My appearance on "The Vanguard Show", a podcast
show hosted by Malik Ismail in Atlanta, Georgia.
We discussed a wide-range of topics that included my
biographies on the world boxing champion Dick Tiger and the one on Frankie
DePaula, the boxer who was murdered by the Mafia. My writing in general, my
YouTube History Channel, my views on Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, African
development, the Black Panthers and the global Covid crisis.
Adeyinka Makinde trained for the law as a barrister. He
lectures in criminal law and public law at a university in London, UK, and has
an academic research interest in intelligence & security matters. He is a
contributor to a number of websites for which he has written essays and
commentaries on international relations, politics and military history. He has
served as a programme consultant and provided expert commentary for BBC World
Service Radio, China Radio International and the Voice of Russia.
Miami-born Malik Ismail is a former Panther Minister of
Informationof the New Panther Vanguard
Movement (formerly known as New African-American Vanguard Movement) whose
writings have been published in The L.A. Watts Times, rolling out Magazine,
It’s About Time newsletter, The Black Panther International News Service, and
he has been profiled in The African Times. Ismail is an Honorary Member of the
1976- 1981 Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Title of Image: “Photo Op”. Credit:
Imperial War Museum/Peter Kennard & Cat Philips (2005)
March 20th 2003 was the start of the Iraq
War, a war many argue was an illegal "war of aggression" as
prescribed under the Nuremberg Principles.
The Chilcot Inquiry found that Tony Blair
was privately committed to the military option even though he lied to the
Cabinet, Parliament and the British public that war would only be a last
resort, and so was himself an active and knowing participant in the conspiracy
to invade another sovereign nation on a false premise.
In doing this, he was breaching the
“Nuremberg Principles” which clearly outlined the crime of waging aggressive
war; the principle under which military and political leaders of the Nazi
regime such as General Alfred Jodl, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Joachim
von Ribbentrop were convicted and later hanged.
For instance, in a telephone conversation
with President Bush in December 2001, which made reference to the need to be
rid of Saddam, Blair noted that an “extremely clever plan would be required.”
(December 3rd, 2001) In July of the following year, he told Bush: “I will be
with you, whatever.” (“Secret Personal Note on Iraq”, July 28th 2002). He was
advised by Richard Dearlove, the Head of MI6 that the evidence of weapons of
mass destruction was “thin”, but that that would be no problem advised Dearlove
because “intelligence and facts were being fixed (by the US) around the
policy.” (“Downing Street Memo”, Sunday Times, 1st May 2005).
In doing so, Blair was:
1. Abrogating his solemn responsibility
to Parliament
2. Defying international law
3. Engaging in a criminal conspiracy
4. Abusing the powers vested in his
office.
As a result, he was prima facie liable
for the following criminal proceedings:
1. A criminal trial at a court of
international jurisdiction for Waging a War of Aggression.
2. A prosecution under The Hague and
Geneva rules which prohibit the pillage of another nation state by
fundamentally transforming the economy of an occupied nation.
3. A trial in the Palace of Westminster
following impeachment as a holder of public office for “high treason or other
crimes and misdemeanours.”
4. Trial for the common law indictable
offence of Public Misconduct. This is defined as occurring where a public
officer acting in the course of their duties wilfully neglects to perform his
duty or wilfully misconducts himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse
of the public’s trust in the office holder.
The war was illegal because it breached
UN Charter Article 2(4) which provides that all member states must refrain from
the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of
any state. And neither of the two exceptions of self-defence, that is the
threat of an imminent attack, and Security Council authorisation applied.
In 2008, Lord Thomas Bingham used the
occasion of his first major speech after his retirement from Britain’s highest
court to describe the invasion of Iraq as a “serious violation of international
law.”
The judgement of the International
Military Tribunal said the following:
“War is essentially an evil thing. Its
consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the
whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from
other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole.”
The long term effects of the conspiracy
have been catastrophic to human life and regional stability. The occupation of
Iraq which included massacres by the US military and torture in places such as
Abu Ghraib; the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria all combined to create a huge
death toll, permanent injuries, ecological damage, and population displacement
which are still with the world to this day.
Unfortunately, Tony Blair has been able
to escape prosecution, not only due to the lack of will of the political class
in Britain, but because of two key legal obstacles, both centring on the lack
of justiciability:
1. The decision to postpone the jurisdiction
of the International Criminal Court over the crime of aggressive war for a
period which covered the conspiracy to attack Iraq and its launch.
