I wrote this diary over one month ago. Nothing has changed except the problems we are facing as citizens of the world are getting worse. We have NO chance of breaking through to new solutions as long as our status quo media are allowed to continue their endless drivel. For me this has gone well past the scope of this first diary on the subject, included below.

Over the past month, as we have read here and elsewhere, climate damage is more severe than even Al Gore predicted it would me. Soldiers and Iraqi civilians keep dying for a war we now conclusively know is about oil and worse, American imperialism. The dollar is still in the tank and the next shoe to drop will be in January and it is breathtaking in its scale.

In the spirit I say NO MORE. IF WE DO NOT GET OUR VOICES HEARD TO THE MEDIA AND I MEAN NOW WE ARE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION.

Following this first list is a much more comprehensive list of to dos

breathingstill :: It’s Time for US to Clamp Down On The Media

In his 35 minute speech Obama was more honest in confronting the fact that racism is in our past and our present but that it has no place in our future as we stare down the problems facing this country. He named them. We all know what they are.

And what has the media done in response? The same media that DID NOT REPORT ON THE FINANCIAL CRISIS UNTIL IT SEEMED SAFE TO DO SO – a clear example of state censorship –  they are busy pounding away at meaningless drivel about Wright in an attempt to garner ratings while smearing this man – a great man.

I say it time to tell them to stop.

In my experience and by now you all know I’ve had a lot of media experience – there is but one thing and only one thing that works and works well.

CALL YOUR CABLE OPERATOR.

TELL YOUR CABLE OPERATOR YOU ARE DROPPING THIER SERVICE COMPLETELY IF CABLE NETWORKS SUCH AS FOX AND CNN CONTINUE TO REPORT A STORY THAT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THIS ELECTION

TELL YOU CABLE OPERATOR YOU ARE GIVING THEM 24 HOURS TO GET THOSE TAPES OF WRIGHT SCREAMING OFF THE AIR OR YOU ARE DROPPING THEM AND NEVER COMING BACK

Each of us is worth a minimum of $3000 – that is right – three thousand dollars a year – to your cable operator. I don’t need to know what your bill is. This number is based upon different metrics. But it is a real number.

With the consolidation in the industry most of us are either Conmcast, Time Warner – they own 60% of the industry. So this time consolidation works in our favor.

50 calls is the magic number to trigger fear and cause a supervisor in customer service to alert someone in the Programming department that a ‘serious event’ is taking place. Wh

(noon – promoted by ek hornbeck)

What follows is a bit of a recap of my two years here…er, there.  I’m going to drop in some of my favorite illustrations and collages from the past 2 years and they won’t necessarily relate to the text.  I beg your indulgence.

On April 30, 2006 I posted my first diary at DailyKos, The Curse of Big Money and The Pledge.  (Wasn’t a big hit.)

In my third diary, Senate says No Permanent Bases in Iraq posted on May 4, 2006, I speculated that the neocons planned a permanent occupation of Iraq.  

In my fourth diary, The False Premises of Conservatism I dismantled Conservative philosophy.

In my 20th diary, I Pissed on the President’s Head.

In An American Tale I told the history of the last 50 years from my personal point of view.

Sadly it seems that we have learned very little from our own history.  We are repeating our worst mistakes, much to our shame, and much to our great loss.  Once again politicians are arguing back and forth about whether or not we can just up and get the fuck out, while a deranged administration defiantly vows to “stay the course.”  In the mean time, people are dying.

Toward the end of the war in Vietnam John Kerry famously said, “How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?”

We face that same question today.  Arguing instead of withdrawing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

I’m 54 now and my father is in his 80’s.  Neither of us can quite believe what’s happened to our country.  I figured out a long time ago that, not only does our government not care about the safety and well-being of each and every one of its citizens, but much to the contrary treats us increasingly with open contempt.

It saddens me that my father lived to see the past few years: the stolen elections; the abandonment of the people by their elected representatives; the lies; the secrecy; the corruption; the torture; the erosion of our Constitutional rights; the end of democracy.  He always loved his country fiercely.  He served it for much of his life.  He never suspected it could come to this.

An American Tale

One of my most popular diaries was In Defense of Hippies.

First of all, the stereotype for hippies is about as reliable as the stereotype for any other people, that is to say not at all.  Hippie culture was never monolithic.  It encompassed well over half of every kind of kid there was in the late 60s and early 70s, and spanned every socio-economic strata of American society.  If you weren’t a hippy in those days, what you know and think about hippies is probably wrong.  It’s not your fault. The media has distorted the reality as a part of the conservative culture wars.  They are, and have always been, threatened by hippies who never had any trouble seeing straight through them and who consistently called them on their bullshit.  Progressivism (or enlightened thinking), started well before the age of the hippies, but for that one seminal decade, hippies were its natural home (though not exclusively of course).

