Impeachment for Torture, Now!

by Hank Edson

(This Post was published by CommonDreams.org on July 1, 2007: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/01/2227/)

There is no shortage of reasons why we should impeach President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Their crimes are so extensive and so egregious that it is hard to find time to grasp just how deliberate their pursuit has been over the past several years. Today’s topic, torture and how impeachment for torture is necessary to the representation of humanity in our democracy, does not even cover the subset of impeachable offenses: war crimes. By my count, this subset contains six separate impeachable war crimes committed by Bush and Cheney: (1) the supreme war crime of commencing a war of aggression, (2) torture, (3) extraordinary rendition, (4) termination of habeas corpus, (5) inhumane weaponry (such as daisy cutters, depleted uranium shells, and phosphorus bombs), and (6) the usurpation of Iraqi self-determination in economic and political affairs protected under the Geneva Conventions. If every America could take just fifteen minutes to read nine or ten pages telling the story of Bush and Cheney’s willful commitment to torture, it would go far to reorient the mindset in our country that has so passively accepted conduct by our leadership that is absolutely offensive to our values, aspirations, and responsibilities as a democratic people. With hope for such a transformation in our public discourse, I offer this summary of one of the most disgraceful episodes of a disgraceful presidency.

White House Cowboys and Dungeon Masters

In 1996, Congress passed the War Crimes Act, which made it a criminal act to violate the ban against torture and cruel of degrading treatment found in the Geneva Conventions. The United States ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1955. As a result of congressional ratification, the conventions already carried the force of law in the United States without the need for the 1996 War Crimes Act to make the government’s use of torture illegal. [i] Notwithstanding this doubly clear statement of law, five days after 9/11 Vice President Dick Cheney was already mentally adding dungeons to the defense assessment the Neo-Conservative think tank, Project for a New American Century, had prepared for him for use in installing the U.S. industrial-arms complex throughout the Middle East.

On September 16, 2001, Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press,

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side…a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies…it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” [ii]

Juvenile George Bush took up his Vice President’s demented, but dead serious advice with gusto, telling his then-counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke and his then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,

“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” [iii]

What penance will America have to pay for placing such a man in its highest office?

Building the Legal Shield

As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes...read more.

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by Hank Edson

War is a pernicious business for what it does in the theatre of battle to be sure, but its insidious assaults are not limited to the enemy on the field, but are often aimed directly at the countrymen at home. For example, at the end of the Civil War, monopolistic railroads successfully conspired to completely change the legal effect of newly ratified social contract provisions intended to protect the freed African Americans. Instead of functioning as a shield, protecting former slaves from injustice and inequity, the 14^th Amendment was turned into a sword, which corporations could use to obtain a superior legal advantage over human beings. Ever since, the expansion of corporate abuse of the people’s commonwealth has run unchecked in our society.

This episode reminds me of George Orwell’s allegory, Animal Farm, which was intended to represent life in Stalinist Russia. The scene that comes to mind here occurs after the animals have revolted, cast the farmer out, and taken over operation of the farm. Then one night the pigs change the social contract written the animals have written on the barn wall while the rest of the farm is asleep. A loud crash brings the farm animals into the barn where they find a tipped over latter, spilled buckets of paint, and new words and cross out splotches on the social contract. Because the animals are not sophisticated enough to piece together what the scene before them clearly reveals, they are doomed to an authoritarian rule by pigs.

At the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln expressed this fearful premonition...read more.

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The Answer to Bloomberg?


Ad-Free Gore!

By Hank Edson

New York City Michael Bloomberg is breaking from the Republican Party to make an independent run at the presidency using his own fortune. Bloomberg is the latest act in a political season burgeoning with discontented energy after six plus years of the worst presidency in the history of our nation. First there were all those potential firsts: the first woman president (Hillary), the first black president (Barack), the first Latino (Bill), the first Mormon (Mitt). Then there were those two non-candidates polling high in both the Democratic and Republican Parties: Al Gore and Fred Thompson. And now, there is Bloomberg, the conservative independent. All this energy is good for a system corrupt with corporate campaign finance, there is no doubt, but none of this energy will provide the American people the type of political leadership that can repair the damage that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have wrought.

