History Will Be Harsh On The US

[Middle finga]

Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international war-crimes trial
by Nat Hentoff
August 28th, 2007 6:30 PM

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

-Snip-

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.

-Snip-

http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=77643&page=&issue=0735&printcde=MzU2NTAzMzA1MA==&refpage=L2FkbWluL2VkaXQvZWRpdC5waHA/aWQ9Nzc2NDMmaXNzdWU9MDczNSZzZWN0aW9uPW5ld3M=

[melody]

1. Tis the whole idea

Set-up the US as the new Nazis and spin the globalists as the "allies". The Bush
family was planted here long ago just for that reason.

[Briar]

3. I don't think this is top down

I am afraid that the failure of this atrocity to gain traction with ordinary people reflects a feeling that, somehow, those involved were "asking for it". These things happened because those responsible were aware they were acting with a lot of backing from ordinary people. There was, and is, a desire to "make them pay". It wasn't just a "save us from the nasty terrorists" thing - it goes deeper. It involves the way that it seems to be so easy in our culture to divide our neighbours into "us" and "them" and to tolerate, and even expect, the inhuman punishment of "them". It ties in with capital punishment and the demand of so many that prison be harsh and brutalising rather than attempt rehabilitation. Then there's the whole "I have the right to shoot anyone who threatens me" thing too. Enough people are into vengeance, vigilantism and violence to keep these barbaric practices going, I fear. Articles like this are encouraging, but they don't chime with the sentiments of the majority (perhaps even on a Democrat site like this one, which can sometimes strike a foreigner as very right wing on law and order issues).

[Vidar]

2. It damn well should be.

[tom_paine]

4. No, history will not be kind to Imperial Amerika, the New Totalitarianism: BushPutinism

But the United States of America died on 12/12/2000, and every day it seems as if the chances it resescitates are smaller, with notable, short-lived exceptions.

So please don't badmouth the Old American Republic. It wasn't perfect and we, like all nations, did many bad things throughout our existance. But, unlike most other nations, we at least did a lot of good for humanity, not to mention "breaking the ice" on BushPutinism in 1776 (they called it Monarchy then, and it was a crude form of the BushPutinism, which is forced to cloak itself as the opposite of what it is, that we live under today).

If there is a history during what promises to be at least 1,000 year Dark Age that is coming within the next 250 years, and maybe a lot sooner if the oil runs out.

[Felix Mala]

5. The United States can't afford to get it wrong...

Our superior system of self-rule is supposed to keep us from making wrong moves.


“When our country is wrong she is worse than other countries when they are wrong, for she has more light than other countries, and we somehow ought to make her feel that we are sorry and ashamed for her.”



- William Dean Howells, 1912