OMNI
MERCHANTS OF DEATH WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
January 27, 2024
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace,
Justice, and Ecology
See
also anthologies on International Tribunal on US Imperialism, Military
Industrial Complex, Culture of War, Militarism, Individual US Wars, and more
CONTENTS
Brad Wolf. “War for Profit”: From WWI to WWII to War
Crimes Tribunal 2023
Kathy Kelly, Nick
Mottern, Brad Wolf. "Come War Profiteers, Give Account." November 10-13, 2023
Col. Wilkerson, “Next
Evidentiary Video.”
Tribunal's investigation
of the U.S. war on Afghanistan
TEXTS
From WWI to WWII to War Crimes Tribunal 2023
MAY 9, 2023
“”War for Profit: A Short History.”
BY BRAD WOLF
The first page of the edition of the Domenica
del Corriere, an Italian paper, with a drawing by Achille Beltrame depicting
Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. –
Public Domain
The senseless slaughter of World War I began
with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name
no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke
Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the
Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.
His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student
and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events
resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians.
An additional 20 million people were wounded.
Entire generations of young men from England,
France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined.
In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the
20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the
post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most
dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread
costs 200
million marks.
World War I ended a period of economic
success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is
thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the
Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the
groundwork for World War II.
Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince
that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United
States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming
number of Americans were against the United States being involved?
Despite major public opposition to the war,
Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373
to 50 in the House of
Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of
the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else
driving their votes?
J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest
investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official
business agent in the United States for the British government and the main
contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont
Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally
wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US
weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.
When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive
loans to Europe which
would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers
stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war.
Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the
international bankers made a profit of $10,000. As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in
1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”
When the war concluded and the dead and
wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious
business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter.
Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.
In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht
called The
Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical
business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits
during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the
arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the
only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death
lobbied both Congress and the President for war.
The American public was incensed. In 1934
almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament
production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for
peace. And Marine
Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War
is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big
business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a
gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.
The growing wave of public outrage led Senator
Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations,
including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In
two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200
witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.
The committee conducted an extensive
investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered
criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying
the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both
sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament
conferences.
“The committee listened daily to men
striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international
racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to
fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.
The Senate Nye Committee recommended price
controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased
industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by
Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled
and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If
such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”
The American public was outraged at the
committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the
country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars,
American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oathsswearing they would never fight in a foreign
war.
Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers,
people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a
war fought to increase the profits of corporations.
And then, business fought back. They lobbied
those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon
did. A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The
committees’ days were numbered.
In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated
that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going
to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.” With World
War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate
American economic and political life.
Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a
veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream
media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the
evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and
atrocities, profits and stock buybacks follow.
Ninety years after the original Merchants of
Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for
aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war
crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those
who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time
be the last time. We may not have another chance.
Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor,
and college dean. He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of
Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.
Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal
https://merchantsofdeath.org/
"Come War Profiteers, Give Account"
November 10-13, 2023
We render you, corporations obsessed with
war profiteering, accountable; answerable!
- Cornel West, Merchants of Death War Crimes
Tribunal Member. The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will
hold accountable — through testimony of witnesses — U.S. weapons manufacturers
who knowingly produce and sell products which attack and kill not
only combatants but non-combatants as well. These manufacturers may have
committed Crimes Against Humanity as well as violated U.S. Federal criminal
laws. The Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict.
About the Tribunal
The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal (November 10-13, 2023) will
hold accountable — through testimony of witnesses — U.S. weapons manufacturers
who knowingly produce and sell products which attack and kill not only
combatants but non-combatants as well. These manufacturers may have committed
Crimes Against Humanity as well as violated U.S. Federal criminal laws. The
Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict.
To reach the largest possible
audience and to maximize international participation, the testimonies of the
witnesses for the Tribunal will be video-recorded throughout the upcoming year
as investigative teams identify witnesses and elicit their testimony. This will
include testimonies from the victims of war, military and weapons analysts,
lawyers, journalists, and moral philosophers and theologians.
These recorded testimonies will
then be presented to the Tribunal and a world-wide audience (via the internet)
during the weekend of November 11, 2023. The opening session with the Tribunal
members will be live (and livestreamed) providing an opportunity to introduce
each Tribunal member, review the purpose of the Tribunal, the charges at issue,
and the naming of the defendants. Similarly, the final session of the weekend
will be live with Tribunal members discussing the evidence and offering their
opinions and recommendations.
Teams of college and university
students led by their professors and lawyers will conduct many of the
aforementioned video interviews around the world. We will ask corporate
directors of weapons manufacturers to sit for recorded interviews. A video
library of these testimonies will be assembled over the course of the next
year. The video testimonies will then be reviewed by lawyers and analysts to
select those that are most pertinent.
By presenting prerecorded videos of
the witnesses rather than live testimonies, we will create a structured and
unique presentation of the evidence to the Tribunal. Technical interruptions
and other delays during the Tribunal will be minimized. Additionally, the
gathering of video evidence can begin soon.