All the “firsts”—those candidates dressing up the debate podiums with their carefully centrist, tentatively strident calls for change—are completely wedded to the system of campaign finance that insures their own corruption. This money does not come for free. These candidates want to win and they do not find within themselves any other way to succeed that does not involve accepting the corrupting consequences of corporate cash.

Al Gore says he’s not getting in the race; Fred Thompson is carefully moving ahead. Bloomberg is looking for a way not to have to be so careful. The problem with Thompson and Bloomberg is that they have devoted themselves to the Republican Party that brought us Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., Gingrich, Delay and Bush Jr. Thompson and Bloomberg are part of a political establishment that has over the last four decades dedicated itself to putting corporate America in charge of our government by pandering to the Religious Right and by crafting a nationalistic foreign policy that institutionalizes an out of control industrial-arms complex. Republicans, even self-made, independent ones, are not acceptable candidates in any shape or form following the disaster that the Republican Party raised to the Presidency in 2000 and 2004. Therefore, the smart money, not the corporate money, has to be invested in Al Gore...read more.

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Campaign Issue:

Targets in the Electoral College

_{by Hank Edson}

What was once the key to building a democratic union has today become a means for isolating the weakest link by the anti-democratic ideologues that have taken over the Republican Party.

In two recent blog entries, I revisited Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. That these phrases “Florida in 2000” and “Ohio in 2004” mean something to the American voter indicates that something terrible has happened to our political process. Why do we not say, “America in 2000 and 2004”? Why is the story of the first and second Bush Jr. presidencies, essentially the story of only a single state? The answer is that our political process has been targeted for short circuiting at its weakest link. To understand how this is possible, the American voter must have a basic understanding of the political process circuitry our Constitution has created for electing the president of the United States. This circuitry is called the electoral college.

The electoral college was originally conceived as a device to protect the interests of “small states” (states with low populations) by preventing regional and rural electoral majorities from being completely washed out by the election results of larger, more populous states. This is how the system was intended to work... read more.

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Using Ohio Like Florida,

the GOP is a Disgrace to America

by Hank Edson, published May 30, 2007

In my post-before-last, I discussed events in Florida during the 2000 election. Friends in the intervening days have emailed me that revisiting these times brought back to life their anger at the Republican Party all over again. It is always surprising to find how few of the facts uncovered by investigative reporters have reached the general public. My friends’ responses spurred me to make my next post about Ohio 2004. Did you know this election was more blatantly fixed than the 2000 Florida election? Prepare to get angry. But what follows is only an introduction…

Investigative journalists, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, describe the strategy employed by the Republican Alliance to steal the 2004 election as “a brilliant, cynical and masterfully executed campaign of death by a thousand cuts.” [1] One commentator began an article on the election in Ohio by describing a few such sword strokes:

Pre-punched ballots; touch-screen vote switching; more absentee votes than absentee voters; unfair provisional voter deletions; change of voting sites on Election Day; voter suppression; voter intimidation; double voting; malfunctioning machines; recalibrated machines; evidently rigged machines; and even 25 million negative votes registered in some races in Mahoning County! These were among the problematic incidents at a 3-hour public hearing on vote irregularities in the Mahoning Valley held on December 21 at the Warrant-Trumbull Public Library. [2]

One American’s email read at the same hearing, explained the deeper significance of the Ohio election crime scene:

The election wasn’t fair, but trying to prove that any one method of fraud or ‘error’ has caused a false outcome will be nearly impossible. Instead I feel that a combination of frauds or ‘errors’ has given Bush the tiniest of advantages in our winner-take-all system. [3]

The Republican Alliance has raised unspoken cooperation to a lethal art-form, impervious to traditional methods of proof. At the end of election-day, however, we are still confronted by the dead body of our democracy. If the cause of death remains undetermined, the autopsy makes clear the injuries on the corpse are many, many times too numerous to be either accidental or of natural causes. ...read more!

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