Against War With Iraq: An Anti-War Primer

(Paperback)

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In this special edition pamphlet three legal scholars from the Center for Constitutional Rights persuasively argue that the looming war against Iraq is both illegal and unnecessary for U.S. national security. The Bush administration's justifications for war are exposed as pretexts and it is argued that such a war with Iraq is liable to increase rather than decrease the terrorist threat. Furthermore, with the clear economic motivation of oil, Bush is shown to be a potential war criminal by United Nations standards. Includes information on how to protest effectively.

Reviews

As the U.S. pushes for another war that no one seems to want, the Open Media Pamphlet Series has published a clear-eyed analysis that deconstructs, piece by piece, the Bush administration's unconvincing sales pitch for war. A fast read, this potent little book is packed with precisely the information and analysis needed to understand the issues. David Barsamian

Author Bio

Michael Ratner is the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Over the years, he has litigated a dozen cases challenging a U.S. president's authority to go to war, as well as many cases against international human rights violators resulting in millions of dollars in judgments. He acted as a principal counsel in the successful suit to close the camp for HIV-positive Haitian refugees on Guantanamo Base, Cuba. As part of the Center's focus on human rights and civil liberties violations in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he has led several cases representing detainees held at Camp X-ray in Cuba. He is the author and co-author of several books and numerous articles, including Stephens & Ratner, International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts (Transnational Publishers, Inc., 1996) and Brody and Ratner, The Pinochet Papers (Kluwer, 2000). Jennie Green, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, specializes in international human rights legal actions, primarily lawsuits in U.S. courts against human rights violators. Recent cases include one against John Ashcroft and other U.S. government officials responsible for the post-September 11 arbitrary detention of thousands of non-citizens by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Other successful cases have included those against Unocal, Royal Dutch/Shell, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, former Chinese Premier Li Peng, former Guatemalan Minister of Defense Hector Gramajo, Indonesian generals Johnny Lumintang and Sintong Panjaitan, Ethiopian police official Kelbessa Negewo, and former Haitian dictator Prosper Avril. She has also worked on international human rights claims in international fora such as the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and the Inter-American human rights system. From 1992 to 1995, Jennie was the Administrative Director at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. She has worked for a wide range of nongovernmental human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, and currently serves on the advisory boards of numerous other organizations. Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Barbara's current docket at the Center includes class action lawsuits concerning immigrants' rights; prisoners' rights; race discrimination in employment, education, the environment and public health; and Native American rights. Barbara graduated from Stanford Law School in 1985, and clerked for two years for Rose E. Bird, Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. She is author of Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy (Seven Stories Press/Open Media Series, 2002). She has also written several articles on democratic institutions, immigrants' rights, public access to radio programming and ownership, and environmental racism, and a chapter on occupational exposures for the 2000 ABA treatise on environmental justice.