in the US media. More...
Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, is a Beirut-based journalist who has covered Middle Eastern affairs for three decades.
Jeffrey Blankfort is former editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and has written extensively on the Israel-Palestine conflict. His photographs of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement and the Black Panthers have appeared in numerous books and magazines and are currently part of a show, "The Whole World is Watching," He lives in San Francisco. He currently hosts radio programs on KZYX in Mendocino, CA and KPOO in San Francisco. He is a journalist and Jewish-American pro-Palestinian human rights activist in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa. He has taught as Visiting Professor at academic institutions in Western Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, has acted as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has worked as a consultant for several international organizations including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the African Development Bank, the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (AIEDEP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
Dr. Chossudovsky is past President of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He is member of a number of research organisations including the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), the Geopolitical Drug Watch (OGD) (Paris)and the International People's Health Council (IPHC). (Centre for Research on Globalisation: http://globalresearch.ca)
William Clark is Manager of Performance Improvement at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research on oil depletion, oil currency issues and U.S. geostrategy received a 2024 Project Censored award, published in Censored 2024. He lives in Columbia, Maryland.
The invasion of Iraq may well be remembered as the first oil currency war. Far from being a response to 9-11 terrorism or Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, Petrodollar Warfare argues that the invasion was precipitated by two converging phenomena: the imminent peak in global oil production, and the ascendance of the euro currency.
Energy analysts agree that world oil supplies are about to peak, after which there will be a steady decline in supplies of oil. Iraq, possessing the world's second largest oil reserves, was therefore already a target of U.S. geostrategic interests. Together with the fact that Iraq had switched to paying for oil in euros -- rather than U.S. dollars -- the Bush administration's unreported aim was to prevent further OPEC momentum in favor of the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency standard.
Meticulously researched, Petrodollar Warfare examines U.S. dollar hegemony and the unsustainable macroeconomics of 'petrodollar recycling,' pointing out that the issues underlying the Iraq war also apply to geostrategic tensions between the U.S. and other countries including the member states of the European Union (EU), Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. The author warns that without changing course, the American Experiment will end the way all empires end - with military over-extension and subsequent economic decline. He recommends the multilateral pursuit of both energy and monetary reforms within a United Nations framework to create a more balanced global energy and monetary system - thereby reducing the possibility of future oil- and oil currency-related warfare.
A sober call for an end to aggressive U.S. unilateralism, Petrodollar Warfare is a unique contribution to the debate about the future global political economy. (full article can be read at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html)
Glen Rangwala trained as a political theorist in Cambridge, UK, switched to the study of international law, and then returned to Cambridge to complete a doctorate in political and legal rhetoric in the Arab Middle East. His specific interest is in Palestinian politics from 1967 to 1977, and the rhetorical relations between the West Bank resident population and the leadership of the Palestinian resistance movement in exile. He is also published on a number of other themes, including international humanitarian law, comparative human rights law, Iraq and nuclear weapons.
In between the academic work, he helped run the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (based in Cambridge, UK) and Arab Media Watch. Some of his more mundane reference notes on the Middle East are also available on-line http://middleeast.reference.users.btopenworld.com/
a former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer who for over twenty years has been trying to bring to public attention his first-hand knowledge of CIA complicity in the drug trade flooding our inner cities with hard drugs as an apparent covert funding mechanism for the weapons trade for destabilizing populations around the world for their economic exploitation. He has become a lead spokesman for the Crack the CIA Coalition which has the endorsement of numerous prominent social activists and groups. For more information on his work and the recently released volume 2 of the CIA Inspector General's report acknowledging CIA complicity in the drug trade (a report in danger of being intentionally obscured by the impeachment process).
Professor of Law, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania