'US threat to nuke Iran is criminal'

[James H. Fetzer]

'US threat to nuke Iran is criminal'

Sat Dec 24, 2011 1:46PM GMT

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/217483.html

Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois

A distinguished American expert on international law says the US government threatening Iran with nuclear war amounts to internationally accepted criminal act.

Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign, further noted that when Obama administration officials say “all options are on the table,” against Iran, they are, in fact, alluding to a nuclear war which is prohibited by international law.

Addressing the 18th conference on “Direct Democracy” in Feldkirch, Austria, on nuclear deterrence, Boyle added that the US government is threatening to attack Iran “under the completely bogus pretext” that it might have a nuclear weapon.

He added that as the sole global authority to monitor nuclear activities, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has already refuted charges against Iran as “simply not true.”

The legal expert stated that Article 2 of the UN Charter “prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense” and the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, “do not qualify under that definition.”

The professor also said that nuclear weapons and “nuclear deterrence” have “never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior.”

Boyle noted that the former US President George W. Bush's doctrine of preventive warfare, which has not been officially repealed by Obama, was in fact, concocted by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and was rejected at that court.

“If we don't act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran that has been already threatened publicly by (the former President George W.) Bush Jr.,” he asserted.

He added that the governments of all the nuclear weapons states - including US, Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea - are "criminal" for threatening to exterminate humanity.

“If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime,” Boyle said.

The professor noted that the US today is engaged in “ongoing international criminal activity” for “planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.”

“The design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, purchase, and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law,” Boyle added.

He concluded by saying that the leaders of NATO states which "go along with US nuclear policies are all accomplices as well.”