Showing posts with label Nazis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazis. Show all posts

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Nazi Hate-Monger Bites The Dust

[Update: Apparently I am in the minority ... of something or other! You can read some differing views here, courtesy of Kenny's Sideshow (an excellent blog, BTW, other than a habit of linking to me!) ... and there's more here at Winter Patriot dot com, courtesy of McJ. ]

The right-wing Austrian politician Jorg Haider has been killed in a car crash. Too bad.

Even though Haider was a Nazi sympathizer who was popular for his racist policies, his obituary (written by Matt Schudel) in the Washington Post tries hard to portray him as a respectable and successful figure, even while mentioning a few of his career low-lights. This tells you everything you need to know about the Washington Post.

Here's a taste:
Jörg Haider, a divisive Austrian political figure who rose to prominence as the leader of a far-right movement that was often seen as sympathetic to the country's shadowy Nazi past, died Oct. 11 in a car accident near the southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt. He was 58.

Mr. Haider was passing another car when his Volkswagen Phaeton left the road, struck a pillar and overturned. He died on the way to a hospital. There was no immediate suspicion of foul play.

The charismatic Mr. Haider single-handedly made the ultra-conservative Austrian Freedom Party a force in national politics with his fiery rhetoric against immigrants, the European Union and the euro, the EU's continent-wide currency. He led the most successful far-right party in Europe, far outpacing the political success of France's National Front.

Handsome, photogenic and perpetually tanned, Mr. Haider was known to his supporters as the "Alpine Rambo," partly for his prowess as a mountain climber and skier and partly for his confrontational style.
...

Mr. Haider's parents had been members of the Nazi party, and he sometimes praised aging Third Reich soldiers at their reunions. But he also mixed easily with a younger generation in nightly visits to discos to recruit new party members.

His rallies attracted throngs of young people who responded to Mr. Haider's pleas to banish immigrants and to challenge Austria's two long-reigning parties, the Social Democrats and the more conservative People's Party.
...

At times, Mr. Haider's followers would start singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," an anthem from the musical "Cabaret" that symbolized the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
...

Jörg Haider was born Jan. 26, 1950, in the Austrian town of Bad Goisern. His father had joined the Hitler Youth in 1929 and soon became a storm trooper in the Nazi armed forces. He participated in a failed takeover of the Austrian government in 1934, four years before Germany annexed Austria.

His mother was a member of the Nazi League of German Maidens.

The younger Mr. Haider was a graduate of the University of Vienna and received a law degree in 1973. As a young man, he practiced fencing with a straw dummy labeled with the name of Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna-based hunter of Nazi war criminals.

Mr. Haider repeatedly denied that he had any links to Nazism or anti-Semitism, but in 1991 he was forced to resign as governor of Carinthia after he praised the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler's "orderly employment program." (He was reelected in 1999.)

To great applause, Mr. Haider lauded a group of Waffen SS veterans at a 1995 reunion as "decent men of character who remained faithful to their ideals."

He was a prominent defender of Kurt Waldheim in the 1980s when the Austrian president and onetime secretary general of the United Nations was exposed as a former officer in the Nazi SS.

Mr. Haider had several Jewish associates in his party, but he often mocked Austria's Jewish leaders and accused his opponents of trying to appeal to interests on the U.S. "East Coast."
...

Mr. Haider lived on a 38,000-acre estate that provided a generous income from inherited forestlands. An uncle had bought the property at a bargain price after its Jewish owners were forced to flee in 1938.
Haider was alone in his car when it crashed. Too bad. It would have been fine with me if a large number of like-minded politicians (and journalists) had been with him at the time.

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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Jim Marrs On The Rise Of The Fourth Reich

Last Sunday, Alex Jones did an extensive interview with Jim Marrs, journalist, historian, and author of "The Rise of the Fourth Reich".

Marrs, whose excellent book "Crossfire" provided the framework for Oliver Stone's seriously flawed film about the assassination of JFK, has been on my radar for a long time, and he's made some outrageous claims, most of which (as far as I can tell) have turned out to be quite correct.

According to his publisher, Harper-Collins:
While the United States helped defeat the Germans in World War II, we failed to defeat the Nazis. At the end of the war, ranking Nazis, along with their young and fanatical protégés, used the loot of Europe to create corporate front companies in many countries, including the United States of America. Utilizing their stolen wealth, men with Nazi backgrounds and mentalities wormed their way into corporate America, slowly buying up and consolidating companies into giant multinational conglomerates. Many thousands of other Nazis came to the United States under classified programs such as Project Paperclip. They brought with them miraculous weapon technology that helped win the space race but they also brought their insidious Nazi philosophy within our borders. This ideology based on the authoritarian premise that the end justifies the means—including unprovoked wars of aggression and curtailment of individual liberties—has gained an iron hold in the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

For the first time Jim Marrs has gathered compelling evidence that an effort has been underway for the past sixty years to bring a form of National Socialism to modern America, creating in essence a modern empire—or "Fourth Reich"!
There's a lot more to the story, of course. Here's a quick sample:
In the ‘30s the National Socialists gained the support of the middle class Germans and middle commercial Germans because they portrayed themselves as conservatives. And they got the bulk of the commercial people behind them, and then by the time these people figured out that these are not the people we want leading, it was too late. And I see the same thing happening today. [...]

[Bush is] destroying the checks and balances in the federal government, and bringing everything into the Executive, which of course is again following the Nazi methodology. This is what Hitler did. He signed emergency decrees, one after another, until finally he just took total power and anybody that tried to stand up against him then was a “terrorist” against the government. And that’s important for people to understand. What the Nazis did, when they killed dissidents, when they killed homosexuals, when they killed gypsies, when they killed trade unionists, when they killed the Jews, this was all under the color of law. [...]

[T]hey talk about the dumbing down of America. Well, it’s not that we’ve gotten dumber. It’s the fact that we have been drugged dumber. [...]

[O]ne of the big issues today that people are genuinely concerned about is the increase in teen suicides and school shootings. We’re all concerned about that. And yet if you go back, the only thing the mass media, the corporate media can talk about is gun control, take guns away. Well, hey, a lot of people listening here in Texas, if you’re over 40 or 50 you remember a time when we all had guns and nobody ever shot anybody. The problem is not the guns. The problem is the drugs, the Prozac, the Ritalin, the drugs [...]

I.G. Farben back in 1800 was actually marketing an antidepressant under the name heroin until finally enough people said, don’t do that. In the aftermath of WWII, a U.S. chemist named Charles Eliot Perkins was sent to Germany to try to reconstruct the I.G. Farben combine there, and he came back and wrote that the German chemist had worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass control that was submitted to and adopted by the German general staff. And this plan was to control the population of any given area through mass medication of the drinking water supplies, namely using sodium fluoride. So they put sodium fluoride in the drinking water of the concentration camps to keep the inmates passive and nonresistant.