In Defense of Hippies

In The ultimate betrayal of the American People I wrote about the neocon coup-de-tat.

Little did we suspect in 2000, even those of us who opposed them, just how much bad intent the Bush crowd was concealing.  We knew they represented Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Business in general.  We knew they represented the filthy rich, the `haves and the have mores’ as Bush so famously put it.  We knew they represented the forces of discrimination, censorship, bigotry, and avarice.  We knew they were famous for `dirty tricks’, and for criminal and near criminal behavior (see Watergate and Iran/Contra).  We knew they were heartless and uncaring about the poor and the needy.  We knew they were the party of social Darwinism and proponents of an every man for himself philosophy.  We knew they were a throwback to an unenlightened age when gay people were viewed as an abomination and women were regarded as chattel.  We knew they wanted to impose their narrow, wrong-headed yet curiously self-righteous views on all the rest of us.  We knew they represented intolerance, greed, selfishness, hatred, and hubris writ large.

What we didn’t know after the jump.

The ultimate betrayal of the American People

I wrote about hard realities in Suffering in America.

Many of us have it pretty good in this country – compared to other third world nations that is.  We dwell in a television-based culture, which incessantly promotes the idea that things are mostly pretty good no matter what.  That is especially true now that the press has rolled over and is playing dead.  We see very little coverage of poverty, hunger, homelessness or other issues that involve human suffering.  It’s just not PC.

If you are among the fortunate who are still employed and not facing layoffs, or impending financial or medical doom; if you are managing to make ends meet, pay the bills, and put food on the table; if you have savings, investments, or prospects for the future; you may not be aware of just how many Americans are trying to cope with gut-wrenching realities.

Suffering in America

I wrote about torture and its advocates in Against Humanity.

Krauthammer, something tells me your moral calculus is more about angels dancing on the heads of pins than it is about either morality OR calculus.  It’s time to be honest about doing terrible things indeed!  How about this for honesty?  Torture is evil, a sin, an abomination, and an affront to the dignity of all mankind!  And it is NEVER justified under ANY circumstances.  PERIOD!  There’s some moral clarity for ya you dickweed.  That is the truth about torture.  And assholes like you who believe it is ever justified missed your place in history.  You all belong in the Spanish Inquisition, and would that I could zap you back there forever because I wouldn’t waste one fucking second banishing you to the annals of history.  Civilized man has no use for you.

And how many times have we heard these same ignoramuses go on and on about how human life is so `sacred’ that we can’t even do life-saving stem cell research?  The word hypocrites doesn’t even do it any more for these imbeciles.  These geniuses are hyper-hypocrites!

Against Humanity

I wrote about the honest use of language in Calling a War Criminal a War Criminal

Although purple prose is a guilty pleasure (as some of you may know), what I truly admire is economy of language.  I’m also partial to language that is straightforward and unambiguous.  I like language that clarifies and reveals.  I am no fan of obfuscation or spin.  As a writer I believe in honoring language, and hate it when it is abused, as it so often is these days.  Clarity, truth, and understanding suffer when people misuse language, and especially so when the misuse is intentional.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

~ George Orwell

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

~ George W. Bush

Calling a War Criminal a War Criminal

I wrote about humanity in Humanity.

As an artist, nothing fascinates me more than the human face and the human form.  At once revealing and mysterious, the human visage tells the history of our race; it sings of our triumphs, radiates our joy, testifies to our struggles, and mourns those of us who are no more.  

(snip)

I grew up an Army brat living in Germany, Laos, Thailand, and France.  I came to be intrigued at how different and yet how similar people from entirely different cultures can be.  Our diversity is profound but at heart we are all the same – at least in our heart of hearts.  We all want a better future for our children.  We all experience love, fear, disappointment, and sorrow.  We all grieve for our dead.  We lose sight of it, but we are truly the family of man.  We all come from the same origin.  That is not only figuratively true, it is literally and scientifically true.  We all ultimately share a common ancestor.  We are truly brothers and sisters.  It is a great pity that we can’t all acknowledge this simple truth – and live our lives accordingly.

Humanity

I wrote about life in Life on Earth.

Life on earth, in fact all life (as far as we know) is sustained by the razor thin and fragile atmosphere of a relatively tiny random globe in an obscure and nondescript solar system based on a third rate star hugging the inner edge of one immense spiral arm of a generic spiral galaxy in a far flung region of the vast and only Universe we know (although we are beginning to suspect that there may be others – see Multiverse Theory).

Life on Earth

I wrote about poverty and economic inequality in Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?.

Once widely admired for our egalitarian spirit, America has become a nation of both unbridled wealth and gut-wrenching poverty.  Long thought of as `the Land of Opportunity’, the last thirty years has seen that myth all but vanish as corrupt politicians passed laws giving ever more advantages to the already privileged, and transferring more and more of the meager holdings of the poor and middleclass into the greedy hands of the filthy rich.  There has been a concerted effort by the Republican rightwing to drive down American wages by exporting jobs and importing cheap labor.  Economic inequality in America is greater now than it has ever been since 1929, the start of the Great Depression.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

I wrote about marijuana prohibition in You Can Drink Yourself to Death, But You Can’t Smoke Pot.

