 So the central problem with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and U.S. war policy generally is that it is in fact a crime, aggression, to attack or invade another country. The judges at Nuremberg called aggression the supreme international crime because as they said it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. None of the other crimes committed in the war would even happen if somebody had not started the war in the first place. So they held Germany responsible for all the destruction and all the crimes committed in World War II and in the same way the U.S. is responsible for all the death and violence and chaos in Iraq. If there is any question that the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq is in fact a crime of aggression, we can thank the Iraq inquiry in the UK for declassifying a number of documents in which the senior British legal advisors including Sir Michael Wood, the senior legal advisor to the British Foreign Office repeatedly and consistently warned Prime Minister Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that to invade Iraq would in fact be a crime of aggression, which they called, quote, one of the most serious offenses under international law. And when we come to other war crimes in Iraq, which generally fall under violations of the Geneva Conventions, we have extensive documentation that senior officers in some cases going all the way up to the White House issued orders to U.S. forces in Iraq to commit war crimes. These generally fall under rules of engagement issued to the troops on the ground and they include dead checking, which means killing wounded enemy combatants or resistance fighters, orders during some operations to, quote, kill all military age men, orders in at least one case to use 360 degree rotational fire if a platoon was, you know, hit a mine even on busy streets packed with people. It was standing orders for many infantry units in Iraq to call for fire, which means to call in airstrikes on any buildings from which they received incoming fire, regardless of whether that was an apartment building full of civilians or a village full of civilians. Fallujah and other areas was designated as weapons free zones, which was simply an updating of the terminology used in Vietnam where they were called free fire zones in which any person, civilian or otherwise was regarded was to be treated as a legitimate target for U.S. troops to fire upon. Torture in Iraq was much more widespread and systematic than media reports about Abu Ghraib or U.S. officials ever acknowledged. The best documentation of that is a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross from 2004 based on 27 visits to 14 U.S. prisons in Iraq documented horrific tortures, a wide range of different techniques that, you know, too many to list in this short testimony. There all of this is documented in the written testimony, which I submitted. Human rights first commands responsibility investigation. Looked at 98 deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. These included at least 12 people who were definitely tortured to death, 26 other cases of suspected or confirmed homicide and 48 more that escaped any official investigation altogether. Human rights first found that no officer above the rank of major was charged with a crime, even though torture was authorized from the highest level. The most severe punishment handed down was a five month prison sentence, even though the U.S. War Crimes Act defines torturing someone to death as a capital crime. So documents already in the public record appear sufficient to convict President George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld and many other officials under for what are capital offenses under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Another under reported aspect of U.S. operations in Iraq is that the U.S. recruited, trained and deployed at least 27 brigades of Iraqi special forces commandos who detained, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere in 2005 and 2006. At the peak of this campaign, 3,000 bodies per month were brought to the Baghdad morgue alone, and an Iraqi human rights group matched 92% of the corpses one month to reported abductions by these U.S.-led special police commandos. This has been reported in U.S. media as if these forces were not under U.S. command and control, but they were. U.S. special forces officers were assigned to special police training teams and then special police transition teams. None of these units ever operated independently of U.S. command and control, and they were controlled through a high-tech command center set up by U.S. forces and staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel. So throughout the reign of terror that they conducted in 2005 and 2006, they were under direct U.S. control working hand-in-hand with U.S. special forces.