Today two-thirds of the water supply in this country is now fluoridated. Think about this. One of the most over-prescribed drugs today is Prozac, which is 94 percent fluoride. [...]

[I]f you go back you’ll find virtually every school shooting involves someone who’s either on these psychotropic drugs or just coming off of them, which apparently is even worse. And yet the media will not talk about that. Why? Because in 2007 the pharmaceutical corporations that can be tracked back to IG Farben and the Nazis spent $3.7 BILLION dollars on consumer advertising.
I definitely think you should check out this interview.

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Federal Court OKs Treason, Crimes Against Humanity

The traitors and war criminals who have taken over our government are dancing with joy this evening, and rightly so. Earlier today, a Federal Court of Appeals in Washington granted them legal immunity for every criminal action they have taken while in office.

The ruling, made by a panel of three judges in dismissing an appeal in the case of Valerie Plame [photo], absolves government officials of individual accountability for any actions taken in an official capacity, regardless of whether those actions violated federal law or jeopardized national security. In effect, it legalizes treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Ho hum. Andy Sullivan reported it this way for Reuters:

Appeals court upholds CIA leak lawsuit dismissal
A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday dismissed former CIA analyst Valerie Plame's lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney and several former Bush administration officials for disclosing her identity to the public.

The Court of Appeals in Washington dealt another setback to the former spy, who has said her career was destroyed when officials blew her cover in 2003 to retaliate against her husband, Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.
It's not only -- or even primarily -- a setback to the "former spy", as Andy Sullivan puts it. It's a setback to the Rule of Law, and a victory for the forces of tyranny. Perhaps Andy Sullivan can't say this, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Plame's outing led [to] a lengthy criminal investigation, which resulted in the conviction of Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

President George W. Bush commuted Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence last year.

Plame and Wilson sought money damages from Cheney, Libby, former White House aide Karl Rove and former State Department official Richard Armitage for violating their constitutional free speech, due process and privacy rights.
But the court ruled that the named officials are not liable for their actions, as Sullivan continues:
[A] three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a federal judge's ruling that dismissed the couple's lawsuit.

The court ruled Cheney and the others were acting within their official capacity when they revealed Plame's identity to reporters.

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

It is interesting -- and horrifying! -- to note that this decision ventures well beyond the "just following orders" defense which was used by the Nazi war criminals and found wanting at Nuremberg.

It even goes beyond the "divine right of government officials" long desired by the Dominionists of the allegedly "Christian" so-called "Right". At least under the proposed "Constitution Restoration Act", government officials would have to claim they believed they were carrying out the will of God in order to be absolved of their crimes.

And -- let's be clear -- there is no question about whether crimes have been committed in this case. The Vice President's right-hand-man, Lewis "Scooter" Libby [photo], has already been convicted, and although his sentence was commuted, that doesn't make him any less guilty.

The crime in this case involved much more than outing Valerie Plame, an undercover national security professional, ruining her career and jeopardizing the lives of everyone who had ever worked with her. It was done at least in part to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who had publicly challenged one of the administration's most useful lies.

The lie was useful because it propelled the country along the road to war against Iraq -- a war waged on false pretenses that has already cost our country trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, not to mention all the other damages that are not so easily counted.

The falsely "justified" war has cost Iraq even more, of course; we've wrecked the infrastructure of a country that used to be home to 28 million people, and along the way we've killed more than a million of them and turned millions more into refugees.

It's a war of aggression, the ultimate crime against humanity, and it was all based on lies, including the tale about how Saddam Hussein had allegedly sought to obtain uranium from Niger -- a claim Joe Wilson investigated personally and found to be utterly baseless.

Proponents of truth and justice regard Joe Wilson's actions in this case as heroic: after all, he was taking a great personal risk in trying to defuse a dangerous situation by bringing to light a mistaken claim which was repeated endlessly by the administration.

But the claim wasn't exactly "mistaken". It was a deliberate, carefully crafted lie. And rather than allowing the truth of the matter to stand, the highest officials in our government chose to attack the truth-teller indirectly -- through his wife!

Exposing the identity of an undercover national security officer is -- according to federal law -- an act of treason. Telling deliberate lies in order to facilitate a war of aggression is -- according to international law -- a crime against humanity. These are the most serious crimes anyone can commit on the national and international stage respectively. All of this goes overlooked in the coverage provided by Reuters and others, who are -- as usual -- focusing on the narrow.

But even in the short and narrow version of this story, the course of action taken by our government officials has been despicable. To get back at a man who told the truth and tried to save many innocent lives, they attacked his wife! They couldn't confront Joe Wilson directly, of course, because he was telling the truth and they knew it.

So instead they outed his wife and damaged his family, and at the same time they also destroyed a precious national security asset -- an undercover professional, an expert on controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration, under the tutelage of political operative Karl Rove [photo], perfected the tactic of using the specter of terrorists with nuclear weapons as a cattle prod. And in light of this, the outing of Valerie Plame alone reveals hypocrisy of the highest order.

But it's only one of many examples of rank hypocrisy in this case, and those examples are but drops in an ocean of hypocrisy, treason, and crimes against humanity that can be found (can't be missed!) in the horrific annals of this extraordinarily destructive administration. But Andy Sullivan and Reuters aren't saying anything about any of them. They're busy casting the decision as a "setback" to a "former spy".

Plame's lawyer says she will probably appeal. But surely the entire weight of the bipartisan criminal policy establishment will be aligned against any potential reversal of this decision.

And in the meantime, what about the rest of us? Because we weren't personally affected, because our careers weren't destroyed, we have no "legal standing" in this case, despite the fact that the ruling -- if upheld -- unleashes a most virulent form of tyranny, and despite the obvious fact that this is the ruling's primary intention.

You probably won't hear anyone criticizing this decision in the mainstream media -- and you might not read much about it elsewhere on the internet -- who knows? John Edwards had an affair, did you hear? Paris Hilton made a video!

So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.

Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

The terrorists have won. The federal courts are now ruling that they are all beyond the law.

No doubt the perpetrators of 9/11 will be afforded the same immunity [* UPDATE: This prediction came true two days later]. Ho hum.

Just another "setback" for a "former spy".

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Yea Though I Walk Through The Valley Of Endless Spin

Chris Floyd was exactly right about Bush and his address to the Knesset, and you should read "Progressive Vision Failure: The Real Scandal of Bush’s Knesset Speech" in its entirety. Pay particular attention to what Chris has to say about the work of Will Bunch. I'll wait.

As Robert Parry writes:
The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.
Parry has even more detail on the connection between the Bush family and rise of Hitler and the state-sponsored evil we call the Nazis, and you should read "The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement" too -- especially if you have any doubt as to the correctness of what Floyd wrote in this regard. I don't mind waiting again.

There are ironies galore in this story -- which continues to reverberate despite its lack of newsworthiness -- and in the short time I have available I wish to mention a few of them...

