Dumas and Verges: Defend Monsters - Not Gaddafi

June 1/2 2011

I'm not entirely sure NATO can be sued, effectively anyways. But two French lawyers of some repute are ready to give it a try, on behalf on Libyan civilian victims of the organization's air strikes. And more to the point here, they're prepared to defend the leader targeted by all these deadly explosions - Muammar Gaddafi. Some excerpts from a news story on this:

French ex-Minister in Libya, would defend Gaddafi
Peter Graff, Reuters, May 29 2011

Tripoli (Reuters) - Former French foreign minister Roland Dumas visited Libya as a lawyer to prepare a legal case on behalf of victims of NATO bombing and said he was prepared to defend leader Muammar Gaddafi if he is sent to The Hague. Dumas, who served as foreign minister under socialist President Francois Mitterrand, said he had seen several civilian victims of NATO bombing in a hospital and had been told by a doctor there that there were as many as 20,000 more.

I rather doubt that high a number, an issue I'll cover seperately. Nonetheless, there are victims, likely well into the hundreds or perhaps low thousands. It is worth a pause to notice that we can't be sure, considering NATO's record of assassination attempts and 'inability' to confirm things, that there haven't been 20,000.

Nonetheless, as Dumas continued:

"This is brutal, brutal aggression against a sovereign country," Dumas told a news conference in a Tripoli luxury hotel on Sunday, attended by people introduced as family members and supporters of relatives of civilian casualties.

"At the moment we have been retained, we have a mandate on behalf of the victims of the military bombardment of NATO, who carried out their military action against civilians with the artificial -- very artificial -- cover of the United Nations," Dumas said.

"Following an approach by the government of Libya, we have decided to make this trip to see for ourselves the condition of the victims and the situation," he said.

It's the guy with Dumas that has me concerned:

Dumas was accompanied by prominent French defense lawyer Jacques Verges, who said his goal was to "unmask those assassins" responsible for NATO air strikes. Verges said he had wept in hospital upon meeting civilians wounded "solely because they are Libyans."

Verges -- whose clients have included Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie -- and Dumas had been among lawyers expected to defend ousted Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, who is being investigated for alleged human rights abuses during the conflict sparked by the disputed 2010 presidential election.

Their names were dropped from the most recent list of Gbagbo's lawyers.

I think Gaddafi as well should drop - or not retain - the team. I don't trust, or know much about, these guys. But it seems to me they might be the establishment anti-establishment of France. And as well all know, France has a lot of its people working this war. The one Libyan defector that wound up in France was the one who made contact with the DGSE, protest leaders, and defecting military, to help arrange the protest-war. Their top "human rights" philosopher, Levy, has made an eloquent-sounding case for supporting the rebels (including this laughable episode). Its water privatizing companies have the most use for Libya's publicly-owned "Great Manmade River." France's diplomats were the first to recognize their rebel foot soldiers as Libya's government, its Air Force is taking the lead in bombing, and its strangle little president Sarkozy oversseing it all unapologetically, pinning all France's war crimes on Gaddafi and painting himself as a big hero.

So when some top French war criminal defenders come out to "defend" the target of these psyops, be wary.

Admittedly, the two sound quite possibly sincere, and I don't know much about either. Dumas I've never heard of, in fact, but Verges is a Thailand-born French maverick, immortalized in that Terror's Advocate movie I've been meaning to see. He's made fame, money, and maybe history defending of various terrorists (most famously Carlos the Jackal) and even Nazi war criminals like Barbie. Here's the trailer:

At the end is the line that, clever as it is, troubles me in this context:

I was asked "would you defend Hitler?" I said "I'd even defend Bush! But only if he agrees to plead guilty."

Would he defend Obama, Cameron, or Sarkozy for their current war crimes if they admitted to them? If he defends their adversary Gaddafi, will he require the Leader to first admit his guilt for the charges he's being saddled with by the International Court that's Criminal? Gaddafi needs someone who understands that he is not the monster he's portrayed as, not someone who thinks it's cool to cozy up to monsters.