2. The dualist tradition of the British
legal system meant that although Britain was a signatory to the Nuremberg
Principles, unlike the situation in a monist state where international law
becomes part of domestic law without being implemented by a national
legislature, Parliament had not translated the crime of waging aggressive war
into an Act.
So far as 1 is concerned, a suitable definition
was finally reached in 2010 when it was decided that alleged offenders should
not be prosecuted until further agreement in 2017. And regarding 2, the case of
R v Jones (2006) put to rest the argument that the crime of aggressive war had filtered
into British municipal law. Ironically the judge who gave the leading
statement, Lord Bingham would refer to the Iraq War as a “serious violation of
international law” after his retirement.
The definition adopted at the Review Conference of the Rome Statute
held in Kampala, Uganda provided the following:
“The planning or preparation or initiation by a person in a
position effectively to exercise control or to direct political or military
action of a state of an act of aggression which by its character, gravity and
scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the charter of the UN.”
Although this wrongdoing is one of
several “core” crimes such as genocide which do not have a statute of limitations,
the legal principle against the retrospective application of laws is seen as a
stumbling block. Of course, it is argued that the law ought not have been in a
vacuum. It has also been argued that Blair could be tried in a court within a
monist state such as Switzerland where the Nuremberg Principles were in
existence at the time of the war.
However, the former British Prime
Minister has continued to evade prosecution.
NB.
. I was interviewed about the culpability
of Tony Blair in 2016 on 'The Mind Renewed' about Tony Blair's alleged
participation in a War of Aggression:
The recent disclosure by the Wall Street
Journal that Israel has been waging a covert war against Syria-bound Iranian
oil tankers, using water mines and other explosives does not come as a
surprise. But it would be misleading to attribute this only to a continuing
historic rivalry between Israel and Syria, or the contemporary one with Iran.
Instead, it is clear that the actions of Israel along with the recent United
States air strikes against purported Iranian-backed militias in Syria, as well
as the imposition of sanctions against Syria represent the continuum of a
failed policy to overthrow the government of Syria. All of these ill-considered
measures do not stand a chance of causing the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad,
instead they risk prompting an all-out war between Iran and its regional
adversaries Israel and Saudi Arabia. However, the fact that the Wall Street
Journal used US government and regional officials as sources for the story may
indicate that there are dissenting voices in Washington which seek to promote a
different course from that taken by successive US administrations.
It has long
been an open secret that the government of the United States has, with the
connivance of its allies in the Middle East, sought to overthrow the Ba’athist
government led by President Bashar al-Assad. This policy, revealed in a
succession of position papers, economic manoeuvres and covert warfare, much of
which was predicated on the utility of Islamist proxies, was an overarching one
designed to reshape the Middle East and North Africa by taking down the
governments in a number of countries, all of which shared a common opposition
to the State of Israel.
The succession
of policy documents prepared by Israel-friendly, often neoconservative,
think-tanks, were often explicit about which countries to take down as well as
the means of accomplishing this. General Wesley Clark’s recollection of a
memorandum shown to him by former colleagues in the Pentagon in 2001 detailed
how the United State was going to “take out seven countries in five years”.
Those targeted were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. This
was consistent with the ‘Statement of Principles’of the now defunct Project for the New
American Century, as indeed they were with the ‘Clean Break’ document, that is,
AClean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a
policy document produced in 1996 for Binyamin Netanyahu during his first tenure
as prime minister of Israel. Part of the strategy alluded to the “weakening,
controlling and even rolling back” of Syria.
Other papers
provided the suggested means of destroying these states. The RAND
Corporation-produced and Pentagon-funded 2008 paper entitled Unfolding the
Future of the Long War: Motivations, Prospects and Implications for the U.S.
Armypointed towards the
exacerbation of tensions between Sunni and Shia communities, while a
declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document from August
2012 which was circulated to US government agencies such as the State
Department, the CIA and the FBI, explicitly desired the creation of a “declared
or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria”, a state of affairs which
it suggested could be achieved by declaring a ‘No Fly Zone’ as had been done in
Libya when NATO had given cover to Islamist militias, including the
al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which had overthrown the
government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi during the previous year. There was
evidence that a segment of the jihadists who were involved in the overthrow of
Gaddafi were transferred to the Syrian theatre most notably through Turkey,
which along with Israel and the Gulf emirates, was facilitating the
infiltration of Syria by foreign Islamists.