The fixation on the "appeasement" angle -- the focus on one short passage of the speech and the interpretation of that passage as an oblique attack on Barack Obama -- is not only a "progressosphere" phenomenon, although, as Chris Floyd points out, this is the angle you will get from the big "progressive" sites. But it's also an angle that got substantial play in the mainstream -- and even the foreign -- press. I got tired of reading about it in the Washington Post so I turned to a Canadian television network, and they -- CBC -- were saying exactly the same thing -- and treating the story as if nothing mattered in that speech except the angle they were pushing. It seemed strange to me that these independent [sic] news [sic] sources should independently [sic] land on the exact same point and put the exact same interpretation on it. But at the same time other elements within the blogosphere were picking up on that loony-sounding point and amplifying it. Hmm.

The appeasement Bush decries is already happening. But it's Bush who is being appeased. His "commander in chief" presidency has not been seriously tackled by any Democrats, none of whom, apparently, want to end up like Cynthia McKinney, much less Paul Wellstone. (There are of course other reasons why Bush's policies have been largely unopposed by the Democrats.) So the "unitary executive" madness continues to deepen and there's no end in sight.

Bush is also being appeased on the international level, where his doctrine of "preemptive warfare" -- meaning the US can attack anyone anytime for no reason at all -- has the rest of the world scurrying for cover. Nobody wants to become the next Iraq, or the next Afghanistan, or the next Pakistan, or the next Somalia ... so they sit back and watch America destroy one country after another with barely so much as the odd "Tut, tut." (This appeasement is not new, of course. America has been destroying one country after another for more than fifty years.)

Historically speaking, the United States didn't exactly vanquish the evil embodied in the Nazis. The US didn't even vanquish the Nazis. They did arrange war crimes trials for the top leaders, but many of the second-level administrators -- the technicians of the giant evil machine -- were smuggled into the USA after the war and became the nucleus of the CIA. How very convenient is it that this is never mentioned?

The US didn't have a monopoly on the recruitment and absorption of German evil monsters, though: Some professional bad guys went to Russia and worked for the KGB. Others stayed in East Germany and became key figures in the secret police there. Others may have suddenly become British, for all I know.

We were told the Cold War was an epic struggle of good vs. evil. But what if it was a power struggle between two different brands of evil? What if our evil was just a shade more potent than the evil possessed by the Russians? What if we won the Cold War because we had more and better Nazis?

The only thing about the Holocaust that matters to the Knesset is the political cover it gives Israel. Because of the anti-Semitism displayed before and during World War II, Israel can now do anything it wants to do, as long as the Americans don't object too strenuously. And the US almost never objects -- strenuously or otherwise.

With their veto power in the UN Security Council, the Americans can protect Israel from the indignation of the rest of the world, and they do -- every time. So when Bush appears before the Knesset and talks about the evils of appeasement, he's really giving the aggressive Israelis a clear signal that the aggressive Americans still support them to the hilt. Some analysts say the speech encouraged Israel to attack Iran if the Americans don't do it themselves, or if they don't do it soon enough. Thus the American hawks are actually Israel's Number One appeasers in this regard.

There's an interesting parallel between the militarized industrialized Nazis proclaiming "God is with us" while persecuting stateless defenseless Jews ... and the militarized industrialized Israelis claiming to be God's chosen people while persecuting stateless defenseless Palestinians ... and the militarized industrialized United States where the culture is rife with mutant militant Christianity and the prevailing mentality looks approvingly on a nation that wages war wherever it wants, whenever its unelected president says God tells him to smite somebody.

But the experts in the national media don't want to talk about any of this, any more than they want to talk about how the Bush family facilitated the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. And the progressosphere wants the very same thing. Hmmm. Once again. Hmmmmmm.

I've said for a few years now that all the big "liberal" or "progressive" blogs are running psy-ops. Saying things like this brands me as a "conspiracy theorist". But on the other hand you can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that president Bush's grandfather helped to facilitate the rise of Adolph Hitler. You can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that 9/11 was an inside job. You can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that John Kennedy was killed as part of a military coup supported by elements deep within the American power structure. There are a number of other things you can say which are obviously true, any one of which will get you branded as a "conspiracy theorist", which is beginning to seem like a compliment.

So here's my question: Who issues the talking points to the Washington Post and the CBC and Atrios and Digby and Will Bunch? Who feeds the American media, the international media, and all the prog-bloggers to the extent that they can all be found saying the very same thing at the very same time?

Who tells them all:
"This is the passage to concentrate on. This is where Bush attacks Obama. Nothing like this has ever been done before. This is worse than torture. This is worse than indefinite incarceration without charge or trial. This is worse than a war of choice based on lies which has killed more than a million people. When I snap my fingers, you will open your eyes, and you will forget this conversation ever happened."
Who tells them? That's what I want to know.

I promise I'll be polite about it. I won't mention any of the ways in which Israeli and American policies and tactics mimic the policies and tactics employed by Hitler and the Nazis. I won't mention the Reichstag Fire and 9/11 and how similar they appear from a certain perspective. I won't say anything at all about Hitler's Enabling Act and Bush's PATRIOT Act. I won't talk about unprovoked attacks on non-threatening foreign countries. And I won't mention any other false-flag attacks that were staged in order to mobilize political support for war.

... because we all know that it's OK to kill millions of people, provided they're not ours (we can only kill thousands of ours), but it's considered impolite to ask questions about it.

And I would never wish to be impolite. Not in the Valley of Endless Spin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Chris Floyd: The Torture Election

I'm still hampered by injury; while I'm recovering, blogging poses several difficult questions. One of the few answers I can find goes like this:

Many of my readers are reading Chris Floyd every day already. If you're not one of them, please take the hint!

Floyd's most recent piece is brilliant, as always ... but maybe a little bit more so this time. Here it is, in full and by kind permission, with a cold comment or two along the way.

The Torture Election
As the presidential horse race grows more frenzied and absurd -- Flag pins! Bowling! Obliteration! -- it is important to keep in mind what the election is really about: torture.

Specifically, the use of torture as an openly admitted, formally recognized instrument of national policy, approved at the highest level of government. The Bush Administration has now dropped all pretense that it is not engaging in interrogation techniques and incarceration practices long recognized by both international and U.S. law as blatantly criminal. What's more, the Administration boldly asserts that the president can simply ignore laws prohibiting torture if he feels that circumstances warrant the use of "interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law," the New York Times reported over the weekend.

