My country invaded a nation was not a threat to ours. We didn’t have good intelligence before the invasion and when I write “we” I mean the citizens and, apparently, the Congress.
As far as we can tell, the vice-presidential-Pentagon cabal that runs our government had good intelligence, but instead cooked up a pack of lies and Congress, the majority of Americans – but not the UN Security Council – fell for them and sent thousands of people to their deaths. Two thousand and more of those people were US soldiers and several thousand more were insurgents or jihadis or whatever you choose to call them, but most of the people who’ve died in Iraq since March 2003 –tens of thousands – have been civilians – women and men, children and old people whose unlucky deaths capped unlucky lives.
(BTW, the notion that a VP-DoD cabal runs our nation is not mine; it’s Lawrence Wilkerson’s. Mr. Wilkerson is a retired Army colonel and was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. You probably knew that, but think about it: a retired colonel, high-ranking Republican bureaucrat says the country has been hijacked and everyone shrugs.)
Eight days ago, a group called The World Can’t Wait asked Americans to stay home from work and school and protest the illegal actions of the Bush administration. Rallies were called for noon. Eight people stood on the curb in front of City Hall in Burlington. Four looked like middle-aged Pax Christi-type nuns, a few were nondescript and two young men held posters. One poster was a wordy indictment of war crimes, the other simply said: “Bush Sucks.” The young men with the posters walked up and down the street shouting angry epithets directed at the administration. This is our anti-war movement?
For four years after 9-11, the US has imprisoned people (some of our own, some foreigners) without due process, without regard to the “unalienable” rights referenced in the Declaration of Independence. We’ve tortured people in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq. Torture was authorized at the very highest levels of our government, by people who should know torture doesn’t work, that a tortured person will say anything to make the torture stop. We’ve been repeatedly caught torturing, we deny the obvious and we keep torturing. (None of this is new to any of us, but we all push the enormity of our nation’s crimes to the edges of our consciousness.)
After four years of this, torture survivor John McCain writes a law to explicitly forbid torture by agents of our government. What should we think of that? On one hand, it seems incredible – are we not already party to any number of treaties and conventions outlawing torture? Shouldn’t we just arrest Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales and send them off to the Hague? If those treaties and conventions hold no force, what good will a new law do? On the other hand, it seems incredible it would take four years for one of the 535 members of our national legislature to write legislation to stop it.
So Dick Cheney, the convener of the cabal, hauls his twisted grimace to the Capitol and starts leaning on members of the House of Representatives to exempt the CIA from the torture ban. George Bush threatens to veto any bill that includes a torture ban.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll reports two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country. Someone calls and we say we disapprove; maybe we forward a couple of those e-mails from MoveOn – that’s our anti-war movement?
The same day the peace rally flopped at City Hall, the Washington Post published a story about America’s chain of secret prisons around the world, more places where we torture people. No one seemed surprised. The ghost network includes a former Soviet prison compound in Eastern Europe. How long before Dick and Don put Auschwitz back in business?
This week, Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert, leaders of the Republican majorities in the Senate and House, respectively, called for a criminal investigation to prosecute whoever leaked the gulag information to the Post. Supposedly they equate that leak to Scooter Libby exposing Valerie Plame to wound Joseph Wilson. Do they not understand the difference, that Valerie Plame is not a war crime and secret torture prisons are?
What about us, the citizens, the people who supposedly run this country? When do we regain our decency and at least scream out loud about what’s happening?
What Will It Take?
My country invaded a nation was not a threat to ours. We didn’t have good intelligence before the invasion and when I write “we” I mean the citizens and, apparently, the Congress.
As far as we can tell, the vice-presidential-Pentagon cabal that runs our government had good intelligence, but instead cooked up a pack of lies and Congress, the majority of Americans – but not the UN Security Council – fell for them and sent thousands of people to their deaths. Two thousand and more of those people were US soldiers and several thousand more were insurgents or jihadis or whatever you choose to call them, but most of the people who’ve died in Iraq since March 2003 –tens of thousands – have been civilians – women and men, children and old people whose unlucky deaths capped unlucky lives.
(BTW, the notion that a VP-DoD cabal runs our nation is not mine; it’s Lawrence Wilkerson’s. Mr. Wilkerson is a retired Army colonel and was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. You probably knew that, but think about it: a retired colonel, high-ranking Republican bureaucrat says the country has been hijacked and everyone shrugs.)
Eight days ago, a group called The World Can’t Wait asked Americans to stay home from work and school and protest the illegal actions of the Bush administration. Rallies were called for noon. Eight people stood on the curb in front of City Hall in Burlington. Four looked like middle-aged Pax Christi-type nuns, a few were nondescript and two young men held posters. One poster was a wordy indictment of war crimes, the other simply said: “Bush Sucks.” The young men with the posters walked up and down the street shouting angry epithets directed at the administration. This is our anti-war movement?
For four years after 9-11, the US has imprisoned people (some of our own, some foreigners) without due process, without regard to the “unalienable” rights referenced in the Declaration of Independence. We’ve tortured people in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq. Torture was authorized at the very highest levels of our government, by people who should know torture doesn’t work, that a tortured person will say anything to make the torture stop. We’ve been repeatedly caught torturing, we deny the obvious and we keep torturing. (None of this is new to any of us, but we all push the enormity of our nation’s crimes to the edges of our consciousness.)
After four years of this, torture survivor John McCain writes a law to explicitly forbid torture by agents of our government. What should we think of that? On one hand, it seems incredible – are we not already party to any number of treaties and conventions outlawing torture? Shouldn’t we just arrest Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales and send them off to the Hague? If those treaties and conventions hold no force, what good will a new law do? On the other hand, it seems incredible it would take four years for one of the 535 members of our national legislature to write legislation to stop it.
So Dick Cheney, the convener of the cabal, hauls his twisted grimace to the Capitol and starts leaning on members of the House of Representatives to exempt the CIA from the torture ban. George Bush threatens to veto any bill that includes a torture ban.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll reports two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country. Someone calls and we say we disapprove; maybe we forward a couple of those e-mails from MoveOn – that’s our anti-war movement?
The same day the peace rally flopped at City Hall, the Washington Post published a story about America’s chain of secret prisons around the world, more places where we torture people. No one seemed surprised. The ghost network includes a former Soviet prison compound in Eastern Europe. How long before Dick and Don put Auschwitz back in business?
This week, Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert, leaders of the Republican majorities in the Senate and House, respectively, called for a criminal investigation to prosecute whoever leaked the gulag information to the Post. Supposedly they equate that leak to Scooter Libby exposing Valerie Plame to wound Joseph Wilson. Do they not understand the difference, that Valerie Plame is not a war crime and secret torture prisons are?
What about us, the citizens, the people who supposedly run this country? When do we regain our decency and at least scream out loud about what’s happening?
© Mark Floegel, 2005