US sanctions against Iran war crime: Academic

Press TV has interviewed James H. Fetzer, a professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, in Madison, to discuss US President Barack Obama’s recent accusations against Iran, claiming that Tehran is a supporter of terrorism.

The following is a rough transcription of the inerview.

Press TV: How do you feel about President Obama there going after Iran? Once again, this rhetoric seems to be heating up.

Fetzer: Well, it is completely ridiculous. There is a nation in the Middle East that has a history of performing terrorist acts but that would be Israel, not Iran. Iran did not blow up the King David Hotel in 1946, dressed as Arabs to drive the British out of Palestine.

Iran did not attack the USS Liberty in the 1967 War in an attempt to sink it and draw the United States into the conflict on Israel’s side. Iran did not blow up the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and when that didn’t draw enough attention, blew up the Jewish Community Center in 1994.

I published about this with Adrian Salbuchi. It is as though all the leaders of our government are ignorant of history and don’t even recognize that our own intelligence agencies, all sixteen of them, concluded that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons in 2007 which they reaffirmed in 2011 and which even the Mossad itself concluded was the case in 2012, three weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu went to the United Nations and asserted precisely the opposite.

I think that Americans are so used to lying and talking out of both sides of their mouths, they don’t understand that a nation like Iran speaks the truth plain and simple.

 Nuclear energy for all, nuclear weapons for none; that is the law of Iran, the policy of Iran. Americans need to understand that.

Press TV: All of this rhetoric is apparently for the Congress to let this deal go through. Do you believe that Obama is doing enough anti-Iran rhetoric to let it go through?

Fetzer: Well, he may be. I have actually contacted the offices of 98 out of the 100 Senators to explain the points I have already made about the US intelligence and Mossad concluding that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. What I do not understand is why Obama, Biden, John Kerry and others aren't talking about the fact that sanctions against Iran are violations of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which specifically proclaimed that no person may be punished for the crime they did not personally commit.

What is going with these sanctions is collective punishment, defined by the Geneva Conventions as a war crime. I do not understand why he is not making that argument. It is there, it is available, it is obvious.

Just as you can verify on the internet the claims I have made about our intelligence agencies, anyone can study the Geneva Conventions that are available on the internet.

It is embarrassing; it is shameful that this is going on.

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