Greece resident Carol Manuel isn’t so sure that her fellow Americans truly know the difference between what’s legal and illegal. She, however, says there’s no difficulty for her in distinguishing between the two. Manuel, who is against the war in Iraq, said it’s easy to determine how to view the county’s actions in the Middle East.
“It was a war of choice, a war of aggression and we were lied to,” she said, “so I think for those reasons the war is illegal.”
Manuel and more than 200 other local residents gathered March 6 to discuss that argument — whether or not the Iraq war is a legal one. Sponsored by more than 40 area organizations, the town hall meeting at Rochester’s First Unitarian Church featured Scott Ritter and Elizabeth De la Vega, two national personalities who talked about the legal merits of the war.
Ritter, who served as the United Nations chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, said there was no question that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s because he saw them himself. But, as the United States crept up to invading the country in 2003, Ritter said there was no longer any reason to do so.
By November 1993, there were only two unaccounted missiles that UN inspectors couldn’t find and Iraq’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons programs were all dissolved by 1996, Ritter said. Even still, Ritter said, the U.S. went ahead with planned military assaults on the country. Ritter added he believes the war is illegal because the real reason for invasion was for regime change, not to search for WMDs.
After hearing about Ritter’s experiences in Iraq, Pittsford resident Janice Barber said she was further discouraged about the war.
“I had an idea about some of the facts, but I had no idea of how illegal it was,” she said, adding that she plans to get more involved in anti-war efforts as a result of the meeting.
Several points for finding the war illegal were laid out by Vega, who worked as a federal prosecutor for more than 20 years and wrote the book “United States v. George W. Bush et al.,” a hypothetical indictment of the Bush administration. Vega said the administration is guilty of conspiracy to defraud due to false statements made to the public and government agencies regarding the cost of the war and the reasons for invasion.