(The Washington Post had a similar story -- similarly buried deep inside the paper. A brazen declaration of presidential tyranny -- in the service of torture, no less -- was considered worth mentioning somewhere in the "papers of record," but obviously not worth making a big fuss about.)
The key words here are "openly admitted" and "formally recognized". Torture as an instrument of national policy runs deep in our history. So do death squads, for that matter, and subversion of democracy. Most of that history, of course, has been hidden from American eyes; but nothing is hidden from the "locals". The "recipients" of our "generosity" always know about the "collateral damage".
Torture is at the very heart of the Bush presidency, the most quintessential manifestation of its governing philosophy: a "Commander-in-Chief" state, where presidential directives can override any law in the name of "national security." The use of torture demonstrates that not even the most heinous crimes -- including techniques used by Nazi sadists and KGB brutes -- are beyond the pale of the "unitary executive's" arbitrary will. On the basis of this authoritarian power -- established through a series of presidential orders and "legal" opinions by appointed lackeys -- many other crimes can be "justified": aggressive war; kidnapping and rendition; indefinite detention; secret prisons; warrantless surveillance; even the "extrajudicial killing" of people the president designates as terrorists or terrorist "suspects."
In keeping with the simultaneous perversion of language and culture, it's misleading to refer to systematic torture as an "interrogation technique", "enhanced" or otherwise.

Unlike what you see on "24", or what you hear when our unelected representatives discuss the "merits" and "necessity" of "enhanced interrogation", torture is not typically used to extract information. This is the conclusion drawn by the legal team at Seton Hall which has been studying unclassified DoD records, based on the finding that most of the detainees in Guantanamo were "interrogated" once a month on a regular schedule.

If you had a detainee in your custody who you thought had information that could prevent an imminent terrorist attack, and you only interrogated him once a month, you'd be derelict in your duty. And it's very unlikely that you'd remain in your position. So let's be clear about the Bush administration's use of torture: it's an instrument of dominance and control, it's a tool of humiliation and degradation, it's a source of sadistic pleasure, and if openly proclaimed it has a chilling effect on domestic dissent. But it's not a source of actionable intelligence.

Indeed, under the Bush administration, no "intelligence" is "actionable" anyway, nor is it intended as such. Each bit of "intelligence" is simply a public relations item, fixed around a previously determined policy. And torture helps to produce even more public relations items. So they have all these reasons -- in their eyes -- to do it, and no reason -- again in their eyes -- not to do it.

The "logic" is simple: unencumbered by moral and ethical questions about deliberately and needlessly inflicting pain and fear on defenseless and possibly innocent people, the torturers just ask themselves: "Can anybody stop me?"
The highest officials of the Bush Administration have gone to enormous lengths to twist, pervert and destroy legal precepts that have been in force in Anglo-American law for centuries -- precisely because they know that their policies are criminal under any reasonable understanding of the law. Bush, and the likely prime mover of the torture regime, longtime authoritarian Dick Cheney, were told at the very beginning that the policies they were instigating would leave them and their minions open to criminal charges. That's why the Administration's legal hacks have devoted so much relentless attention on subverting the Geneva Conventions, which are incorporated into and have the full force of American law.
And this is why the Bush "legal" approach is at once so brilliant and so dangerous: if an act recognized worldwide as heinous can be excused based on the proclaimed intention of the perpetrator, then all rules are off, for selected perpetrators.
Bush and his minions know that if the rule of law is ever restored -- even partially and imperfectly -- they will be rightly be subject to prosecution, imprisonment and possibly even execution.
Execution seems most certain in my cold view; it also seems pitifully inadequate, even though the number of minions who would be endangered by such a restoration of law is almost impossible to overestimate.
And this is why torture is the core issue -- perhaps the only real issue -- in the presidential campaign. Iraq is not really an issue; whoever wins, the war will go on, in one form or another. Even under the so-called withdrawal plans of the "progressive" candidates, Americans will be killing and dying in Iraq for years to come. As for the economy, by their own admission none of the presidential aspirants will do anything more than tinker around the edges of the present rapacious system -- an unholy marriage of crony capitalism and corporate socialism that has devastated America's communities, left millions with harsher, diminished lives, corrupted civic society and degraded and homogenized American culture. For the elite factions that thrive on war profits and the brutal economic structure, none of the candidates represents a serious enough threat for any action -- beyond the usual lying, sabotage, vote-rigging and media manipulation to get their favorite into power, of course.

But torture is a different matter. Consider how many very powerful people -- and hundreds of their minions -- face very serious charges if the next president decides to apply the law. Will they really allow this to happen? Or even risk allowing this to happen?

Right now, the torturers control the military and the security apparatus, including many secret forces and units that we know little or nothing about. They have already used these assets to launch a war of aggression, to instigate a system of torture, to spy without restraint on the American people, and to imprison anyone in the world they claim is a terrorist. Why should we imagine that they will draw the line at using these assets to save themselves from prison -- or the poison needle?
Several wars of aggression, now that I think about it. It has seemed to some people -- and it still seems quite possible to me -- that they might even use these assets to stage "another 9/11" in order to prevent another "democratic" election.
It would seem then that the Bush Administration has only two choices: cut a deal with the candidates on torture -- or eliminate them from the race, one way or another.
A potential third choice then would be to eliminate the election itself. But this would be a drastic step which might engender resistance. It may be difficult to imagine whence or from whom such resistance might come, but surely a smoother path to absolute tyranny must seem safer and more secure to the tyrants. So it stands to reason that they would try to hold an "election" if at all possible, under carefully controlled conditions, of course.

If they lost control of the conditions, the balance might tip differently. But for now, at least, it seems we ought to pay attention to the candidates.
It goes without saying that John McCain will do nothing but revel in the authoritarian powers brought into the open by Bush; certainly it is inconceivable that he would ever prosecute the instigators of the Bush torture regime. Thus the focus here falls on the winner of the Democratic nomination.

It is Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton who will have to come to terms with the Bush team on torture. (If they have not already done so, that is. Given the intimate, growing personal ties between the Bushes and the Clintons, one could plausibly surmise that Clinton at least has already signalled her benevolent intentions on this point. But perhaps not. The true relations of our ruling families remain forever obscured from the rabble. Meanwhile, Obama is clearly leaning in the "right" direction, as noted here, although he retains a little wiggle room; perhaps he's not yet sealed the deal.)
It may still be possible to imagine Barack Obama as a "stealth candidate" -- something like George W. Bush in reverse. As you may remember, Bush promised to be "a uniter, not a divider" who would run a "humble foreign policy". We now know that his intention was just the opposite. And it may be true that Bush never would have been elected if the electorate understood what he really wanted. (He was never legitimately elected anyway, but who's counting?)

For a while four years ago I entertained fantasies of John Kerry as a stealth candidate. "It's all tactical," I told myself. "He's trying to outflank Bush on the side of more war because he thinks he can win that way. Then he'll stop the war." But it was always obvious that Kerry meant what he said. He didn't want to end the war. He didn't even want to win the election. Kerry as a "stealth candidate" had been a foolish if hopeful illusion.

This time around, Barack Obama doesn't seem particularly committed to restoring the rule of law or holding the Bush administration accountable for obvious crimes against the nation and against humanity. Why is this? Is it because he really doesn't care? Or is it because he's a "stealth candidate" who knows he can't speak freely about anything this serious and remain a viable and visible presidential candidate?

