Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 407 Editor's Choice: 5
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cynicism and political farce
[Read the article: The war on teen terror]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush and Cheney need terrorists to excuse their inexcusable failure in government and in war and to justify their assault on the law and on Muslims: if they can't get their hands on terrorists they're perfectly happy to buy or invent them. If what's gone in Guantanamo Bay is not a war crime then the term has no meaning. I defy anyone to watch 'Taxi to the Dark Side'(the story of a taxi driver, completely innocent of any crime, who was tortured and beaten to death at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan by American soldiers over a period of weeks - or months) and not be horrified at what America has done to human beings out of sheer blood lust and sadism. It's all a horrifying reminder of what people will do when the rule of law is removed or breaks down. Pretending that the law can be a weapon of one administration or bent to one political agenda is the problem. To claim that the world has changed because of one violent event that happened to occur in America under highly controversial circumstances is an accurate measure of America's hubris. Britain was bombed day and night by the Luftwaffe during World War II and didn't find it necessary to dispense with civil society or to declare that the truth was whatever they said it was or to imprison and torture young boys to defend itself. And as if to confirm that the right learns nothing, John McCain, himself a prisoner who was tortured, is turning himself into a clone of George W. Bush - only too happy to inflict the horror of war on others in the name of 'victory in Iraq' or ending Iran's nuclear program or whatever the current excuse is. The fact is that no one has ever won the kind of war that is being fought in Iraq or Afghanistan by military means and the purpose of invading both these countries has been clouded in deceit and propadanda. When I watch Robert Mugabe accusing the DMC in Zimbabwe of carrying out the violence he himself has orchestrated I think of '1984' and I think of Bush and Cheney and how similar their lies are to his.
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John McCain's biggest fan
[Read the article: Obama: "I bit my tongue" on Clinton]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's now very obvious that Alex Koppelman hates Hillary Clinton much more than he wants John McCain to lose the general election. What exquisite agony it must be. It reminds me of that hilarious scene in a Steve Martin movie where Steve was a woman trapped in a man's body and found that half of him wanted to go one way and the other half wanted to go the other way.Could lead to the chiropractor.
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Don't punch the waiter if you don't like the meal
[Read the article: Bush's top general quashed torture dissent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Seeing Myers' name mentioned reminded me of the military saying reported in the 'Army Times' on May 17 2004 that the soldiers who appeared in the torture photos from Abu Graib were the 'six morons who lost the war'. Chalmers Johnson quotes this in his 2006 book 'Nemesis' but goes on to add that actually seven morons lost the war: Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard B. Myers, Lt.General Ricardo Sanchez, Major General Geoffrey Miller and John W. Warner, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman (Republican Virginia).
Be that as it may, it was Bush who legalized torture. In a presidential memo on September 17 2001 he vastly expanded the CIA's powers to carry out covert operations in some 80 countries without having to come back to get presidential permission. This gave Bush 'plausible deniability'. More importantly the memo removed all constraints and safeguards on the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, even though the US Congress had ratified (in October 1994) a UN convention against torture and other cruel,inhuman and degrading treatment which read in part...'No state ...shall expel, return or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.'
On January 18 2002 a second Presidential memo, drafted by John Yoo and titled (with no sense of irony) 'Humane Treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees' states that captives from Afghanistan need not be given prisoner of war status and the US government would therefore not abide by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war. Presumably Bush did this to protect his accomplices in war crimes from the federal War Crimes Act of 1996 which carries the death penalty. It freed Bush's agents to torture and, of course, murder as they pleased. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (1977) prohibits 'at any time and in any place whatsoever' violence including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture and outrages to human dignity against protected persons -that is persons taking no active part in hostilites, such as civilians, the wounded and prisoners of war. 'Such persons are in all circumstances entitled to respect for their honour AND RELIGION and must be protected against insults and public curiousity. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised to obtain information from them or third parties. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited'. I suppose this makes it clear why John Yoo was called in to draft 'other' laws that allowed all of the above. But Yoo and Myers are just pawns. Bush and Cheney are the ones who moved the pieces on the board. They are war criminals.