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Bush Administration Pronounced Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity

Bush Administration Pronounced Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity

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The Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration released its final verdict on Wednesday, September 13, 2006. Guilty.

11:00 AM, Press Conference, Camp Democracy (Constitution & 14)
12:00 Noon, Delivery of Verdict to the White House

Full text of the verdict in PDF.

An unprecedented Commission of Inquiry has found the President of the United States and his administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The five-member panel of jurists unanimously found the administration’s actions “shock the conscience of humanity” in five areas – wars of aggression, illegal detention and torture, suppression of science and catastrophic policies on global warming, potentially genocidal abstinence-only policies imposed on HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the Third World, and the abandonment of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.

THE VERDICT

In their summary, the Commission jurists found that: “Each of these constitutes a shocking crime in itself, and taken together the full horrors are all the more unconscionable. It is also clear that this is an administration that demonstrates an utter disregard for truth and flagrantly lies about the reasons for its actions.

“In arriving at this decision the jurists were particularly alarmed by the degree to which the Bush Administration’s actions in all five indictments were informed by the extreme right. …. although the specific conduct differs among the indictments, the result is the same: human life was debased and devalued by gratuitous acts of violence, torture, narrow self interest, indifference, and disregard.”

In arriving at their verdict, the Commission’s panel of jurists examined a wealth of evidence with care and rigor. Consistent standards were employed, with well-established international law referenced where applicable.

The panel of jurists consisted of Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, William H. Bowen School of Law, Little Rock; former executive director, National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL). Dennis Brutus, former prisoner, Robben Island (South Africa), poet, professor emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. Abdeen Jabara, former president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Ajamu Sankofa, former executive director, Physicians for Social Responsibility-NY. Ann Wright, former US diplomat and retired US Army Reserve Colonel.

THE HEARINGS

The Commission’s year-long investigation included five days of public hearings in October 2005 and January 2006 in New York City. The 45 expert and first-hand witnesses included former commander of Abu Ghraib prison Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, former UN official Denis Halliday, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, Guantanamo prisoners’ lawyer Barbara Olshansky, and Katrina survivors.

The verdict’s release comes with war crimes again on front pages following President Bush’s defense of secret prisons, rendition, and practices constituting torture under existing law, his demand that the War Crimes Act be fundamentally weakened, and his threats against Iran.

In a preface to the printed verdict, historian Howard Zinn writes: “The Bush Administration has been following a course, which can only now be described as a series of crimes against humanity. . . . What could be a higher crime than sending the young people of the country into a war against a small country on the other side of the world, which is no danger to the United States, and in fact a war which is condemned by people all over the world and a war which results in, not only the loss of American lives and the crippling of young Americans, but results in the loss of huge numbers of people in Iraq? These are high crimes.”

Yes. Thank you Colbert.

Yes. Thank you Colbert.

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I’ve been waiting a bit to comment on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. There are a lot of opinions out there, and I’m happy most of all that people are talking and writing and thinking about issues, humor and satire vs. criticism and insult, comedy as news, the role of a court jester, and so on.

Steve Bridges did a great imitation of Bush, and was obviously Bush’s own choice (for his own roast, he gets to choose?). I’ve heard that Bridges can do Clinton just as well. That was the light side of the dinner, although there were a couple of low-grade zings in that one, too.

But I have to say that I think Colbert’s performance was the more important. I did actually think much of it was funny, in the traditional way of a roast. As it went on, he transitioned through court jester, and went all the way to performative critique. The film clip of Colbert pretending to be the White House Spokesman forced the viewer to dwell in a fairly unpleasant space – it even made me a little anxious because of the genre of suspense, the music, the way it was drawn out. It was meant to make people squirm. It worked for that, but I could almost hear the pulse of a pounding vein in Bush’s own head by the end of it.

The video wasn’t funny – but it was performative, dramatic, and scathing in its depiction, and that was even better. Scott McClellan probably had the most right to feel attacked…. wasn’t that pretty much a depiction of him?

It focused on a single question, finally: Why did we really go to war in Iraq?

Helen Thomas herself – I swear I saw her wipe a tear. I was glad to see someone stand up for her, and for the questions she’s not been allowed to ask anymore despite her long history as the media hardnose to the President. And I was glad to see someone stand up for us, we who are being fed a bunch of hogwash propaganda day and night, straight from the White House to Fox News, etc.

Anyone who has watched the Daily Show or the Colbert Report would know what his humor was like. Remember, he was invited.

I fully expected Colbert to pull a Family von Trapp while the film clip was playing, but to my shock and admiration, he was still standing there at the end.

Thank you Stephen Colbert

The Speech Video

Stephen Colbert Musical Extravaganza

The Colbert Report

Colbert Clips on ifilm

Yes, I approve.

Why? Because I’m angry at his administration – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et. al. – as well as its bullied, corrupt, or spineless members of Congress, the controlled or cowardly media, and the American people themselves – who have allowed our country to be twisted and trampled into something it should never be. If we continue on this path, our future is dismal.

William Rivers Pitt puts it pithily (when angry, spitting and sputtering are common) – Why the anger?