But what if he wins? Will he then reveal a different agenda? In other words, is Barack Obama secretly riding in on a white horse? Chris Floyd doesn't imagine him coming to the rescue of the republic anytime soon.
In the most benign scenario for these negotiations, perhaps some small fry will be offered up as a PR sop for the victor. Just as Scooter Libby took the fall for Karl Rove (in another obvious backroom deal), we might see John Yoo or that despised putz-for-all-seasons, Doug Feith, put on trial, while Bush, Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice and the other "principals" go free.

But it is much more likely that any acknowledgement of criminality will be unacceptable to the torturers. It would establish a principle -- or rather, re-establish a principle -- that would forever leave them open to future prosecution.
And this is precisely the point. They have gone so far to defeat the rule of law -- and to discredit the notion that the rule of law is a good thing -- that they would earnestly wish to avoid seeing it take root again in any form -- on principle and as a matter of existential necessity.
So again, we come down to a stark choice for the Democratic candidate: either agree to "move on" from "bitter partisan rancor" over "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- or else. There are of course several ways to eliminate someone from public life; the tools have been refined somewhat since the days when "lone gunmen" stalked the land, removing inconvenient figures.
Is Obama thinking like this, too? Does he imagine he could become president by slipping under the radar with secret plans to make all the criminals accountable after his inauguration? And if so, what then? With such "treasonous" ideas, how long could he stay in the Oval Office? How long could he stay alive?

Those audacious enough to harbor some hope may be working overtime by now.
But given the proven nature of the Bush team -- and the dire consequences they face from any normal, rightful application of the law -- we should assume that they will do whatever it takes to escape those consequences.

And that's why torture is the decisive issue of this campaign. But this decision will not be in the hands of the voters; it will be made -- as most of the decisions that govern our lives are made -- in the inner sanctums of elite power.
And that means, unless I am much mistaken, that the key decisions are already made.

We would never have been led down this evil road if we were meant to turn back.

Oh no. The big decisions were made years ago. All the rest has been implementation.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Selling Hope And Unity, Obama Makes His Intentions Clear

Hope is a wonderful thing, without which we can achieve nothing of value. And that may be sufficient reason to sell it as a political commodity, but it's not a good reason to buy it.

On the other hand, after seven years of being sold nothing but fear, the American people are ready to buy something different. So "hope" it is, and "unity" too -- two hot-ticket items this year.

But hope for what? Unity behind what? Clearly Barack Obama is hoping the country will unite behind him; but what then would become of the country?

Obama explained his position as clearly as we could ask for in Pennsylvania on Friday, as reported by Devlin Barrett of the AP, via Chris Floyd:

Obama aligns foreign policy with GOP
Sen. Barack Obama said Friday he would return the country to the more "traditional" foreign policy efforts of past presidents, such as George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

At a town hall event at a local high school gymnasium, Obama praised George H.W. Bush — father of the president — for the way he handled the Persian Gulf War: with a large coalition and carefully defined objectives.
...

"The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that's been naive and it's people like John McCain and, unfortunately, some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world," he said.
Under the title "Hope Abandoned: Obama Stands Up for Murder and Plunder", Chris Floyd goes on to explain just what it means to "return" to the "traditional bipartisan realism" that has marked US foreign policy since World War II, with the exception -- according to Barack Obama -- of George W. Bush, who has been -- in Obama's word -- "naive".

You should read the whole piece. But you won't have to go far.

After quoting the AP piece, Chris writes:
Obama is doing two things here, reaching out to two very different audiences, on different wavelengths. First, for the hoi polloi, he is simply pandering in the most shameless way imaginable, throwing out talismans for his TV-addled audience to comfort themselves with: "You like JFK? I'll be like him! You like Reagan? I'll be like him too! You like the first George Bush? Hey, I'll be just like him as well!" This is a PR tactic that goes all the way back to St. Paul the spinmeister, who boasted of his ability to massage his message and "become all things to all men." Obama has long proven himself a master of this particular kind of political whoredom -- much like Bill Clinton, in fact, another champion of "bipartisan foreign policy" who for some strange reason got left off Obama's list of role models.

But beyond all the rubes out there, Obama is also signaling to the real masters of the United States, the military-corporate complex, that he is a "safe pair of hands" -- a competent technocrat who won't upset the imperial applecart but will faithfully follow the 60-year post-war paradigm of leaving "all options on the table" and doing "whatever it takes" to keep the great game of geopolitical dominance going strong.

What other conclusion can you draw from Obama's reference to these avatars, and his very pointed identification with them? He is saying, quite clearly, that he will practice foreign policy just as they did. And what they do? Committed, instigated, abetted and countenanced a relentless flood of crimes, murders, atrocities, deceptions, corruptions, mass destruction and state terrorism.

Obama is telling us -- and the war-profiteering powers-that-be -- that he will give us "realistic policies" like those of John Kennedy. These include his steady march into the quagmire of Vietnam, and the backing of a deadly coup in Saigon to replace one brutal junta with another; greenlighting successful coups in Guyana, the Dominican Republic and Iraq, where the CIA helped the Baath Party come to power; greenlighting the spectacularly unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, not to mention the terrorist operations and assassination attempts there. As Edward Jay Epstein noted (in John Kennedy Jr.'s magazine George, of all places):
While the Mafia continued its unsuccessful machinations, John F. Kennedy became President and, in April 1961, launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, an attack on a swamp in Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles that ended in disaster. Furious at this humiliating failure, Kennedy summoned Richard Bissell, the head of the CIA's covert operations, to the Cabinet Room and chided him for "sitting on his ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime" (as Bissell recalled). Richard Helms, who succeeded Bissell, also felt "white heat," as he put it, from the Kennedys to get rid of Castro.

By then, the Kennedys had set up their own covert structure for dealing with the Castro problem the Special Group Augmented, which Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor effectively ran and which, in November 1961, launched a secret war against the Castro regime, codenamed Operation Mongoose. Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, who was not a formal member of this group but attended meetings, later testified: "We were hysterical about Castro at about the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter. And there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro." It was a "no holds barred" enterprise, as Helms termed it, for which the Special Group Augmented assigned such "planning tasks" as using biological and chemical warfare against Cuban sugar workers; employing Cuban gangsters to kill Cuban police officials, Soviet bloc technicians, and other targeted people; using agents to sabotage mines; and, in what was called Operation Bounty, paying cash bonuses of up to $100,000 for the murder or abduction of government officials.
More of this kind of thing, then, from Obama when he reaches the White House?

As for his other two foreign policy mentors, Reagan and Bush I, the rap sheet is far too long for even a brief accounting here. (And indeed, I've spent much of the past seven years detailing many of these crimes in various venues -- because they involved so many of the same players now spewing filth and blood from the current administration.) We could begin, I suppose, with Reagan and Bush's act of treason in negotiating with Iranian hostage-takers in 1980 to ensure that Teheran would not release the American captives at the U.S. embassy before the November election; in return, Reagan and Bush pledged to provide cash and military hardware to the extremist mullahs, which they duly did. (See here, and here.)

