THE CURRENT THEME
Entries from October 1, 2007 - November 1, 2007
Demand Impeachment!
Extraordinary Rendition:
Apologies Are Not Enough
By Hank Edson
After Two Years, It’s Still Business As Usual
The Bush administration’s determined and diseased compulsion to torture ought to be reason enough to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but sadly, it is far from the only reason for taking such politically responsible, humanitarian action. The White House has claimed itself justified in the exercise of a totalitarian brutality that begins with unprovoked shock and awe mass murder of innocent populations, and then swiftly proceeds past torture into the worst nightmares of Joseph Kafka or George Orwell. We are all hopefully aware by now that the depravi ty of the war on terror extends well beyond heinous torture and involves something the administration refers to as: “extraordinary rendition.”
Extraordinary rendition consists of the seizing of foreign individuals in the midst of their daily lives, refusing them any communication with the outside world, even to spouse or family, and transport ing them to various “black sites ” around the world, secret prisons where they are to be beaten, tortured, drugged, and left like brute animals, naked in tiny cells for months and even years. All this is done, often without the CIA taking even the most minimal efforts to ascertain whether the innocence of the seized individual can be easily and conclusively determined. Unbelievable as all this is, it is not fiction.
And although the administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition has been known for almost two years, still the White House maintains its rhetoric about spreading democracy and freedom with their war on terror. And still, the rest of American society goes about its business as usual. Meanwhile, on October 10, the United States Supreme Court ruled against the innocent victims of American barbarity, agreeing with the government that were one such victim, Khaled El-Masri, allowed to sue the government, vital state secrets would be revealed that would undermine our national security. [i] While the Bush administration has remained entrenched in its authoritarian commitments, members of congress are beginning to feel the indictment of their own conscience, though not so strongly as to demand the impeachment so obviously called for.
Instead, last Friday members of a congressional committee heard testimony by video link from an innocent victim of extraordinary rendition who could not testify in person because he is still not allowed in the country. After hearing Canadian Maher Arar testify, the members of the committee gave Mr. Arar an apology, which the Bush administration still refuses to offer. [ii] Although these congressional representatives are to be praised for providing any sign of remorse for the inhumane and criminal conduct of our government, their apology is a failure of world diplomacy because it fails... READ MORE !
Hank Edson
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MP3 Away: Replay of June Torture Post
We Want Our Humanity Represented!
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!
Note: Look for MP3's next post detailing the history of the Bush Administration's other war crimes.
1 Reference
Progressive Profiles
What’s It
All About,
Barack?
By Hank Edson
Is it just me, or has America already gotten tired of the 2008 presidential campaign, more than a year before the actual election? Has the corporate media winded itself in its frenzied impulse to hype meaningless content 24/7? Why does it seem in early October 2007 that the 2008 campaign has already come and gone, complete with YouTube presidential debates, “fundraising primaries,” and book tour after book tour? In the eerie emptiness of campaign news, we have a moment of contemplation available in which to reflect upon the strange Twilight Zone of historical moments in which we presently find ourselves.
This is the first presidential campaign in over 50 years with no incumbent president or vice-president seeking the oval office. We find ourselves not only at war, and not just the unjust aggressors in that war, but also the duped people of a democracy now confronting the tragedy our house has wrought upon both itself and the world. We have the most sinister and most powerful vice president and the worst president in history. For the first time in history, we will spend over $1 billion on this presidential campaign. Meanwhile, we have an unprecedented Pentagon budget, an unprecedented level of national debt, and a spreading housing crisis. The economic engine of China, like a baby dragon, which is slowly coming of age feeding on our debts and our trade imbalance, will clearly outsize us, if it remains intact, as the world’s foremost economic power. Furthermore, the Presidential race has started earlier than ever before. The states are competing to move their primary election dates forward as far as possible. And we have for the first time a woman presidential front-runner, a serious African-American contender, Mormon contender, and Latino contender. And it’s still a year away from the actual election and it seems no one has anything to say except that the pollsters say Hillary Clinton is more and more likely to win—as if the pollsters understand what the voters are thinking about November 2008 here in the odd light of October 2007.
What’s it all about, Barack?
This is a particularly fair question for Barack Obama. Barack was catapulted to the forefront of national politics in a manner that has never before been seen in the history of...READ MORE!
Can We Stop the War and Torture?
New Secret Torture Memos;
Nationwide Protest on October 27th!
By Hank Edson 
Just as they say that the one thing that never changes is change itself, the one thing we have learned about the Bush administration is that we always have more to learn.
Today, The New York Times has published an important article by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen detailing the Bush administration’s still active pursuit of the right to torture, now three years after the passage of the McCain Detainee Treatment Act, which was intended to outlaw what was already twice illegal: torture under the Geneva Conventions ratified by the United States in 1955 and also under the the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996.
Some of the story has entered into the public lexicon, “the torture memo,” “Abu Ghraib,” and “waterboarding” are now sadly common usage in American English, a fact that makes me want to resort to the Oxford Dictionary of Cursing to find appropriate descriptors of our president and vice president.
Paired down to the bare essentials, here is the sequence of events laid out in The New York Times article.
On September 16, 2001, Vice President Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that the U.S. would “ have to work, though, sort of the dark side” and that “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.”
Not long after, the United States began using extreme techniques unsupervised by the American Red Cross, which according to The New York Times, included “ slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.”
In August 2002, following increasingly urgent and frequent inquiries by troubled interrogators wondering if they were “crossing the line” legally in applying the techniques they were being instructed to apply, an up-and-coming Conservative lawyer in the Justice Department named John Yoo authored what has now become infamous as “the torture memo.” The memo said that no interrogation technique was illegal unless...READ MORE!
Jena and American Racism
America’s Crime
Against Its Own Humanity
By Hank Edson
We are a nation and a culture recklessly out of balance in many more ways than one. I will not count the ways here, but will say that in addition to war, the criminal abuse of our political process by our executive branch, and global warming, we also have our own deep seated racism still twisting our American soul and we must not ignore it in the coming presidential campaign.
Now, as always, but now more than ever, it is a time when we must try once more to look at our own moral culpability as a society straight on. Lately, reality has been challenging us to do this, but we have been resisting with all the determination of a corporate media intent on discussing O.J. Simpson rather than focus on what happened in Jena. Jena is a challenge for us to look at ourselves more honestly, a challenge to look more thoroughly, more deeply into just how strong our racism remains inside us.
Jena
In case you are unfamiliar with what happened in Jena, let me quote to you the story as told by journalist Gary Younge:
“Fittingly for a post-civil rights story, it began with the discrepancy between what you are allowed to do and what you can do. In August last year, Kenneth Purvis asked the principal at Jena High School if he could sit under the “white tree”–a place in the school courtyard where white students hung out during break. The principal said Purvis could sit where he liked. So the next day he went with his cousin Bryant and stood under the tree. The morning after that three nooses dangled from the tree.”
“The overwhelmingly white school board judged the nooses a youthful prank and...READ MORE!