Because millions of people are staggered by the idea that, yes Virginia, we have to go through this again. We have to watch soldiers slaughter and be slaughtered for reasons that bear no markings of truth. We have to watch the reputation of this great nation be savaged. We have to watch as our leaders lie to us with their bare faces hanging out.

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children’s future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

There is at least a small amount of comfort in knowing that that the President had to hear, at least once, a few of the reasons why those approval figures are so low.

Living with War

Living with War

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Listen to Neil Young’s new album, Living with War.

Visit the blog.

Don’t need no ad machine
Telling me what I need
Don’t need no Madison Avenue War
Don’t need no more boxes I can see

Covered in flags but I can’t see them on TV

Don’t need no more lies
Don’t need no more lies
Don’t need no more lies

Click on the track title for the lyrics in ticker formet at the official website, or here for the whole list.

“Let’s Impeach The President”

Let’s impeach the President for lying
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

Who’s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
They bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the President for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

(Bush clips)
Flip – Flop
Flip – Flop
Flip – Flop
Flip – Flop

Let’s impeach the president for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lots of people looking at big trouble
But of course our president is clean.

Thank God

I’ve added him to the “Salute” category of links. Thanks Neil.

“Like” a third-world country?

“Like” a third-world country?

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If you want to live in the America you’ve heard about, you’ve got to start noticing what’s really happening. A democracy requires your attention and participation. Drollette has a few choice words for those who don’t understand that by many standard measures, we are a kind of banana republic. The comparisons have been made by others, with more facts and figures, but I like the wording here. The article is worth reading (actually the “Smirking Chimp” site, despite its dehumanizing name, has been picking up better and better articles over the last few months – check out the headlines on the right-hand menu).

The Mark Drolette: ‘What do you mean, it’s ‘like’ living in a Third World country?’ – Smirking Chimp

As the blistering is applied, one refrain is heard with regularity: “This is America, not some Third World country.”

Hmm. Well, when I think of a Third World country, I think of one where the already-filthy rich get much richer at the expense of the ever-poorer, where millions go without basic health care, where elections are fixed, where education becomes a privilege only for the privileged, where the environment is poisoned and plundered, where national debt is mega-astronomical, where women’s rights are under pressure, where government is corrupt and squarely in the filching hands of Big Business, where labor is vilified and oppressed, where civil liberties are stripped, where precious resources are thrown away on, oh, let’s say, bombs and tanks and ships and planes while its citizens go hungry…

And where the country’s leadership doesn’t care if its own people die. Not until, that is, the dying is done out in the open and is no longer out of the newspapers.

Some readers may know I’m planning to retire to Costa Rica next year, a country that carries Third World status. Costa Rica has national health care, a literacy rate in the mid-90s, clean water, safe food, a fine educational system, a quarter of its land dedicated to national parks, and no standing military. I’ve often mused how nice it would be if those things could be found in “advanced” America.

So who’s zooming who?

Many, if not most, of us who have been paying attention to America’s gradual (and intentional) dismantling over the last two decades, accelerating to warp-speed during King George’s reign, cannot be surprised at what’s happened in New Orleans and the Gulf States over the past week. Aghast, yes. Surprised, no.

With a little help

With a little help

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A roundup from some of my reads.

An Etherealgirl’s Adventures in Cyberland has been following opinion and news on New Orleans and is just as miserable and angry as I am. She points to the Time Photo Essay, and some of the coverage at Daily Kos (see the video from Hannity and Colmes – “Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera were livid about the situation in NOLA as they appeared on H&C. When Hannity tried his usual spin job and said “let’s get this in perspective,” Smith chopped him off at the knees and started yelling at him saying, “This is perspective!” It was shocking.” What’s happening is even worse than the hurricane itself – people are locked in, starving, no sanitation, with checkpoints at the bridges turning people back.

Raven’s Retreat finds the government reponse to Katrina unacceptable, and urges them to “get off their asses and help those people.”

PusBoy knows about where Bush’s bread is buttered. He quotes from Yahoo news: “Asked if U.S. oil companies should forfeit profits during the crisis, Bush said instead American corporations should contribute cash to hurricane relief funds.” Pusboy notes that the “donations” would not begin to approach the levels of record profits. I agree with his two-word summary.

Richard at Love Ministries posts on the responsiblities of caring, loving people. ” “It would be unloving, and thus, antispiritual, to say that an important event or issue is “political,” and hence, to imply that it is somehow “outside” of spirituality. For spirituality is life, and everything in life, that has to do with justice, fairness, the poor, society, the nation, and the world. So, when a compassionate person sees the betrayal of people, the abandonment of Love, she is called by Love to expose that ignorance. Loving and conscientious people all throughout history have spoken against tyrants, warmongers, greedmongers, and other corrupt types, especially those in power.”

Lovebevvy at Honey I’m Fabulous seems to be working on the blog, or she has disappeared. Drop me line, wouldja hon?