A brief recap of how we got here…

“Thank God the American’s got the Puritans and we got the criminals.”

~ Australian saying

Our Anglo-Saxon progenitors were always a bit uptight (don’t be offended ye of European ancestry, I happen to be among you).  Any Indian or black person could tell you though.  We’ve always been a little touchy at best.  Early American culture was heavily influenced by Puritanism, Calvinism, and a whole host of other isms that have kept us wound tighter than a clock down through the centuries.  

My people have always had a hard time relaxing, what with kings and barons always stealing our barley and running off with our fair maidens and such, religious persecution and whatnot.  It’s enough to make a fella uptight.  We can’t relax – that damned baron could be anywhere, and the church is burning people at the stake again.  The pleasure and refreshment of deep and true relaxation too often eludes us.  That’s why so many of us can’t dance and why when we go bad we tend to drink like fish.  Alcoholism is a long and proud tradition with us (we Irish anyway) – it kills a good many of us.

Our general uptightness and difficulty in relaxation may also explain why it made us so uncomfortable ‘long about 1930 or so when it came to our attention that Negroes (remember it’s the 30s) and Mexicans were smoking weed and communing with the universe and each other in a most relaxed and jubilant sort of way.  They would dance, laugh, make music, and make love, joyfully, gleefully, peacefully, with total relaxation and benign abandon.  It made them eerily calm and peaceful.  White people didn’t know what to think.  It seems that nobody has an inclination to fight or fuss when they’re high on weed – entirely unlike our old friend alcohol.  

Peaceful though it might have been, it worried the white folks, especially when white people started smoking it too.  Such euphoria just wasn’t natural.  No poor folks had a right to that much serenity, or that great a sense of well-being.  That was the jealously guarded purview of rich white folk, so they made a law.  And they did it in a most underhanded and devious way (so like my people – * sigh *).

You Can Drink Yourself to Death, But You Can’t Smoke Pot

There was much excitement when I called Bullshit on America.

Our nation, culture, and political system are all steeped in lies, contradictions, distortions, and propaganda – in other words, bullshit!  It has taken me much of my life to shed the misconceptions and outright lies that have been drilled into me from birth, to develop and fine-tune my bullshit detectors, to learn to see anything with any clarity at all.

(more below the fold…)

The government has powerful tools with which to manipulate our views, circumscribe our information, and mold our opinions (including the MSM and all the propaganda arms of the government itself) – and they use them with great zeal.  The full extent to which the ruling class wants to hoodwink the rest of us cannot be overestimated.  Their worst fear is that we will learn the truth.

If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.”

~ George H.W. Bush to journalist Sarah McClendon

Calling Bullshit on America

Some people took issue with me when in November of 2006 I said:

They don’t give a damn what we the people want.  They have their own agenda and it doesn’t include listening to the democratic majority.  It has nothing to do with what we want and everything to do with the 300 billion barrels of light sweet crude oil upon which Iraq sits.  They’ve never explained the 14 ‘enduring’ bases they’ve been building in Iraq at a cost of a billion-dollars plus…each, and if you ask me, they have no intent of leaving – EVER.

The Surge Option is for SUCKERS!

I honored poor people and included some of my own poetry in Let’s Drink to the Salt of the Earth.

It’s Hard at the Bottom

There is too much that we ignore;

Important things;

Like children,

And the young,

And the old,

And the sick,

And the poor,

And our prisoners,

And each other.

We don’t do enough to protect our children.

We don’t do enough to help each other.

We don’t do enough to save our planet.

We don’t do enough to save ourselves.

We care way too much about all the wrong things.

We despise the peasants, and worship the kings.

We spit on the angels, and lionize demons,

As the righteous among us are dragged away screamin’.

It’s all upside down,

But smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em,

’cause Lord have mercy!

It’s hard at the bottom.

Let’s Drink to the Salt of the Earth

What’s This Fool Doing Still In Office? got 729 comments.

If you don’t think Bush should be impeached immediately, and I do mean ASAP, I hope you’re prepared to accept your part of the responsibility for the damage he does over the next two years.

What’s This Fool Doing Still In Office?

A year ago I wrote One Year at DailyKos.

It’s amazing how much you all have taught me in a year’s time.  I’ve learned from, been informed by, and fallen under the spell of many of the truly great writers and thinkers here.  We represent a wide range of views, temperaments, backgrounds, ages and interests but are united in our love for democracy, truth and justice.  I marvel that we have kossacks from every economic strata, ethnicity, religion or lack thereof, sexual orientation, education level, national origin, and so on.  Despite our differences we respect each other’s humanity, and that’s what makes us progressives (IMHO), because we care about humanity and thus human rights, the general welfare, etcetera.

