American Insouciance
Does
This Make You a Proud American?
By Paul Craig Roberts
07/06/08 "ICH"
--- -Now that military officers selected by the Bush Pentagon have
reached a split verdict convicting Salim Hamdan, a onetime
driver for Osama bin Laden, of supporting terrorism, but
innocent of terrorist conspiracy, do you feel safe?
Or are we superpower Americans still at risk until we capture
bin Laden’s dentist, barber, and the person who installed the
carpet in his living room?
The Bush Regime with its comic huffings and puffings is unaware
that it has made itself the laughing stock of the world, a
comedy version of the Third Reich.
Hamdan was not defended by the slick lawyers that got O.J.
Simpson off, and he most certainly did not have a jury of his
peers. Hamdan was defended by a Pentagon appointed US Navy
officer, and his jurors were all Pentagon appointed US military
officers with an eye on their careers. Even in this Kangaroo
Court, Hamdan was cleared of the main charge.
The US Navy officer who was Hamdan’s appointed attorney is
certainly no terrorist sympathizer. Yet even this United States
officer said that the rules Bush designed for the military
tribunals were designed to achieve convictions. He also said
that the judge allowed evidence that would not have been
admitted by any civilian or military US court. He said that the
interrogations of Hamdan, which comprised the basis of the Bush
Regime’s case, were tainted by coercive tactics, including sleep
deprivation and solitary confinement.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080806/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guantanamo_bin_laden_s_driver
Does this make you a proud American?
Do you think you are made more safe when you stand there while
“your” government implements its own version of Joseph Stalin’s
show trials?
The trial and conviction of Hamdan has made every American very
unsafe.
The one certain fact about US law is that it is expanded until
it applies to everyone. Consider RICO, for example, the asset
freeze law that was intended only in criminal cases involving
the Mafia; it wasn’t long before RICO found its way into civil
divorce proceedings.
Bush’s multi-year, multi-billion dollar “war on terror” has been
reduced to railroading a low level employee, a driver, for
“terrorism.”
One would hope that the Hamdan verdict would be enough shame and
ridicule for the US in one day. But no, Bush didn’t stop there.
On his way to the Beijing Olympics, President Bush expressed
“deep concerns” for the state of human rights in China.
But not in Guantanamo, nor in Abu Ghraib, nor in the CIA’s
torture dungeons used for “renditions,” nor in Iraq and
Afghanistan where the US is expert at bombing weddings,
funerals, children’s soccer games, and every assortment of
civilians imaginable.
As the good book says, clean the beam from your own eye before
pointing to the mote in your brother’s eye.
But Americans, the salt of the earth, have neither beams nor
motes. We are the virtuous few, ordained by God to impose our
hegemony on the world. It is written, or so say the neocons.
What would President Bush say if, heaven forbid, the Chinese
were as rude as he is and asked Mr. Superpower why the land of
“freedom and democracy” has one million names on a watch list.
China with a population four times as large doesn’t have a watch
list with one million names.
What would President Bush say if China asked him why the US,
with a population one-fourth the size of China’s has hundreds of
thousands more of its citizens in prison? The percentage of
Americans in prison is far higher than in China and is a larger
absolute number.
What would President Bush say if China asked him why he used
lies and deception to justify his invasion of Iraq. China,
unlike Bush, is not responsible for 1.2 million dead Iraqis and
4 million displaced Iraqis.
China’s human rights policy is not perfect. China’s greatest
human rights failing is that China is the Bush Regime’s prime
enabler of its war crimes and human rights abuses in Iraq and
Afghanistan. By financing Bush’s budget deficit, China is
financing Bush’s gratuitous wars. Indeed, China can be said to
finance the weaponry that the US gives Israel to enable the
suppression of the Palestinians and with which to bomb the
civilian population of Lebanon.
China is a serious human rights abuser, because China is
complicit in Bush’s human rights abuses.
If we are honest about who is actually murdering and abusing
people, it is the US, Israel, and the UK. There’s your “axis of
evil.”
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