An outline of the presentation is
as follows:
- Opening comments
by the Tribunal.
- Session 1 –
Testimonies of victims of war harmed by United States weapons.
- Session 2 –
Testimonies from experts regarding the types and destructive power of
weapons that have caused the harm described by the witnesses in Session 1.
This will include, where possible, video of tests of these weapons showing
their destructive power.
- Session 3 –
Testimonies from experts on the specific manufacturers of the weapons
used, the amount of weapons produced and sold to the United States and
abroad, the cost of such weapons and the profits resulting.
- Session 4 –
Testimonies from experts regarding lobbying practices, advertising and
other methods used by weapons manufacturers to influence Congress and the
public, not only in the purchase of weapons but also to influence United
States warmaking policy.
- Session 5 –
Testimonies from philosophers, theologians and others regarding the
morality of weapons manufacturers engaged in the conduct presented and the
impact of their conduct within the United States and globally.
These five sessions will be
followed by discussion and recommendations by Tribunal members.
Meet the Organizers
Kathy Kelly
Kathy Kelly, a peace activist and
author, made over two dozen trips to Afghanistan from 2010 – 2019,
living with young Afghan Peace Volunteers in a working class neighborhood in
Kabul. She learned about conditions in Afghanistan through encounters with
mothers and children, many of whom were directly affected by war. With Voices
in the Wilderness companions, from 1996 - 2003, she traveled 27 times to Iraq,
defying the economic sanctions and remaining in Iraq throughout the Shock and
Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. Kathy has been an educator
for most of her life, but she believes children of war and those who are
victims of violence have been her most important teachers. She is board
president of World BEYOND War and a co-coordinator of the Ban Killer
Drones campaign. (www.bankillerdrones.org)
Nick Mottern
Nick Mottern is Co-coordinator with
Kathy Kelly of BanKillerDrones.org and is an organizer of the Merchants of
Death War Crimes Tribunal, which will be holding hearings in November 2023. He
is a member of the national board of Veterans For Peace. He is also a reporter,
whose work has appeared on Truthout, Common Dreams, Counterpunch and on other
websites, and he is a researcher and organizer who has worked for the U.S.
Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Bread for the World and
Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. While with Maryknoll he coordinated, with Jerry
Herman, of the American Friends Service Committee, the Africa Peace Tour, an
educational tour that brought Africans to the U.S. to speak about apartheid and
U.S. military involvement in Africa.
Brad Wolf
Brad Wolf is a lawyer, former
prosecutor, professor, and community college dean. He is cofounder of Peace
Action Network of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an affiliate of Peace Action and a
partner of World BEYOND War. Brad is a full-time activist for peace and justice
and his writings have been published in The Progressive, Common Dreams,
Counterpunch, Antiwar.com, Consortium News, and Dappled Things. He recently
authored a book on Philip Berrigan's collected writings entitled "A
Ministry of Risk."
Upcoming Events & Ways to Take Action
1) Deliver the Subpoena to the Top
Weapons Manufacturers
Take action locally by printing the subpoena and contempt
citation, and delivering them to
any of the four corporations (Boeing, Raytheon, General Atomics, and Lockheed
Martin) that may have offices in your area. Take pictures of your nonviolent
action delivering the subpoena/contempt citation and email them to us to post.
2) Subpoena Your Local Congressperson or
Senator to Testify as a Witness before the Tribunal
Download the
subpoena, which compels a
witness to testify, and serve it on your local congressman or senator. Type in
the name of your local congressmember or senator on the blank line, and deliver
it. Plus, don’t forget to take pictures of your nonviolent action delivering the
subpoena and email them to us.
| |||||||||
Hello
Dick,
The new video episode of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal concludes
the Tribunal's investigation of the U.S. war on
Afghanistanwith a focus on the last
attempts by U.S. Presidents to bomb the Afghans into submission. It is a tragic
story of a military empire using massive weapons in a doomed attempt to force
its will upon an indigenous people.
The
link for this video evidence is here: https://rumble.com/v48fjpk-the-final-bombing-campaign-of-afghanistan.html Please share this video link with friends and
colleagues. Form discussion groups
around all video evidence of the Tribunal.
The link for previous video episodes of the Tribunal is here: https://rumble.com/user/merchantsofdeath
Encourage
friends to sign up to receive future video segments of evidence here: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-for-emails-from-the-merchants-of-death-war-crimes-tribunal?clear_id=true
In
solidarity, Brad Wolf, Kathy Kelly, and Nick Mottern
Organizers, Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal
The
Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold accountable -- through
testimony of witnesses -- U.S. Weapons manufacturers who knowingly produce and
sell products which attack and kill non-combatants. These manufacturers may
have committed Crimes Against Humanity as well as violated U.S. Federal
criminal laws. The Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict.
Donate to support the Tribunal.
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