The learning I have experienced here has been sometimes difficult, occasionally stressful, frequently raucous, but always interesting.  This community has challenged me like I haven’t been challenged in many years.  The struggle to both compete (though I don’t really think of it as that) to make the rec list and to deal with the criticism and the challenges issued by others has made me a better writer and a better person…though there are those who will tell you that dealing with criticism is not my strong suit.  I’m better at it than I was though.  I have grown through my participation here.

I’ve also found deep friendship and brotherhood in this extraordinary and delightful community.  What a cast of characters, and what an honor it is to know them all!  I have made many fine friends.  They seem like so many long lost brothers and sisters to me.

One Year at DailyKos

Remember Where You Heard It First got 1,236 comments.

Have you ever had an embarrassing friend?  You know, that guy who is deeply cool but a little uncouth or unkempt.  For all his brilliance, insight, and understanding maybe his shoes are sometimes untied, his clothes a bit rumpled, or his shirttails hanging out.  Maybe he goes about with three-days growth of beard, has tattoos, or smells a little funny.

Maybe he’s somewhat indiscreet, has dirty fingernails, or says things like fuck, warpigs, or evil rightwing bastards in polite conversation.  

You’ve come to love and respect him but may wince a little should he appear at an inopportune moment because he’s just not easily explained to your more conventional friends.

Being an unabashed member of ‘the extreme radical left’ sometimes feels like being the embarrassing friend to the rest of the Democrats.  The limousine liberals, the Volvo liberals, the champagne liberals, the moderates, the centrists, and the establishment Dems are all a little or a lot embarrassed by their association with us in the wild-eyed wing of the Party.  Some of them would probably pay good money to get rid of us (though I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas).

Yep, even a lot of left-leaning Democrats would like to pretend like we don’t exist.  After all, it’s hard to be ‘respectable’ when you have friends like us.  You can’t invite us to your soirees; we’re always testing the gravy with our fingers, smoking pot in the bathroom, or chanting ho-ho-ho chi minh at the drop of a hat.

Remember Where You Heard It First

In Before I Sleep I wrote of my hopes for my son.

Before I sleep for the last time and forever, there are a number of things I want to be able to say to my beloved son.

I hope to be able to say to him, with a straight face and an open heart, that because of the tireless and courageous actions of liberals, progressives, and yes, revolutionaries, that America has redeemed itself in the eyes of the international community, thrown out the fascists, the oligarchs, and the gutless wonders, rejected its imperialist ambitions, purged its government of corruption, punished the traitors to the people, and brought its war criminals to ultimate justice before the world.

Before I Sleep

In Eye on the Sky I wrote about working on NASA’a Hubble Space Telescope project.

All in all I have to say that my time on the Hubble Space Telescope project was a highlight of my life.  I have often wished I could find my way back to that kind of work but it just hasn’t been in the cards.  It’s funny how the universe unfolds sometimes.  But one thing is certain, its wonders are overwhelming and every new discovery leads to even deeper mysteries, and all that we now know is but a miniscule portion of that which there is to be known.

Eye on the Sky

I have posted over 200 diaries here and it’s been a blast.  

To have this outlet, to find such friends, to experience this electronic brotherhood with you, America’s finest examples of the human spirit, has been a mind-blowing experience for me.  I cherish many of you as much as I do my own family – and in many important ways, you guys are my family.

This is a smart, aware, involved, and vibrant community engaged in important work.  The pool of talent, knowledge and intelligence here is nothing less than awe-inspiring.  I feel distinctly privileged to be a small part of it.  I learn from you all and am inspired by so very many of you (you know who you are).

One criticism I have is that many here are overly concerned with the game of politics and insufficiently concerned with the larger realities.  And that’s fine. This is a site for political junkies after all, but I think raising the consciousness of the community is a worthwhile and necessary endeavor.  Please, when you see a diary attempting to do that, give it a little extra consideration.  And please try to resist the temptation to obsess over the game at the expense of more important matters (like the war, climate change, the food crisis, the water crisis, the healthcare crisis, etc).  Let us not be distracted.  We have important work to do that extends far beyond the realm of politics, and we can’t afford to fail.

And we have to re-establish the rule of law for the upper echelon of our society, and we can start by arresting the war criminals and holding them to account.  Then, and only then, can we take back our country and start the massive clean up that we must now undertake.  

BEWARE EVERYONE, the Republicans have mastered the black art of electronic election theft.  They stole 2000 and 2004.  They stole the governorship of Alabama from Don Siegelman, and they plan to steal the Presidency for a third time this November.

Are we stupid enough and weak-willed enough to let them get away with it again?  I guess that remains to be seen – but based on past experience, I wouldn’t bet the ranch.