Or we could cite Reagan's ardent support for mass-murdering militarist regimes in Central and South America; the arming and funding of the Contra insurgent army in Nicaragua, which received CIA training in terrorist tactics. Or the Iran-Contra affair, which saw Reagan and Bush ship weapons to the extremist Iranian regime in return for cash which they then gave to their Contra terrorist militia, in flagrant violation of the law. Or Reagan's stupid and pointless invasion of Grenada, which he undertook solely to cover up the embarrassment of his stupid and pointless intervention in Lebanon, where 241 American soldiers were killed after having been dropped into the middle of a multi-sided civil war. Or Reagan's vast expansion of a policy begun under Jimmy Carter of arming, funding, training and organizing a global network of violent Islamic extremists -- a "foreign policy" masterstroke that is still paying dividends today. (Quite literally paying dividends for investors in the defense, security and military servicing industries.)

But at least Obama did qualify his embrace of Reagan's traditional and realistic bipartisan foreign policy, saying that he would emulate "some" of Reagan's approaches. So maybe he will skip on the election-fixing treason and go for supporting mass-murdering militarist regimes instead? Or are we being too cynical? Perhaps Obama means he will follow in the footsteps of some of Reagan's more merciful and reconciliatory policies -- such as the time the Great Communicator laid a wreath at a cemetery where Nazi SS soldiers lie in honored burial: a clear signal from the U.S. president to these dead mass-murderers that "all is forgiven" at last.

Obama offers no qualification at all to his championing of George Herbert Walker Bush however. Indeed, his was the first name uttered in the paean to bipartisan foreign policy. But here too one quails (and Quayles) at the prospect of toting up the high crimes and monstrous follies of this "traditional realist" whom Obama promises to emulate. Should we start with Bush's arming and funding of Saddam Hussein -- long after the latter "gassed his own people" -- and Bush's later perversion of the legal process to cover up his largess to the dictator? Or Bush's pointless and unnecessary invasion of Panama, which killed hundreds if not thousands of innocent people and drove at least 20,000 people from their homes, all to remove a long-time U.S. intelligence "asset," Manuel Noriega, who in the 1970s received fat payments of bribes from the director of the CIA -- one George Herbert Walker Bush?

Or perhaps we should follow Obama's example and point to "the way [Bush] handled the Persian Gulf War." Yes, let's take a closer look at that, since Obama clearly sees it as a model for his own presidency. Here's an excerpt from an earlier piece, Scar Tissue: How the Bushes Brought Bedlam to Iraq (where you will also find much more on Bush's backroom tryst with Saddam):
Then came Bush's "Gulf War," when he turned on his protégé after Saddam made the foolish move of threatening the Kuwaiti royals – Bush's long-time business partners [in the oil business], going back to the early 1960s. Saddam's conflict with Kuwait centered on two main issues: first, his claim that the billions of dollars Kuwait had given Iraq during the war with Iran was simply straightforward aid to the nation that was defending the Sunni Arab world from the aggressive onslaught of the Shiite Persians. The Kuwaitis insisted the money had been a loan, and demanded that Saddam pay off. There was also Saddam's claim that Kuwait was "slant-drilling" into Iraqi oilfields, siphoning off underground reserves from across the border. These disputes raged for months; a deal to resolve them was brokered by the Arab League, but fell apart at the last minute when Kuwait suddenly rejected the agreement, saying, "We will call in the Americans."

How worried was Bush about the situation? Let's look at the historical record. In the two weeks before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush approved the sale of an additional $4.8 million in "dual-use" technology to factories identified by the CIA as linchpins of Hussein's illicit nuclear and biochemical programs, the Los Angeles Times reports. The day before Saddam sent his tanks across the border, Bush obligingly sold him more than $600 million worth of advanced communications technology. A week later, he was declaring that his long-time ally was "worse than Hitler."

Yes, the Kuwaitis had called in their marker. Like a warlord of old, Bush used the US military as a private army to help his business partners. After an extensive bombing campaign that openly – even gleefully – mocked international law in its targeting of civilian infrastructure (a tactic repeated in Serbia by Bill Clinton – now regarded as an "adopted son" by Bush), the brief 100-hour ground war slaughtered fleeing Iraqi conscripts by the thousands – while, curiously, allowing Saddam's crack troops, the aptly-named Republican Guard, to escape unharmed. Later, these troops were used to kill tens of thousands of Shiites who had risen in rebellion against Saddam – at the specific instigation of George Bush, who not only abandoned them to their fate, but specifically allowed Saddam to use his attack helicopters against the rebels, and also ordered US troops to block Shiites from gaining access to arms caches. It was one of the worst, most murderous betrayals in modern history – and has been almost entirely expunged from the American memory.

Then came the Carthaginian "peace" of the victors – Iraq sown with the salt of sanctions, which led to the unnecessary death of at least 500,000 children, according to UN's conservative estimates. The sanction regime actually strengthened Saddam's grip on Iraqi society, as the ravaged people were reduced to surviving on government handouts of food....
Yes, these are truly worthy examples of the kind of traditional, realistic, bipartisan foreign policy that we need more of. And my stars, isn't that Obama a breath of fresh air, promising to take us back to that golden age of yore!

Next up: "Sen. Barack Obama said today that he would appoint Supreme Court Justices 'like John Roberts, Samuel Alito and, in some ways, Antonin Scalia,' in 'a return to a more traditional, realistic, bipartisan judicial philosophy.....'"

P.S. We've said it before and no doubt we'll say it again: an Obama presidency, like a H. Clinton presidency, will mean some measure of genuine mitigation of some of the worst depredations of the Bush Regime. There's no question about that. But no one who openly embraces the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan and George Bush I, or John F. Kennedy for that matter, is going to change in any substantial way the militarist-corporate machine that has already destroyed our democracy, gutted our Constitution, corrupted our system beyond all measure (and probably beyond all repair), and killed – and keeps on killing – hundreds of thousands of innocent people, decade after decade. Given this fact, every American voter must decide, in his or her own conscience, this question: Should I act to mitigate some small measure of the mass suffering wrought by this machine; or does that action, that participation, merely legitimize the machine, and strengthen it?

That is the only question at issue in this election. For none of the prospective presidents offer any hope – audacious or otherwise – of any kind of root-and-branch reform of the imperial system, which will continue to grind on -- in its traditional, realistic, bipartisan way.
I almost always agree with Chris Floyd, but we disagree just a bit this time. My understanding of Kennedy's position on Vietnam is closer to John Newman's analysis (which Noam Chomsky calls "deeply flawed") than it is to Chomsky's (to which Chris links with approval).

In other words, I believe Kennedy was trying to get out of Vietnam, rather than marching into the quagmire there -- certainly Kennedy didn't march in with gusto, the way LBJ did. But this minor disagreement is of little consequence in the long run, and in all other respects (in my humble opinion), Floyd's history lesson is right on the money -- so much so that there's very little left to be said. But that's never stopped me before.

