Monday, December 19, 2005

Crimes

Norwegianity has this to say about this article on the ABC News site. Yes, I've agreed since day one.

We can no longer pretend otherwise: our leaders are war criminals who have blatantly violated the Geneva Convention time and time again.

This warrants a full Congressional investigation leading directly to impeachment and removal from office.

No other response is even close to honorable or Constitutional.

Here's a bit from the ABC News article:
"We're not talking about torture in the abstract, but the real thing," said John Sifton, terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch. "U.S. personnel and officials may be criminally liable, and a special prosecutor is needed to investigate."

The report said Benyam Mohammad, an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee who grew up in Britain, claimed he was held at the facility in 2004.

"It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time," he was quoted as telling his lawyer. "They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days."

Mohammad went on to say that he was forced to listen to Eminem and Dr. Dre for 20 days before the music was replaced by "horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds."

"The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night," he was quoted as saying. "Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."

Criminals and thugs, folks. We're living in bad times, and the longer we go along as happy motoring nation, as Kunstler puts it, the longer we are simply complicit in these crimes committed by our government supposedly in our name. It's not only a matter of criminality, unconstitutionality, immorality, it's also a matter of complicity.

2 comments:

troutsky said...

Its not so much that we conspire to "go along" it is that there is no where else to go. All our social relations have been effectivly colonised and our protestations mean squat.Shopping, working, blogging,playing, even dreaming is all done within the pre-determined frame ,eh? Even impeaching some fruity little president has little meaning because we know exactly where they will get the next one and people will feel so RELIEVED all has been righted.Unless we are willing to take it to the next level of committment.

helmut said...

I wonder what the next level is?

I don't think absolutely everything is colonized. We can write what we want on blogs, even if they are monitored, and there are plenty of people who live outside of the administration's brainwashing. Even when technology or culture or language or ideology appears dominated by a particular view posing as universal truth, there are usually plenty of examples of transformation within. The problem I have with revolutionary thinking (I don't mean to imply that this is what you mean, Troutsky) is that it sets up another truth, culture, ideology as a replacement.

The problem is, rather, when any party or agent lays claim to foundational realities or absolute truths to the extent that they do and should govern human thought and behavior. The Bush administration is particularly ingenious at this methodology (by simply repeatedly denying what we can see is true, and condemning those who say the emperor has no clothes). But it's a mistake to replace it with another form closer to our own pre-established preferences. This is the tragedy of the philosopher-king, which is even more tragic when you actually have a clown-king.