Thanks for putting up with me for two years kossacks.  I sure do appreciate it.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

On May 1, 2003, exactly 5 years ago, President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to mark the end of major combat operations in Iraq:

Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card (ph), officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

More than 4,000 US troops have now died in Iraq, more than 97% after the President’s speech.  The number of injured US troops and injured and killed Iraqi men, women, and children follows the same relationship: the vast majority of the casualties occurred after the “major combat operations in Iraq [   ] ended.”

Think Progress reports:

Today (4/30/08), reporter Helen Thomas asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino how the president would “commemorate” the date tomorrow. Perino said the White House had “certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner”:

 

PERINO: President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific, and said, Mission Accomplished For These Sailors Who Are On This Ship On Their Mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.

Does the White House seriously think we’re so stupid as to believe that Bush wasn’t really talking about the end of hostilities in Iraq?  that he was talking about something else?  Think Progress points out:

Just a month after his speech on the U.S.S. Lincoln, he also spoke to troops in Qatar: “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.”

Chalk that up as just one more reason why on May 1, 2008, I’m not working and why I’m participating in a one-day General Strike.

Need other reasons? How about torture, Gitmo, illegal extraditions, secret renditions, $3.67/gallon gasoline, sub prime mortgages, lack of universal health care, the recession, and on and on and on.  You could make your own list.  You could write an essay that was just a list.  It would go on and on and on.  It’s not necessary to do that.

I’m striking.  Please join me.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

WANTED

Associated Press has a story up on the ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center releases periodic lists of top war criminals from the Nazi era still at large. Despite the Wiesenthal Center’s one-sided apologetics for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (all sides have engaged in atrocities), we should pay attention to their efforts to bring Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice, even decades after their hideous crimes took place. Such efforts should also make Bush and his cronies start sweating, for reasons I will make clear.

Currently, the sadistic SS doctor from Mauthausen concentration camp, Aribert Heim, is at the top of Wiesenthal’s list. (A former Israeli Air Force Colonel claims Heim was kidnapped and executed over twenty years ago, but other Nazi hunters are not convinced.) Heim was captured by U.S. forces, but mysteriously released. The AP article notes that “his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen”. The U.S. protected numerous fleeing Nazis. The Nazi Gehlen intelligence organization was specially protected, and Nazi scientists were imported into the United States in the little-known Operation Paperclip.

Perhaps the U.S. saw SS Dr. Heim, grotesquely, as some sort of scientist, because he engaged in so-called scientific experiments at Mauthausen. Here’s an example of Dr. Heim’s “science”:

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

Why would the United States protect such a ghoul? But this is not a question that can be publicly asked in America today, where a mainstream politician like Barack Obama is pilloried because he dare mention that some out-of-work small town Americans may feel “bitter”, or his pastor has anti-establishment or unorthodox beliefs about the perfidy of the American government.

The Wiesenthal Center supposedly lists the top ten wanted Nazis, who besides Heim include John Demjanjuk, whose numerous prosecutions, appeals, acquittals, and legalistic maneuvers ended with a conviction for war crimes committed as a concentration camp guard, a conviction upheld in 2004. Just last January, Demjanjuk’s order for deportation was upheld, and he awaits, pending further appeal his deportation to the Ukraine.

Demjanjuk is 88. Heim, if alive, would be 93. The other wanted Nazis are all elderly. But they remain underground, or under threat of prosecution and deportation, while protected by the state where they reside. SS-Obersturmführer Søren Kam is one of those. Wanted for the 1943 murder of Danish editor Carl Clemmensen, a German court denied the extradition of the 87 year old Lam, saying the statute of limitations on Clemmensen’s murder has run out, accepting that Lam, who has admitted to involvement in the case, had committed manslaughter, not murder. (Clemmensen’s body had been riddled by eight bullets from three different revolvers.)

U.S. War Criminals to Be Hunted Someday?

The geriatric status of Heim, Lam, Demjanjuk and others has not prevented them from being charged with crimes, and they will no doubt be pursued one way or another for the rest of their remaining lives.

U.S. war criminals — currently uncharged — like George W. Bush, president of the United States, and other members of his administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.), should ponder the fate of the Nazis pursued by justice, even unto their last years. No matter what they think they can get away with, if a party or regime in this country ever comes into power and sets its aim as cleaning up the crimes of this country, whether to serve justice, or as a matter of realpolitik, needing to reclaim some measure of integrity internationally, then Bush et al. had better have set aside a defense fund.

This is in addition to the possibility that other countries may choose to extradict or prosecute those criminals who aggressively invaded a sovereign country (Iraq), killing over a million people, and then proceeded to torture thousands or tens of thousands of individuals. Attempts to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld for torture have been made in France, Germany, Argentina, and Sweden.

