(crossposted from the front page of
My left Wing)
By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.
Adolf Hitler ~ Mein Kampf
Certain questions can sometimes be difficult to face. For Americans, questioning our fundamental goodness falls into that category. To those raised on the legends and lore of WWII (that would be most of us), America will always be the `good guys,' forever riding to the rescue of those too weak to help themselves.
But that's not what a clear-eyed look at our history shows. They call that cognitive dissonance when what you believe diverges from what is - or maybe it's just truthiness.
(more over the fold...)
Removing America's Blinders
By Howard Zinn, The Progressive. Posted April 24, 2006.
If Americans were more aware of how often our leaders have lied in order to wage war, would anyone have believed this president's justifications for attacking Iraq?
Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?
The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans -- members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen -- rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq. Source
Yes we all negotiate our way through life with blinders on to some extent, yet many exercise the ability to lift the blinders from time to time to get a good look at the larger realties surrounding us. And some never do, whether they have just not formed the habit or would simply rather not know. I am acquainted with so many otherwise intelligent Americans who have never acquired skill in scratching deeply beneath the surface of things, and many who explicitly do not want to know the underlying truths. These latter have their fingers in their ears. La la la la la!
The unexamined life is not worth living.
~ Socrates
I've always found it surprising, but undeniable, that some folks aren't interested in knowing the truth. The attitude seems to be, let me just get through this shit-storm without all the agony of soul searching and truth seeking. I have always believed that the truth would set us free.
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
~ Anais Nin
Why all this blathering about the truth? Because we in America have some hard facts to face up to. We cannot continue to blindly follow leaders who have committed crimes against humanity. We have to come to terms with this awful reality, and we owe it to the rest of the world to deliver up some justice.
Did Bush commit war crimes?
Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld could expose officials to prosecution.
June 30, 2006
THE SUPREME Court on Thursday dealt the Bush administration a stinging rebuke, declaring in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that military commissions for trying terrorist suspects violate both U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention.
But the real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court's holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda -- a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act. Source
The Hamdan decision is a start (thank God the Supreme Court occasionally gets one right), but we all know that torture has its supporters. We've all seen the stories, the headlines, and the jabbering TV monkeys, experts all at rationalization, wrong-headedness, twisted logic, fallacious reasoning, misdirection, and subterfuge. We've all seen the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib, the news footage of Gitmo, the tearful testimony of survivors, but how many of us have swallowed that big slimy hunk of putrid truth that our `leaders' have been systematically torturing people all over the world in the name of the United States of America? Not nearly enough of us (IMHO).
The war crimes in Iraq have been piling up from the day we went in. At this point it is a towering heap of rotting corpses and murdered innocence - war crimes within war crimes.
Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes
We now know the US also used thermobaric weapons in its assault on Falluja, where up to 50,000 civilians remained
George Monbiot
Tuesday November 22, 2005
The Guardian
(snip)
But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC that white phosphorus "was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants". He claimed "it is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal." This denial has been accepted by most of the mainstream media. UN conventions, the Times said, "ban its use on civilian but not military targets". But the word "civilian" does not occur in the chemical weapons convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.
The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people, rather than poisoning them, and is covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the US has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic. The gas it produces attacks the mucous membranes, the eyes and the lungs. As Peter Kaiser of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told the BBC last week: "If ... the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because ... any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons."
The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence: "It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets." Source
"It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets." And the ban on outlawed weapons isn't the only international law we've wiped our feet on lately. We've been clandestinely snatching people off the streets of foreign cities without the knowledge or approval from the nation involved, spiriting them to secret prisons in the darkest corners of the world and torturing them there - and an untold number have been
tortured to their deaths.
Italy Seeks Arrests of 13 in Alleged Rendition
By Craig Whitlock and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 25, 2005; Page A01
MILAN, June 24 -- Italian authorities said Friday they have issued arrest warrants against 13 American intelligence operatives, charging that they kidnapped a radical Islamic cleric as he walked to a mosque here two years ago, held him hostage at two U.S. military bases and then covertly flew him to Cairo. He later said he was tortured by Egyptian security police. Source
And of course the chief hypocrite blatantly lies about it all, denying everything. Torture? What torture?
