Today, Arundhati Roy - one of my very favorite leftist heros for almost innumerable reasons - defined what it means to be an enemy combatant: "anybody who harbors thoughts of resistance" and then promptly declared herself to be an enemy combatant.  Apart from the immediate observation I had of this comment, first, she's a few years too late picking up the mantle and second, I seriously doubt she has a t-shirt declaring her as such (as I do), I don't think she really would want to be an enemy combatant.  Ideologically, though, I think we both are - though her definition is too broad and dramatic to be of any real use.  There's a great quote from her conclusion speech today that I'll have to transcribe for later.  It's sort of like moral aromatherapy: the smells feel nice in your head.  Also, I have the damn t-shirt. Anyway, that's a tangent.

She presided over the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul, Turkey where people came to describe the horrors they've seen and experienced and to condemn the invasion of Iraq.  As expected, they delivered their condemnation.  This exercise was styled after Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre's International War Crimes Tribunal held in the 1960's against the Vietnam War.  Being a prominent writer, playwright, and emotionalist (in my head) one would've thought I'd be right up there but for some reason, this didn't appear on my Outlook calendar.  I'm a bit disappointed, actually, since I was looking forward to an international trip.  The oddity of all this is how such conclusions play into the body of statements and laws called "international law."

As with Russell's forebearer of the UN's ICC, the World Tribunal on Iraq came out with a list of condemnations they've entitled "Preliminary Declaration of the Jury of Conscience World Tribunal on Iraq" in which they find the US, UK, governments of other countries, private corporations, the corporate media and UN guilty as charged.  Some of their recommendations include reparations, withdrawal, nullification of laws, war crimes proceedings, calls for actions against the private corporations and the military.  Unlike Russell's tribunal, they didn't condemn the US of genocide.  Wussies!

One of the charges against the US/UK governments is "Using disproportinate force and indiscriminate weapons systems".  I don't think they'd've been pleased if the US/UK decided to use nuclear or chemical weapons on the Iraqi military which would've been a "proportinate force" considering almost every nation and the UN were convinced that Saddam's Iraq had wmd at the time.  Ah well, gotta have a clear conscience somehow.  I'm not a Pespi product drinker and therefore my conscience is clear (A recommended boycott list includes Pepsi - go me!)

Edit:
Here's the statement I wanted to quote from Arundhati Roy:

Surely, we have the right to express an opinion, and surely, if that opinion is irrelevant, surely, if that opinion is full of false facts, surely, if that opinion is absurd, it will be treated as such, and if that opinion is, in fact, representative of the opinion of millions of people, it will become very huge.

They're not mutually exclusive states.