Evidence has been mounting for some time on the war crimes of the Bush Administration. I knew the ACLU has a call for the release of a Justice Department Office of Inspector General report on the investigation of the FBI’s role in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, but only recently came across this article from a few years back in The New Standard (emphasis added):

Dec. 21, 2004 – Repeated references in an internal FBI email suggest that the president issued a special order to permit some of the more objectionable torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prison facilities around Iraq. The email was among a new batch of FBI documents revealed by civil rights advocates on Monday. Other documents describe the initiation of investigations into alleged incidents of torture and rape at detention facilities in Iraq….

The author of the email, whose name is blanked out but whose title is described as “On Scene Commander — Baghdad,” contains ten explicit mentions of an “Executive Order” that the author said mandated US military personnel to engage in extraordinary interrogation tactics.

An Executive Order is a presidential edict — sometimes public, sometimes secretive — instituting special laws or instructions that override or complement existing legislation. The White House has officially neither admitted nor denied that the president has issued an Executive Order pertaining to interrogation techniques.

The specific methods mentioned in the email as having been approved by the unnamed Executive Order and witnessed by FBI agents include sleep deprivation, placing hoods over prisoners’ heads, the use of loud music for sensory overload, stripping detainees naked, forcing captives to stand in so-called “stress positions,” and the employment of work dogs….

The correspondence is dated May 22, 2004 — a couple of weeks after images of torture and humiliation at the prison broke in the world media…

Of course, it was only earlier this month that news broke that the highest officials in the Bush administration were intimately involved in the planning and execution of torture at Guantanamo, and possibly elsewhere, and that Bush himself admitted knowledge of the entire process and “approved” it.

Some believe that Bush’s September 6, 2006 speech to Congress “amounted to a public confession to criminal violations of the 1996 War Crimes Act”, in that he “implicitly admitted authorizing disappearances, extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, transporting prisoners between countries and denying the International Committee of the Red Cross access to prisoners.” And certainly, it’s not that that Bush and his cronies weren’t warned about what they were doing.

It was no less than then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales who warned Bush in a memo dated January 25, 2002 that their treatment of detainees already amounted to war crimes:

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes — defined in part as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to “U.S. officials” and that punishments for violators “include the death penalty,” Gonzales told Bush that “it was difficult to predict with confidence” how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions – such as that outlawing “outrages upon personal dignity” and “inhuman treatment” of prisoners – was “undefined.”

One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,” Gonzales wrote.

“It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act],” Gonzales wrote.

The only thing keeping Bush and his top political aides and cabinet members from being prosecuted as war criminals is will… well, also their tremendous political power, the cowardice of the opposition party, and the fear and/or torpor of the mass of the American population.

Still, as the fates of Aribert Heim, John Demjanjuk, and others demonstrate, times do change. And one day it may be Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice, who must hide for their lives, or stand in the dock of a criminal court and answer for their crimes.

As an aside, the Establishment hatred for Obama’s now-former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is not because of his conspiracy theory about the AIDS virus — a crank notion rooted in some very real crimes by the United States, not least the barbaric, racist Tuskagee syphilis experiments, wherein “for forty years the US Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis,” without their knowledge or provision of medical assistance. No, they hate him, and seek to use the black preacher against the moderately liberal mainstream politician Obama, because he dared to criticize the United States for its own use of terrorism.

“You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you,” said. “Those are Biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles.”

It is incontroverible that the United States has engaged in state terrorism and illegal war and occupation upon other countries. I very much don’t want to see it “come back” upon America. But I do want to see those responsible brought to justice in a court that provides full rights for the accused, but also is unafraid to mete out justice to the convicted.

Also posted at Invictus

1. Lurita Doan, the horribly incompetent GSA head and certified Bush political hack, has resigned. It only took her a year to do so. The Washington post reports “At the request of the White House, General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan resigned last night as head of the government’s premier contracting agency… Doan’s resignation came almost a year after Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he believed Doan could no longer be effective because of the allegations about her leadership.”

   Doan “violated the Hatch Act in January 2007 by asking political appointees how they could “help our candidates” at an agency briefing conducted by a White House official, according to several of the appointees present for the briefing”. She still needs to be prosecuted for sponsoring illegal political meetings.

   Video from June 2007.

2. The Washington Post reports U.S. Role Deepens in Sadr City. Since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ‘stir the hornet’s nest’ campaign last month in Basra, the U.S. has been drawn deeply into the fighting between rival Shi’ite factions. Yesterday, U.S. troops fight a four-hour battle against Shi’ite militia fighters that killed at least 28 Iraqis dead.

   “Until Maliki’s push into the southern city of Basra, U.S. troops were not intensely engaged in Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood of roughly 3 million people that was among the most treacherous areas for U.S. forces early in the war.” Since Maliki’smove against Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Basra, “more than 500 people have been killed and 2,100 injured in Sadr City“.

   The Iraqis are deliberately escalating the fighting in Iraq to prove the “surge” has not worked, which of course, McCain will explain that this means the “surge” has worked and the Iraqis are just trying to influence the U.S. election. The “surge” cannot possibly fail.