OUTSOURCING TORTURE
The secret history of America's "extraordinary rendition" program.
by JANE MAYER
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07
On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush's statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that "you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother." Source
How is this any better than the KGB at its worst? Or the North Koreans? Or Torquemada? Or the Nazis? Or any other evil regime you care to name? (I don't mean quantitatively, I mean qualitatively.)
Amnesty attacks US 'disappearances'
Peter Walker
Tuesday May 23, 2006
The United States' reported use of secret CIA-run prisons for terrorism suspects amounts to a policy of "disappearances", human rights watchdog Amnesty International said today in its annual report.
In a sometimes scathing assessment of Washington's rights record, the London-based group also raised serious concerns about detainees held without trial in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Washington had failed to bring to account those potentially guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity, it added. Britain also faced condemnation, with Amnesty saying the government had "continued to erode fundamental human rights" through new anti-terrorism laws and the possible use of evidence obtained through the torture of suspects in other countries. Source
And who among us hasn't heard the shameless rationalization and defense of the indefensible by the usual rightwing blowhards?
Limbaugh on torture of Iraqis
CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men.
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off? Source
Yeah man, looks like fun. What say we take some oxycontin and go get in a great big naked pile? You'd like that wouldn't you Rush?
Maybe you also heard this fool.
BLITZER: Alan, how do you know he doesn't have that kind of ticking-bomb information right now, that there's some plot against New York or Washington that he was involved in and there's a time sensitivity? If you knew that, if you suspected that, you would say [to] get the president to authorize torture.
DERSHOWITZ: Well, we don't know, and that's why [we could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came close to doing it, and we don't know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite. Source
Abso-fucking-lutely! We wouldn't want to be hypocritical torturers, now would we? "A sterilized needle underneath the nail." He wants to dress it up in a doily. He calls torture a "horrible, horrible technique," yet doesn't mind advocating it as long as it's `civilized' torture, "Make sure that needle is sterilized boys!" I hate to be the one to tell you Mr. Dershowitz but you can't just put lipstick on that pig and call it a pony.
And then of course, if you are very lucky, you may have had the pleasure of hearing this idiot.
The Truth about Torture
It's time to be honest about doing terrible things.
by Charles Krauthammer
(snip)
That is why the McCain amendment, which by mandating "torture never" refuses even to recognize the legitimacy of any moral calculus, cannot be right. There must be exceptions. The real argument should be over what constitutes a legitimate exception. Source
Krauthammer, something tells me your moral calculus is more about angels dancing on the heads of pins than it is about either morality OR calculus. It's time to be honest about doing terrible things indeed! How about this for honesty? Torture is evil, a sin, an abomination, and an affront to the dignity of all mankind! And it is NEVER justified under ANY circumstances. PERIOD! There's some moral clarity for ya you dickweed.
That is the truth about torture. And assholes like you who believe it
is ever justified missed your place in history. You all belong in the Spanish Inquisition, and would that I could zap you back there forever because I wouldn't waste one fucking second banishing you to the annals of history. Civilized man has no use for you.
And how many times have we heard these same ignoramuses go on and on about how human life is so `sacred' that we can't even do life-saving stem cell research? The word hypocrites doesn't even do it any more for these imbeciles. These geniuses are hyper-hypocrites!
Detainee handling may amount to war crimes
Officials move to rule out charges against military
BY R. JEFFREY SMITH
Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- An obscure law approved a decade ago by a Republican-controlled Congress has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes and prosecuted at some point in U.S. courts.
Senior officials have responded by drafting legislation that would grant U.S. personnel involved in the terrorism fight new protections against prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996. That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.
In light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the international Conventions apply to the treatment of such detainees, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has spoken privately with Republican lawmakers about the need for such "protections," according to someone who heard his remarks last week. Source
Protection? They think they can just legislate some protection after having done such terrible things? No way. The law of kharma will catch up with you eventually. You can't wipe these sins away with a piece of paper. Humanity is not going to forget what you have done. Some fine day you will all pay for your crimes.
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Updated: 9:14 a.m. ET May 19, 2004
May 17 - The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue.