I want to point out that the word "realistic", when used in this context, is meant in the political (i.e. false) sense. When did we ever have a "realistic" policy? We didn't. But we have had some presidents who liked short, sharp wars against small, weak countries, and these are the presidents (if I am right about Kennedy) whom Barack Obama wants to emulate. They didn't attack big countries all alone; if they couldn't drum up a "coalition", they subverted them quietly instead.

This is the "realistic" foreign policy that appeals to Barack Obama. He's not against all wars, he's just against long ones that we lose!

So there's not much to return to. And a turn to something resembling sanity is unthinkable -- not without a full and open investigation of 9/11 (and the subsequent anthrax attacks), and -- even more unlikely -- a full repudiation of George W. Bush's so-called "reaction" to those events.

But Obama won't have it, and there's the rub, because investigating 9/11 and punishing the crimes of the previous administration would be just the first step. The next step would be a repudiation of the foreign policy Barack Obama wants to emulate.

One other point is absolutely critical in this regard: Because the so-called War on Terror has been declared a top-priority item (as opposed to so many of the "realistic, bipartisan" war crimes committed by JFK, RWR and GHWB) it will get all the money it wants, until and unless it is stopped. So Barack Obama's domestic policies have no chance to get funded, unless he ... What am I saying? There's no money left anymore anyhow; even if Obama nuked the Pentagon and never gave the DoD another nickel, there would still be no way out of the mess his predecessors have made.

Not that he's looking for a way out, mind you -- he simply wants to abandon Bush's "naive" ideas about invading and occupying big countries, and return to the traditional, realistic, bipartisan method of "picking up small crappy little countries and throwing them against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" ...

... for as long as we can afford it ...