   To prove how right McCain is, al-Sadr “has threatened to call off the eight-month cease-fire, which has been widely credited with lowering the level of violence in Iraq, if the government does not end its offensive against his followers.” And according to a random Mahdi Army member quoted by WaPo, they are “very close to the Zero Hour” meaning time is nearly up.

   McClatchy Newspapers reports Defense War Secretary Robert Gates as saying Lull in Iraq has ended, but withdrawal will go on. He’s sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, but denied it has anything to do with the Bush administration’s plans to attack Iran. The “surge” is working though, because:

   April has been the bloodiest month for Americans in Iraq since September, with 44 troops killed, compared to 39 in March and 29 in February.

   April also was the first month since November that saw U.S. Marines killed in once restive Anbar province. Two Marines were killed in April in Anbar, which had been the deadliest part of Iraq for U.S. troops before a widely heralded tribal rebellion drove Sunni militants from the province.

   Meanwhile, to distract Americans from the obvious success of the “surge”, a trial for Tariq Aziz has begun. BBC News reports, “The trial of Iraq’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz over the deaths of a group of merchants in 1992 has opened in Baghdad,” but “after a brief session the judge adjourned the trial until 20 May”.

Four at Four continues below the fold with stories about the show trials in Guantánamo Bay and the Bush administration’s meddling with science.

3. News from The New York Times how the show trials in Guantánamo Bay are progressing. First, a Military lawyer urges Canada to try a citizen held by U.S. Forces.

   A United States military lawyer representing the only Canadian held at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, urged Parliament on Tuesday to push for his client’s repatriation.

   The lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, told the House of Commons subcommittee on international human rights that the Canadian, Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was arrested by American forces in Afghanistan, would not receive a fair hearing from a United States military commission. He added that Mr. Khadr, who was born in Toronto, would probably be convicted.

   “Justice will not result from a military commission that cannot try U.S. citizens and treats a Canadian as worth less than an American,” Commander Kuebler said. “Bring this young man home to face due process under a legitimate system.”

   That’s because there will be no acquittals from the military commissions.

   And then there’s this benignly named story, An apologetic boycott in good-natured banter.

   The first indication that the afternoon’s hearing in the case of Salim Hamdan was going to be different came when he showed up in war crimes court in his prison khakis, a loose-fitting outfit that looked like yesterday’s pajamas…

   Then, Mr. Hamdan, whose name already has a big place in American law, and the Navy judge, who seemed to want most to keep his case moving, began an extraordinary 40-minute exchange about the fairness of Guantánamo and the definition of justice.

   “There is no such thing as justice here,” Mr. Hamdan said. He said he would boycott. He said he would not allow his lawyers to speak in his absence, an option it is not clear he has.

   Before long there was a good-natured debate, tinged with a little desperation on both sides, and amiable apologies from Mr. Hamdan. It was soon obvious that the back-and-forth was leading toward the latest bewildering wrench in the military tribunal system here. Can a detainee tie the system in knots by saying he is boycotting but keeping his lawyers to muzzle them?

   …

   [Hamdan] noted that the court was not applying United States law, but some new law that he said seemed to have been passed just for him, since it followed his Supreme Court victory.

   The Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in 2006, governs the court here, the judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred, acknowledged.

   “They changed the law,” Mr. Hamdan said. “Why did they change the law? Just for my case?”

   Hamdan was once Osama bin Laden’s driver and now “in his seventh year of captivity”.

4. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that according to the GAO, the White House blocked EPA studies. “The Government Accountability Office reported today that the White House’s budget office, the Pentagon and other agencies had delayed or blocked efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to list chemicals as carcinogens by requesting more research or more time to review the risks… GAO officials also faulted the administration for setting new rules that keep secret any involvement by the White House or a federal agency in a decision about the risks of a chemical.” The first rule of Bush Club is you do not talk about Bush Club.

Yesterday NLinStPaul asked (rhetorically)

You mean we can do this and have some fun?

Goddess above, I hope that’s true!!

In my opinion, fun is vital!

The guy who is fond of the phrase The Long War, THIS guy …. is anti-fun….

and we are anti-That guy. Logically then, we are PRO-FUN!

It is a long war….a never ending one, as a matter of fact….

Having fun…dancing, playing, joking, resting…having sex. Is taking care of ourselves. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we burn-out. If we burn-out, we can’t fight, if we can’t fight, they win!

So we all need mental health days. Days to recover and refresh so we can be at our best, I need one today, so I wrote this essay to tell you all that I won’t be writing an essay today.

Sorry!

Take care!

Do you recognize this man?

His name is Rod Serling and he once hosted an amazing little television show called the Twilight Zone.  Each week, he would appear to announce the story of someone trapped in a bizarre set of circumstances, typically surreal and frightening.  It was fiction, but great fun.