The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes--and that it might even apply to Bush adminstration officials themselves-- is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by NEWSWEEK. It urges President George Bush declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Source
Gee, why all the concern now? All over a few "new and unorthodox measures." They were obviously not concerned about their war crimes when they committed them. Could it be conscience? Nahhhhh! I seriously doubt that. I think their `moral calculus' was that as long as they won in Iraq they could get away with anything. Now that they are losing they are beginning to see the flaw in that plan.
Time to Talk War Crimes
By Robert Parry
March 28, 2006
In a world where might did not make right, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their key enablers would be in shackles before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague, rather than sitting in the White House, 10 Downing Street or some other comfortable environs in Washington and London.
The latest evidence of their war crimes was revealed in secret British minutes of an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 31, 2003, when Bush, Blair and their top aides chillingly discussed their determination to invade Iraq, though still hoping to provoke the Iraqis into some violent act that would serve as political cover. Source
The aggregate of what they have done is a crime of enormous proportions resulting in the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of innocents and children, the needless sacrifice of over 2,500 young American lives, 115 British lives, and over 50,000 Iraqi lives. They know this and yet remain stubbornly heartless in their determination to murder while their corporate masters reap the bloody profits of war. Staying the course they call it. They must be made to pay.
Pinter demands war crimes trial for Blair
David Fickling
Wednesday December 7, 2005
The Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has called for Tony Blair to be tried for war crimes, in his acceptance speech to the Nobel committee.
The 5,000-word speech excoriates the US government over Guantánamo Bay and its attempts to destabilise Nicaragua in the 1980s.
But he saves his most savage comments for the UK, described as "pathetic and supine" and a "bleating little lamb" tagging along behind the US in its support for the Iraq war.
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," he said.
(snip)
"We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people, and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'." Source
So now our ghoulish gang of government thugs have pushed us to the brink of WWIII in the Middle East, and having lit the powder keg, they are standing on the sidelines cheering the madness and refusing to stop the bombing of innocents and children. Any lingering doubts anyone might have had as to their sheer wickedness have now gone up in the searing flames of the white phosphorous incendiary bombs being dropped on civilians in Lebanon - while our `government' does nothing but egg it on.
During the three years of carnage in Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has shifted away from her now-discredited warning about a "mushroom cloud" to assert a strategic rationale for the invasion that puts her squarely in violation of the Nuremberg principle against aggressive war.
On March 31 in remarks to a group of British foreign policy experts, Rice justified the U.S.-led invasion by saying that otherwise Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "wasn't going anywhere" and "you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it." [Washington Post, April 1, 2006]
Rice's comments in Blackburn, England, followed similar remarks during a March 26 interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" in which she defended the invasion of Iraq as necessary for the eradication of the "old Middle East" where a supposed culture of hatred indirectly contributed to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Source
Nuremberg principle? What Nuremberg principle? Condi is a graduate of the Alfred E. Newman School of International Diplomacy - summa cum howdy.
July 25, 2006
Bush Greenlights War Crimes
Willful Blindness
By MARJORIE COHN
It is a violation of the US Arms Export Control Act to provide weapons to foreign countries that are not used for defensive purposes or to maintain internal security. During the last major Israeli incursion into Lebanon, in 1981, the Reagan administration cut off US military aid and arms deliveries for 10 weeks while it investigated whether Israel was using weapons for "defensive purposes."
Last week, both houses of Congress, mindful of the importance of retaining Jewish votes and campaign contributions, passed resolutions stating that Israel is acting in self-defense. The vote in the Senate was unanimous; the House vote was 410 to 8.
Walking in lockstep with Bush, neither resolution calls for a ceasefire. The Senate resolution praises Israel for its "restraint" and the House resolution "welcomes Israel's continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties."
US-provided Israeli bombs have killed nearly 400 Lebanese, the overwhelming majority innocent civilians. The bombing has displaced half a million people and caused an estimated $1 billion in damage. Source
Some say we need to focus on the future and that's a point well taken, we
do have more immediate concerns than ultimate justice like an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the November mid-term elections, and 2008. But at the same time we must never forget that we bear a solemn obligation to History and to the world to see that justice is done according to the law. And we need to bring that bitch down like a mighty fucking hammer!
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
~ Last verse of Dylan's, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall