Words with amorphous meanings to Americans

Bernie Madoff - convict

Americans are such damn funny people... as in strange.

Many people have been in the news lately from the banksters to auto makers to politicians to CEOs. They proclaim they are responsible for this or that (not so much CEOs).

Responsibility: They take it, but what does it mean? It would seem acceptance of responsibility should carry with it some consequences. It doesn't appear that is so. Except for Obama who could lose his job in 3 years, no one appears to suffer in any way for their having claimed responsibility.

Socialism: Americans mostly hate it, but live with it every day. Most firefighters, police, the FBI, are all socialized. Few would find it preferable to have private militias protecting them.

Free trade: There's no such thing unless it's linked to human rights. It's merely a mixture of tariff controls, or lack thereof, which allows exploitation of people so other people can buy stuff cheaply. I think we can all agree NAFTA has certainly improved the lot of thousands of Mexicans, right? Many more after NAFTA are middle class with shiny new cars and big houses, right? Yeah, that worked out pretty well.

Theft: This one depends on your level of masochism. If banksters have fucked you by destroying your 401k or diminished your other retirement accounts and you liked it, then you don't see any theft. If you live in the real world, you realize there are many more Madoff's out there who need free room and board courtesy of the state.

War crimes: They don't apply to American politicians. Nor do they apply to Tony Blair. So they are not really crimes.

There are many other such words, but I'm not out to write a damn dictionary.

'Just followed orders': Guantanamo mission came straight from Bush, Rumsfeld

When military investigators questioned Erie County Judge Michael E. Dunlavey about reported prisoner abuse during his tenure at the Guantanamo Bay camp for suspected terrorists, Dunlavey told them he got his "marching orders" from President Bush, according to a new book about U.S. policies regarding torture.

The book, "Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond," relies on government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to trace the development of what the authors claim was prisoner abuse and torture that emerged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The book uses Dunlavey's words to place him, a retired two-star general in the U.S. Army Reserve, at the advent of the development of what have become disputed interrogation policies.

In a statement Dunlavey provided to a U.S. Air Force lieutenant general investigating FBI reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Dunlavey explains that as leader of interrogations at Guantanamo, he reported directly to President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Hmmm.

I have no reason to question what the authors claim. In fact I'd bet the farm they've got it right, but "just following orders" didn't work at Nuremberg and I seriously doubt if that defense is gonna get Judge Dunlavey off either.

War crimes are war crimes no matter what the provocation. Dunlavey was a military general at the time and under military command, but that doesn't exonerate him for his participation.

There's gonna be a lot of "correcting" required when the dust clears. The Bush administration is stacking up war crimes like chord wood.

I've said it before and will repeat it. There are some things people just shouldn't do to other people.

Via The Signs.

History Will Not Absolve Us

OMG, but Nat Hentoff is good!

He's right ya know. Congress should be investigating. That's part of their mandate. You can't personally do much about all this, but you can damn well insist your elected representatives do.

If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn't let them in.

But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do—on the orders of the president—to "protect American values."

She quotes a former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that dark a place without it changing you."

Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques—without disclosing anything about them.

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

Via Village Voice.

AFGHANISTAN: War crime immunity law gets green light

This is gonna be popular. It seems Bush's style of rule is spreading. There's nothing wrong with committing criminal acts.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday signed a controversial bill which provides sweeping amnesty for war crimes committed over more than two decades of conflict in Afghanistan.

Afghan legislators who have been opposing the bill criticised the move.

"We are deeply concerned over the contents of this undemocratic document," said Shukria Barakzai, an MP and democracy activist whose parliamentary group opposes the amnesty law.

Mir Ahmad Joyenda, another lawmaker, told IRIN that those "MPs opposing the immunity law were explicitly threatened by powerful warlords in the national assembly".

Noor Akbari, a former Afghan diplomat, said the enacted law contradicts the country's constitution and will violate some of the international human rights treaties to which Afghanistan is a signatory.

To be clear. No one has the right to grant amnesty to war criminals. No one. There are some people who don't deserve amnesty such as child molesters, serial killers and especially war criminals.

(read more)