It is against this
background that Israeli strikes on Iranian tankers, the launching by the Biden
administration of missile strike in Syria and the implementation of sanctions
against Syria can be understood.
These actions
come in the wake of the failure to unseat the government of Syria. At the heart
of this were the actions of Syria’s regional allies, the component nations of
the so-called Shia Crescent represented on the ground by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and forces of
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The intervention of Russia
proved decisive in preventing the fall of the secular government of Syria. The
Syrian Arab Army alongside its Shia allies and the use of Russian air power
gradually reclaimed most of the major cities of the country. This reconquest
from Islamist groups such as the so-called Islamic State would have been total
but for the actions of the United States in occupying the oil-producing eastern
part of the country and Turkey in doing the same along parts of its border with
Syria. Turkey has also been instrumental in protecting the last bastion of
Islamist control in the city of Idlib in north eastern Syria.
The substantive
interest of the United States in taking down the government of Syria is not
immediately obvious to an impartial observer. And with the perennial economic
motives related to mineral wealth absent, the centrality of Israeli interests
to which the United States has strenuously catered to for many decades becomes all
the more apparent. Certainly, Roland Dumas, a former foreign minister of
France, when speaking on the French Parliamentary TV network station LCP in
June of 2013, was clear in his assessment that the war in Syria, which had been
in his words “prepared, conceived and organised” at least two years before the insurgency began in 2011, was pursued
for the benefit of Israel.
Israel’s
influence on American foreign policy is well
documented as is its historical mission to achieve and maintain its regional
hegemony by a continuous policy of seeking to balkanise its Arab and
Muslim neighbours. One clear motive for achieving the dismemberment of Syria
would be the difficulty of successor statelets to reclaim the Golan Heights
which it illegally annexed in 1981.
Israel has
pursued its covert war on Iranian tankers with a well practiced amorality and
cynicism. The damage or destruction of oil carrying vessels obviously runs the
risk of polluting the oceans and nearby coastlines, and the revelations of this
subterfuge puts into doubt Israeli accusations that Iran was responsible for
the deliberate spilling of oil which reached its coastline and caused what is
believed to be one of Israel’s worst ecological disasters. The suggested
“environmental terrorism” on the part of the Iranians as claimed by Gila
Gamliel, the Israeli Environmental Protection Minister, may likely be in fact
the proceed of Israeli terrorism on the high seas.
The moral
bankruptcy of the policy pursued by the United States and Israel in providing
both direct and indirect aid to Islamist groups bent on overthrowing the Syrian
government continues with the acts of terror committed by the Israelis on the
oceans, a policy condoned by the Trump administration.
President Joe
Biden’s decision to launch strikes into Syrian territory meant that he became
the third successive U.S. President to do this against a sovereign country with
which the United States is not officially at war. It is disturbing to note that
apart from some voices who questioned the constitutionality of taking such
action given that War Powers Act of 1973 expressly prohibits the executive
branch from committing the country to an armed conflict without prior
authorisation from Congress, few political figures apart from former congresswoman
Tulsi Gabbard have referred to the context of America’s strategy of regime
change.
Also lacking a
moral basis is the regime of sanctions imposed on Syria by the United States
through the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (the ‘Caesar Act’), an action which only serves to deprive the
bulk of the Syrian population of food and medicine. The aforementioned
occupation of Syrian territory by the United States and Turkey is depriving the
war ravaged country of food which could be made from wheatfields and oil which
would provide revenues desperately needed for national reconstruction.
Sanctions often
only have the effect of increasing mass suffering in the countries which are
targeted. One example is the estimated deaths of at least half a million
children in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. Secretary of
State of the time Madeleine Albright unfortunately asserted that she believed
that the price was “worth it.”
The
cold-blooded callousness behind Albright’s words are no less relevant to what
is being imposed on Syria today by the United States which bears responsibility
as the grand author of the Syrian tragedy. There is less
chance of the United States and Israel succeeding in overthrowing Assad through
an economic war than there was in overthrowing him via a covert war. The
combination of multiple airstrikes on Syrian territory by Israel and the
imposition of sanctions only serves to prolong the presence of Iran and Russia
in Syria, a country where as the invitees of the legitimate government of a
sovereign state, they have a legal presence in contrast to the illegal
occupation of the United States.