Gentle Breezes displays a photo of some people on a roof in New Orleans. “Help” is written on the roof in chalk, and they are waving American flags. “About sums it up, eh.. (snip) Now will you tell me, with most of the country being run by incompetent men, why do they give the killer hurricane the name of a woman? Seems to me it should be called George.” She also recommends the BuzzFlash article “Incompetence, Lying and the Betrayal of a Nation: It’s Deja Vu All Over Again — And More Death and Chaos from “The Master of Disaster,” George W. Bush.”

Just Rambling wonders how prepared any of us are for a real emergency, and what we would do (for instance) if we couldn’t afford to buy the gas that was available.

Where the Dolphins Play isn’t surprised that the conservative christian group Repent America issued a statement that God “destroyed” New Orleans for its wickedness, citing a gay-themed event that was supposed to take place there. What next – will Falwell and Robertson chime in too? Sick.

And so, my ever-reliable Grateful Bear has devoted a long post to arguing against the idea of the hurricane as an expression of God’s wrath upon the wicked. I think that it is incredibly pathological that such would be needed, but evidently… He also points to Tony Campolo’s article at BeliefNet – here is a snippet: “Instead of looking for God in the earthquake or the tsunami, in the roaring forest fires blazing in the western states, or in the mighty winds of Katrina, it would be best to seek out a quiet place and heed the promptings of God’s still small voice. That voice will inspire us to bring some of God’s goodness to bear in the lives of those who suffer.”

Mousemusings wonders what Homeland Security actually does. She also points out that prochoicers need to contact the FDA to give them feedback on the morning after pill, which would reduce the number of abortions. If we can control condoms we can control this. A tip from me – you can ask your doctor for a prescription of birth control pills, even if you don’t use them. Find out from your doctor – don’t guess! – what would be the dosage of those pills to use as morning-after pills. Save them for an emergency and make a note of the expiration date. Remember that oral methods of birth prevention do not protect against disease.

Total Information Awareness quotes mondro dentro’s comment at TPM Cafe – and it’s good enough to re-quote: “I don’t think people are yet grasping that America’s cities just simply do not fit into the Republican narrative. Consider: They are full of the poor and minorities. They vote Democratic. They epitomise Modernity and it’s discontents. They consume large amounts of government resources. They are home to the cultural and economic elites most strongly in opposition to a rightist agenda. They are dens of iniquity. From this perspective, the rightist power elite and their base, consciously or not, simply do not care if the cities are destroyed. Indeed, I think many believe, again, perhaps only unconsciously, that the future of America is to be a cityless, suburban, libertarian paradise. A sort of hyper-real post-modern recapitulation of frontier American life. ..So, if you want to know why our cities are not protected, in my view that’s why. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”

Oh, and – take a look at this

Anyone have the current deficit amount?

Out national debt, a worse can of worms, is up to $7.9 trillion. In this fiscal year alone, the government has already had to pay more than $315 billion of your money on interest payments to the holders of the national debt (guess who?). Payment of this interest is the third largest expense in the federal budget (for comparision, NASA at $15 billion, Education at $61 billion, and Department of Transportation at $56 billion).

Hard times ahead, friends.

Open letter to Bill Clinton

Open letter to Bill Clinton

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Dear President Clinton,

I have always respected you, but I am disappointed with you today. Please stop ministering to King George. This country needs you in a completely different way. You can still be a leader. By the way, this buddying up isn’t helping Hillary’s chances for a presidential run, believe me. You can’t be all things to all people, and it’s time for our leaders to start showing some spine.

This administration has undone all the good you did – how can you be so complicit and supportive? Jimmy Carter is diplomatic about it, but it’s clear that he is opposed to what this administration has been doing. Where is our guy? Where is the guy who feels our pain?

What is happening in New Orleans and other places should be a wakeup call, no – a wakeup alarm. It’s past the point of a “call.” I saw a black woman on the news pointing to the corpse of a white man, saying “See? He’s white! It’s not all black people dying – please help us.” I saw triage. I saw overwhelmed nurses and doctors working in the dark. I saw officers walk past hundreds of Americans to get some diplomat’s relative out first. The news is starting to actually do a bit a real reporting for a change, but our administration is chillingly unempathetic and distant.

Couldn’t we have dropped supplies and water from the air? Isn’t anyone going to mention that FEMA has been dismantled by this administration, and competent people everywhere replaced by yes-men? How about the cuts to our domestic security? Our domestic protectors, the national guard has 30% of their men and women from that area overseas -not to mention 50% of their equipment. How is it that funding for New Orleans – a security concern that was indeed foreseen – was cut so much, while the porkish highway bill included $231 million for a bridge to an small uninhabited Alaskan island? Why is there more concern about people stealing supplies to save their lives than on getting them out of there? What has been planned for the risk of disease? How do they plan to restore the wetlands, the marshes and swamps that act as natural water barriers? You have not addressed any of this as you stand there in the “Bushes.”

However, if you do intend to go around with a stricken-looking senior Bush to raise money on the “Katrina” tour, why not start with what money Halliburton is planning to give back to us? Why not ask the corporations, whose infinite grasping greed controls many of our policities, for some of our stolen money back? I’m sure it’s deductible.