... even if it means we can never afford anything else.

~~~

The perversion of the language is so severe that it's almost impossible to write about these issues without lying. We're in the realm of political "secret code", where the words don't always mean what they mean.

For instance, Obama calls the policies of three of his recent predecessors "realistic", "bipartisan", and "traditional".

There's no doubt that such policies were "bipartisan". In fact, two of the three past presidents Obama mentioned were Republicans.

And there's no doubt that such policies are "traditional" as well -- after all, they've eaten everything in their path for the last 60 years. And that's why we now have nothing left except a government of heinous criminals, a propaganda mill of blood-soaked liars, massively crumbling infrastructure, a crippling national debt, the enmity of the entire world, and these "realistic" policies. Oh yeah, and some private armies, too. I suppose they add to the realism.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush's foreign policy features preemptive, aggressive war based on lies -- not just one lie but a deliberately crafted, expensively packaged, constantly shifting story. It includes bombing defenseless residential neighborhoods. It involves the use of incendiary weapons on innocent civilians. It involves indefinite detention without charges, and torture as a matter of course. And when Barack Obama describes these policies, the word that comes to mind is "naive".

Naive?
having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature or absence of artificiality; unsophisticated; ingenuous ... having or showing a lack of experience, judgment, or information; credulous ... simple, unaffected, unsuspecting, artless, guileless, candid, open, plain ...
Let's get this straight: the president starts a war based on a pack of lies that kills a million people and destroys the lives of millions of others, and when his lie is exposed, he makes a big joke and laughs about it, and this happens because he's "guileless, candid, open, plain ..."??

How about cynical?
showing contempt for accepted standards of honesty or morality by one's actions, esp. by actions that exploit the scruples of others ... selfishly or callously calculating: showed a cynical disregard for the safety of his troops in his efforts to advance his reputation.
But that's not a hopeful and unifying message, is it?

Sunday, March 16, 2008

US Military Attorney Accuses US Government Of Manufacturing Evidence

A US military attorney representing a suspect charged with murder has accused the US government of manufacturing evidence against his client.

Omar Khdar, 21 [photo], was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, allegedly during a battle against American forces. He has been held at Guantanamo Bay ever since, and he is now accused of murder. The US claims Khadr threw a grenade that caused the death of an American medic, Sgt. Christopher J. Speer.

Khadr's case is significant in a number of ways. Fabrication of evidence is the easiest to describe, but may not be the most alarming.

Khadr's attorney, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, says that on the day after the battle in which Sgt. Speer was killed, an American commander identified only as "Lieutenant Colonel W" wrote a report which said an American soldier had killed a man identified as the suspect in the slaying of Sgt. Speer.

But months later, according to Kuebler, a revised version of Lieutenant Colonel W's report was issued, bearing the same date as the original. In the revised version, the suspect had no longer been "killed", but merely "engaged".

Kuebler says the new report was presented to him by prosecutors, who told him it was an "updated" document. Obviously, if the man who killed Sgt. Speer is already dead, then Oman Khadr cannot possibly be guilty of that crime -- if indeed it was a crime.

Prosecutors did not dispute Kuebler's version of events, nor did they respond to a request for comment.

I wouldn't comment either, if I were in their shoes. But then I would never be in their shoes in the first place.

Not long ago, while discussing Bush's veto of a bill that would have restricted the CIA's use of torture, I mentioned professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School, who has been leading a team of law students through an examination of unclassified documents describing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The method used by Denbeaux's team is worthy of notice, in my opinion. They have taken a mass of documents from the Department of Defense, and put together a database representing the information in those documents.

They haven't questioned the veracity of any of these documents; instead they have used the documents themselves to confirm or deny the official pronouncements we've been hearing. And the results are not flattering to the official pronouncements.

One of the studies performed by Denbeaux's team looked at the claim -- made dozens of times by various government officials -- that "terrorists" who had been released from captivity at Guantanamo had "returned to the battlefield" and resumed "shooting at Americans". They studied unclassified summaries of the evidence against more than 500 detainees and found some very disturbing facts.

Only 5% of the detainees had been captured by American forces. Only 4% of the detainees were accused of having been on a battlefield, ever! And out of 516 unclassified summaries, only one so much as alleged that a detainee was captured by United States forces on a battlefield.

This, of course, is exactly the allegation laid out against Omar Khadr. He's "the worst of the worst". And the evidence against him is fabricated.

Or perhaps to be fair I should rephrase that. Omar Khadr's attorney, who works for the American government and who surely must be feeling the same pressure to obtain convictions that the prosecution feels, nonetheless stands up for his client and alleges that the evidence against him was fabricated. And the prosecution doesn't dispute the charge. What does that tell you?

Chris Floyd has recently written about the case of Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi,
who was forced to flee from his home by American bombing raids in the early days of the attack on Afghanistan, and was then sold to American forces by local bounty hunters in December 2001. He has never been charged with any crime; indeed, one of Bush's own military panels declared that Al-Ghizzawi was not an "enemy combatant." One of the officers on the panel testified, under oath, that the evidence against the purchased prisoner was "garbage."
Chris asks:
Why was Al-Ghizzawi not freed long ago, when it was first determined that he was not an "enemy combatant," and therefore, even under the ludicrous legal theories of the Bush gulag, should not have been subject to indefinite detention without charge or trial?
He points to the answer, too:
Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of one of the minions most directly responsible for imposing Bush's perverse lust for torture: William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Defense Department. At Harper's, Scott Horton references the accounts given by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief military prosecutor in Guantánamo, of his conversations with Haynes. As noted in the Nation:
“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”
"If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?" This has been the crux of the matter for a long time concerning the many prisoners in Guantanamo who are innocent of any wrong-doing. (And it should be noted that all of the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held under an illegal and unjust system, backed up by force and torture -- a system that is a complete repudiation of the "civilized values" that the Terror War purports to defend.) What indeed can the Bush Regime -- and its willing executioners in Congress, including the Democratic "opposition," who have done nothing to shut down this shameful enterprise -- do with all these innocent people they've held captive for so long? It would be too embarrassing to admit that their incarceration was a mistake -- much less the crime that it undoubtedly is. And while some prisoners have been released from time to time -- usually under a cloud, often rendered into custody elsewhere -- it is clear that the Bush Regime's Gitmo endgame strategy is simple: put some of the captives on trial in the kangaroo court of rigged "military tribunals, and leave others, like Al-Ghizzawi, to rot and die in darkness, in silence, forgotten by the world.
That's exactly right, in my opinion. The decision, for people like Haynes, comes down to a simple comparison: What's worse: for innocent men to spend their entire lives in captivity? Or for us to be embarrassed?

The really strange part is how much they don't mind embarrassing themselves. Omar Khadr was captured when he was 15 years old. According to international law, he is supposed to be treated as a child soldier -- decommissioned and rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian life. But the Bush administration sees more value in trashing international law than in obeying it, so there will be no rehabilitation for Omar Khadr, as far as the US is concerned. They simply want him for murder -- even for a murder he didn't commit.

As Scott Horton points out, the pressure to try and convict Omar Khadr is tremendous. As the Washington Post noted:
Senior defense officials discussed in a September 2006 meeting the "strategic political value" of putting some prominent detainees on trial, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis. He said that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed "sexy" over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.
"Sexy"? What could be "sexier" than a murder trial conducted by a "system of justice" so rigged that even though no trial has even begun, four prosecutors have already resigned rather than participate in such a travesty?

Perhaps we will learn more about this case in the coming days. Because Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen, the Canadian press has taken much more interest in his story than they otherwise would have, and Khadr's lawyers have just been granted access to some important bits of evidence, including permission to interview the Lt. Col. who altered the report about Sgt. Speer's death.

Certain additional information has come to light as well, perhaps accidentally:
The Guantanamo judge also ruled that the prosecution must provide to the defence a list of all personnel who interrogated Mr. Khadr. If the defence wishes to interview any of those personnel, the judge ruled, the prosecution must provide phone numbers and times for such interviews.

One of those interrogators, it was revealed by mistake, was Sergeant Joshua Claus, a U.S. soldier involved in a case of torture in Afghanistan that left one prisoner dead.

Sgt. Claus's name was not supposed to be revealed, but the judge accidentally said the soldier's last name in court on Thursday. Because Sgt. Clause is believed to have been the interrogator present at virtually all Mr. Khadr's interrogations while he was held in Bagram base in Afghanistan, defence lawyers say the likelihood that Mr. Khadr was also tortured is high.

Sgt. Clause was one of 15 U.S. soldiers who faced charges after a young man, believed to be an innocent taxi driver, was brutally beaten and later found dead. Sgt. Clause eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five months in prison.
Ah, yes. The United States of Torture. Welcome to The Dark Side.

Friday, March 14, 2008

The U.S. State Department Is Now Openly An Organ Of Israeli Propaganda

The State Department has just submitted to Congress a report called "Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism". According to Reuters,
Anti-Semitism, including government-promoted hatred toward Jews and prejudice couched as criticism of Israel, has risen globally over the last decade, the State Department said on Thursday.

"Today, more than 60 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is not just a fact of history, it is a current event," it said in a report to Congress.
...

"The distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that -- whether intentionally or unintentionally -- has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel's perceived faults to its Jewish character," it said.

This was common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but was even encouraged by some activity at the United Nations, the report said.

Various U.N. agencies are asked each year to investigate what are often "sensationalized reports of alleged atrocities and other violations of human rights by Israel," the document said.

Such unremitting criticism of Israel "intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism." This hostility can translate into physical violence, as in the surge in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide during the 2006 war between Israel and the Shi'ite Muslim group Hezbollah, the report said.
The message couldn't have been clearer:

The State Department now works for Israel.

So let's get this straight: Because of the atrocities committed against European Jews by Nazi Germany, Israel can now do whatever it wants to do.

And anyone who dares to criticize the policy of this rogue state "intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism", which because of the Holocaust is infinitely more despicable than any other form of racial and/or religious prejudice known to man.

In fact, Israel uses the horror of the Holocaust as a human shield, but that's all right with our so-called "diplomats", who often act more like zombies under an evil spell than intelligent human beings.

The spell is so powerful that Israel's full-scale assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 is now referred to as a war against a "Shi'ite Muslim group". And atrocities committed by Israeli military forces are not even mentionable without words like "alleged" and "sensationalized".

I've got an idea: Let the State Department compile a summary of crimes against Arabs and Muslims over the last ten years. Skip the "alleged"; skip the "sensationalized"; let's stick to actual physical reality.

Is Anti-Muslimism growing? Are innocent Arabs and/or Muslims being killed or injured for no reason other than where they live? And if so, by whom? And for what reason?

Let the State Department answer those questions, and then we can talk.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Frank Rich: The 'Good Germans' Among Us

Here's an excellent column from Frank Rich in Sunday's New York Times, brought to my attention by Larisa Alexandrovna, who notes:
Frank Rich has the courage to call a spade a spade or in this case, torture-torture.
Here's the piece from Frank Rich, in full:

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us
“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.
Larisa's closing comment is worth repeating as well, in my opinion:
I think this took a great deal of journalistic courage and I hate what will likely follow this. The brown shirts will descend from their hills and holes to stalk, smear, and "investigate" Rich's family. And people still wonder how an entire nation went along with Hitler? Because Hitler had his bullies conduct all out assault on anyone who raised a finger in protest. Remember, the "good Germans" did not start with the Final Solution. That horror show was toward the end of WWII. In the 1930s, Germany focused much more on imprisoning, attacking, and killing all "liberals," anyone perceived to be a "Communist," a "terrorist," and so forth. Only later did we learn that the people who were labeled in such way were actually political opponents, human rights advocates, journalist, intellectuals, and Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals were finally and horrifically targeted. Sadly, we are at the first stage of a similar domestic conflict for control of our nation and the people who are being disappeared are immigrants (both legal and illegal), journalists, American citizens (Jose Padilla), and anyone viewed as a "terrorist," including journalists held in our secret prisons.

I await the Patron Saint of Concentration Camps - shiksa Malkin - to pen some horrible diatribe in which she will define Rich as antisemitic.