The
prolongation of anti-Syrian actions risks sparking a destructive regional war
between Iran and its regional allies on the one hand and the Israelis and the
Saudis on the other, with the latter bloc hoping to involve the United States.
Such a war would not only be catastrophic for the region, it would ensure that
American moral authority would sink to greater depths after decades of waging a
succession of illegal wars.
There is some
hope perhaps that sanity will prevail because the help given by official
sources to the Wall Street Journal which
revealed the sabotage policy being pursued by the Israeli state, can be
construed as a rebuke for the futile sustaining of a discredited and failed
policy of regime change.
Joe Frazier swings and Muhammad Ali evades
during their epic encounter at Madison Square Garden on March 8th, 1971
Half a century
has now passed since the third and last bout dubbed ‘The Fight of the Century’
during the 20th century.
The first bout
between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali was a unique clash of undefeated
heavyweight champions. One of the most anticipated events in sporting history,
it was promoted as reflecting the ongoing battle in America between the forces
of conservatism and those of the counterculture, represented respectively by
Frazier and Ali.
Only two other
fights had carried a similar level of significance: Joe Louis’s return
confrontation with the German Max Schmeling on the eve of World War Two, and
the duel between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries in 1910. While Louis-Schmeling
was touted as a contest between opposing ideological camps on the threshold of
war, the encounter between Johnson and Jeffries was perceived and promoted as a
clash between black and white, and nothing short of a battle for racial
hegemony.
Held at Madison
Square Garden, Ali-Frazier I was attended by an extraordinary array of people.
New York’s nobility and the city’s underworld sat ringside with celebrities
such as Frank Sinatra, who worked on assignment as the official photographer
for Life, and Miles Davis. Burt Lancaster worked
as a co-commentator.
But beyond the
hyperbole and the mischaracterization of what both men represented (Frazier was
not a man of the Establishment and Ali, then a member of the Black separatist
Nation of Islam, was not an aficionado of the counterculture) was the display
of skill and courage over 15 gruelling rounds. Ali, who had been stripped of
his world title by a vengeful Establishment over his refusal to be drafted into
the United States Army during the Vietnam War, and whose religious affiliations
had engendered widespread public animus, fought Frazier having had only two
bouts after an absence of three and a half years.
Although he
caused Frazier a significant amount of physical damage, which necessitated
Frazier’s stay in a hospital after the bout, Ali, himself was also
significantly corroded by the contest, during which he was felled in the last
round by a patented left-hook. Frazier won the bout in which both fighters
shared equally, the then colossal sum of 5 million dollars.
And while the
sport of boxing then as now is criticised for its raison d'etre for the
purposeful infliction of violence and its tendency to criminally exploit
fighters, nothing can take away from its capacity for spectacle, as well as its
ability to function as a vehicle for expressions of ideological sentiment and
sociological undercurrents.
Ali-Frazier I
embodied this.
It is arguable
that no two other athletes have commanded the world’s attention as they did in
the build up to their fight.
Adeyinka
Makinde is the author of Dick Tiger: The
Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal and Jersey
Boy: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula. He is also a contributor
to the Cambridge Companion to Boxing.
Lt. Edward Piringondo, a decorated member of the Selous Scouts (left),
and clipping of the Monday, February 18th edition of the Hartford Courant
"We are extremely delighted that the evildoers were ... caught and destroyed in their own devilish trap." - Robert Mugabe speaking at a press conference on Monday, February 18th 1980.
The build up to the first universal elections
in the history of Rhodesia, the country which after the elections would be
reconstituted as Zimbabwe, was a tumultuous period. After the failure of
internal settlement, the negotiations and hard bartering at the Lancaster House
Conference, had, it was hoped, finally set the country onto the path of peace
and national reconciliation. But tensions remained high during the campaign
period. There were rumours of a coup by the Rhodesian Army should Robert Mugabe
win and a pledge by some White soldiers to continue the fight along the lines
that the French O.A.S. had embarked once Algeria was lost. The Black political
parties of ZANU and ZIPRA were accused of intimidating Black voters, and Mugabe
threatened a civil war if he was disqualified by Lord Soames, the British
Governor-General. Mugabe himself had survived two assassination attempts in
Fort Victoria and Salisbury. The campaign was punctuated by episodes of
violence, one of which involved the commission of a ‘False Flag’ operation by
the Selous Scouts Special Forces unit.