I suddenly find myself looking for Rod Serling to appear again because I am suffering from the same uncomfortable sensation of surreality, except this time it is neither fiction nor fun.

Do you recognize this man?

Of course you do. The traditional media and blogosphere have been talking about him around the clock. Over at Big Orange, there have been over 650 diaries about Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the past week.  If there was nothing else newsworthy, I might understand how a retired pastor basking in the media limelight could get so many knickers in a twist.

Do you recognize this man?

I do not want to detract from Wrightfest, but I think there is something you should know.  You live in a country where one of the Supreme Court justices goes on national television and says that torture is not prohibited in the U.S. Constitution.

Here is what Antonin Scalia told Lesley Stahl during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday.

Point 1. The Constitution does not prohibit torture.

“I don’t like torture,” Scalia says. “Although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But who’s in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. Everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution,” he says.

Point 2. Torture does not qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.

“If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ doesn’t that apply?” Stahl asks.

“No, No,” Scalia replies.

Point 3. Torture to extract information (such as a bogus confession) is not covered in the Constitution.

“Cruel and unusual punishment?” Stahl asks.

“To the contrary,” Scalia says. “Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”

“Well, I think if you are in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody…,” Stahl says.

“And you say he’s punishing you?” Scalia asks.

“Sure,” Stahl replies.

“What’s he punishing you for? You punish somebody…,” Scalia says.

“Well because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime…or that you know something that he wants to know,” Stahl says.

“It’s the latter. And when he’s hurting you in order to get information from you…you don’t say he’s punishing you. What’s he punishing you for? He’s trying to extract…,” Scalia says.

“Because he thinks you are a terrorist and he’s going to beat the you-know-what out of you…,” Stahl replies.

Point 4. Scalia is certain of his position.

“Anyway, that’s my view,” Scalia says. “And it happens to be correct.”

When a Supreme Court justice argues that torture cannot be readily defined, does not fall under the purview of the U.S. Constitution, and harsh treatment to extract information is not torture or punishment, we are in serious trouble as a society. Unlike Jeremiah Wright, Scalia’s words matter. Scalia is one of a very small group of individuals in our society granted the ultimate authority to interpret the laws of the United States.

Scalia was not bothered by the international treaties and laws of which the United States has ratified that prohibit torture, even though the Constitution indicates that those treaties are the law of the land.

(Article VI, Section 2): “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.

Scalia says that torture is difficult to define, even though there is a federal statute that defines it clearly.

A federal anti-torture statute (18 U.S.C. § 2340A), enacted in 1994, provides for the prosecution of a U.S. national or anyone present in the United States who, while outside the U.S., commits or attempts to commit torture. Torture is defined as an “act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

Source

Scalia’s comments raise two questions. If a citizen of another country in U.S. custody is tortured to extract information, including confession of guilt, can the information be used in legal proceedings against the individual?  This situation exists in detainees coming to trial being held in Guantanamo. If a U.S. citizen is accused of being involved in terrorism, would torture be a legally defensible method to extract information? This situation has already taken place with Jose Padilla.  We are already on a slippery slope and Scalia has the means and opportunity to further grease our slide back into barbarity.

The media barely noticed Scalia’s comments. Rolling Stone gave it a small blurb in their national affairs section of the April 28 edition. Scalia can say something far more offensive than Wright, say it on national television, and almost no one notices.

This is not the first time Scalia has made this point.

Hudson v. McMillian: “For generations, judges and commentators regarded the Eighth Amendment as applying only to torturous punishments meted out by statutes or sentencing judges, and not generally to any hardship that might befall a prisoner during incarceration.” (Thomas & Scalia, JJ., dissenting.)

As long as torturous treatment befalls you as a prisoner during incarceration, the Eighth Amendment does not apply. The simple minded defense of Scalia in the CBS interview is that he was only pointing the Eighth Amendment does not cover torture. This pathetic parsing overlooks the fact that Scalia was careful to note that “everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution.” He was also careful to not offer anything that might be taken as constitutional prohibition against torturous treatment of prisoners. I cannot help but think that this man would have loved the delicious tale of society creating the legal justification for torture while its citizens were preoccupied with trivia.

More Scalia:

That’s because – until recently – he was often on the losing side in cases he cared about most. Over the last several years Scalia has reached outside the court, speaking out publicly about his philosophy, in hopes of influencing the next generation. It’s a role he relishes.

“Little kids come to the court, they’re brought by their teachers. And they recite very proudly what they’ve been taught. I mean, this is how widespread the notion has become that ‘The Constitution is a living document.’ And I have to tell them ‘It’s a dead document,'” Scalia told the students at the Oxford Union.

Certainly seems like a dead document in the hands of too many powerful people in American government these days.

Albert Hofmann died yesterday at the age of 102.  

Blessings on your Journey Al!

Obit on WaPo.