On the night of
Thursday, February 14th, 1980, the Black township of Harare was rocked by an
explosion in a Renault 12TL Sedan parked near St. Mary’s Anglican Church. The
occupants, two young Black men, were blown apart and the vehicle disintegrated.
The Salisbury Herald reported that an assistant priest at the church,
Reverend David Manyau collected the human remains scattered over the area and
buried them at a nearby spot.
Then a few
hours later, two bombs exploded. One was at a Presbyterian church and the other
at a non-denominational church. Another set of incendiaries would be found the
following morning near the entrance of the city’s Catholic cathedral. Inside a leather
briefcase were a time-bomb comprising 2.7 kg of TNT and a Chinese mortar bomb.
The Herald reported that a slogan “Pambere neMugabe!” was written in the
briefcase among literature referring to ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National
Union – Patriotic Front), the political party led by Robert Mugabe.
Residents of
Salisbury, the capital city soon to be renamed after the township, woke up to
read an advertisement in the local paper which warned that Mugabe would close
all churches if he was elected.
There was a
link between the explosions and the advert. The bombs which damaged the
Presbyterian church and the non-denominational one had been set by a timer, as
police would discover, by the now deceased occupants of the bomb-wrecked
Renault. The advert also appeared to have been timed to coincide with the
previous night's explosions, just as the undetonated bomb-in-a-brief case near
the Catholic church had been designed not to explode to implicate a political
party because of the literature contained inside of it.
But instead of
implicating the party led by the Jesuit Marxist Mugabe, the circumstances only
served to deflect suspicion from ZANU to the security forces. This included the
clumsy choice of words used in the slogan found in the unexploded briefcase.
The guerrillas and other Africans did not use such wording, inviting the
reasoning that it had been composed by a European.
Police and
agents of ZANU-PF were quick to put together the pieces of the jigsaw once the
identities of the men who were blown up in the car were discovered. This was
only made possible because Mugabe had pressured the military command to reveal
them after agents working for him had traced the car registration to one of the
dead men.
They were
Lieutenant Edward Piringondo and Corporal Morgan Moyo, both members of the
Selous Scouts, a Special Forces unit of the Rhodesian Security Forces, which
had gained a reputation as the most effective fighting outfit against the Black
African guerrillas during the 2nd Chimurenga or ‘Bush War’.
In a surprise
communique issued on Saturday, February 16th by Rhodesian Combined Operations
Command on, it was admitted that Piringondo and Moyo were in the
privately-owned Renault. It claimed that both men had contacted their duty
officer an hour before the fatal explosion to report that they had information
about the presence of “terrorists”. They were told to investigate and report
back. However, the communique did not explain why the soldiers should have been
transporting explosives in a private vehicle. When pressed, Combined Operations
refused to give further details. This appeared to onlookers to be an
unconvincing attempt at effecting what in intelligence circles is referred to
as plausible deniability.
Formed in 1973
as a tracking unit, the Scouts quickly germinated into a multi-racial outfit
tasked with waging unconventional warfare. Its members employed infiltration,
abduction, torture, sabotage and blackmail. Many of the missions they undertook
relied on deception, and such deception was used to either kill a large number
of the insurgent enemy or to kill specific civilian targets in order to blame
the Black African insurgents. They were also a key component in the waging by
the White minority government of chemical warfare against their Black
opponents.
Lt. Piringondo,
an early African recruit, was a 27-year-old veteran of ‘pseudo-operations’,
many of which involved infiltrating guerrilla bases. One such mission was
carried out in November 1979 prior to ‘Operation Murex’, an attack on a ZIPRA
brigade in the Kabanga Mission area of southern Zambia.
For this and
other audacious assignments, Piringondo had won the Rhodesian Silver Cross
(SRC), the country’s second-highest military decoration for conspicuous
gallantry. He had also been posthumously nominated for the Grand Cross of Valour
which, had the Scouts not been disbanded, would have made him Rhodesia’s most
decorated soldier.
Piringondo was
thus the sort of man on which the Scouts could call upon to perform a mission
which was designed to implicate the military wing of Mugabe’s
Marxist-orientated party and paint Mugabe as anti-religion and anti-religious
freedom.
But it was a
mission too far for Piringondo and his accomplice in arms, Moyo, both of whom
Mugabe would state with some relish had been “caught
and destroyed in their devilish trap”.
