Muppetry

I know this story is kind of old news by now, but I can 't help wondering whether Dick Cheney - who sees this in the mirror:

ever actually had any intention at all of coming to Toronto. His last public appearance in Canada saw him get "trapped" in his hotel by protestors for seven hours. And by trapped I mean "decided not to leave the hotel because the crowd outside threatened to hurt his feelings" by calling him a war criminal to his face, something that doubtless would have been captured on camera and replayed endlessly in campaign commercials. The notion that Cheney's various assembled bodyguard and the sizeable police presence couldn't have protected him from the crowd outside is as ridiculous as the notion that Ann Coulter's speech was shut down due to actual threats rather than as a publicity stunt. 

Notice that none of the stories about the supposed cancellation of the speech actually quote Cheney or his Princess of Darkeness in training daughter Liz, who was also supposedly booked to speak. Notice too, that there is no mention of tickets having been sold, or refunds being offered. There is also some evidence to suggest that he was never actually booked to begin with.

Spectre Live's Ryan Ruppert, president of the company promoting Cheney's appearance, has apparently claimed the Cheneys, through their agent, said they felt the chance of violent demonstrations was too high in Toronto. There are also suggestions that death threats were received and that Cheney feared arrest by the ICC for war crimes.

This is all bullshit. If the Toronto Police can arrest 1,000 people and beat up hundreds more for little or no reason during the G20, I think they can manage to keep "anarchists" from burning down the city if Cheney comes to speak.  As far as death threats are concerned, I would think that Cheney probably gets death threats whenever he leaves his lair and he is probably at more risk visiting New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or even Dallas than he would be in Toronto. And given the way our present government venerates him, I hardly think he needs to worry about the mounties clapping him in irons.

No, I suspect what really happened is that there just weren't enough rich assholes willing to pay $60 to $250 a seat to see the oil industry's meat puppet dance around the fact that he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and the United States embracing torture. Without lots of advance ticket sales, the very new promotion company would never have the money to pay Cheney's sizeable speaking fee, and you know Dick doesn't do any of this out of the goodness of his cyborg central blood pump. So what to do?

What do conservatives ever do? Play the martyr! "Big mean commie protesters have prevented Dick Cheney from speaking! Won't you please help fight the dirty hippies and defend freedom of speech by buying a ticket to see our brave free speech warriors speak?"

No, not Ezra Levant, he was busy. No, those dumb enough to get fleeced by this bait-and-switch will be getting the SUN-TV B team.

Now that Cheney has cancelled his speech in Toronto due to "safety concerns" he has been replaced by former theatre critic and current drama queen Mark Steyn and SUN-TV's resident overage racist skinhead Michael Coren.

In other words, instead of seeing this:

Blogging tories and other idiots will be forking over their money to see this:

Bonus added awfulness: Steyn deigns to speak to the socialist rabble at CBC Radio about how the mean, mean marxist thugs are violating Dick Cheney's right to brag about torturing and killing children.

Tweet

War criminal feels the wrath of American military justice!

That will teach him a lesson! And let the dire fate of  marine Staff Sgt. Frank G. Wuterich be an example to every other soldier on the battlefield that the rules of war and human decency must be obeyed.
Well, mostly.
Unless you get angry because one of your fellow soldiers is killed, then ordering your men to shoot the nearest women and children is kinda like a bunch of unpaid parking tickets or getting caught shoplifting. Assuming of course the women and children are brown not-Americans foolish enough to have been born in a country to which the United States takes a dislike.
Three whole months in the stockade and forfeiture of two thirds of his pay for those three months. Assuming the USMC commandant doesn't step in and reduce the penalty.
And certainly the United States military doesn't want such a wanton law breaker and killer within its ranks, well not as a Staff Sgt. anyways, so he's been busted down to Private for now.
Imagine for a moment that an Iraqi soldier was responsible for killing 24 Americans - say U.S. security contractors or soldier, not women and children - what do you think the consequences would be? Can you conceive of any possible scenario in which that man would not be killed? Either through legal means with a quick show trial and a hanging or by presidential order and special forces hit team?
Tweet

Headlines we wish we could use

The United States Marine Corps -  America's No. 1 fighting force

(sorry, I couldn't help it)
Tweet

"If they run, they're VC. If they don't run, they're well-disciplined VC"

Most of the news out of Afghanistan is depressing and occasionally enraging, but when I see Seymour Hersh's byline attached to a story, I make sure to read it even though I know it will probably be both depressing and enraging. This story is no exception. It seems "the good guys" are now executing prisoners on the battlefield, or at least that is the story that has been relayed to Hersh by U.S. troops.
I won't argue that Hersh is infallible -- no one is -- but he is one of the best reporters working today and his track record from My Lai to Abu Ghraib is pretty impressive.

This isn't a story, at least not yet. This comes from a talk Hersh gave at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva on April 24, 2010.

HERSH: The purpose of my [Abu Ghraib] stories was to take it out of the field and into the White House. It's not that the President or the Secretary of Defense Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush, or Cheney, it's not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib. It's that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen.

And I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They're being executed on the battlefield. It's unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn't necessarily get reported. Things don't change. 

[...]

What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now.

Support the troops

I had a whole big outraged, shocked-but-not-surprised, how-evil-have-we-become? kind of a post planned about this, but then I read what the Medium Lobster had to say, and decided it had all been said and better.
Just remember, all good Germans supported the troops in the late 30's and early 40's too.

My Canada does not include war criminals

In light of this, I think that it is undeniable that there must be a fully public, non-partisan inquest, preferrably by a provincial coroner or similar authority that is more than arm's length away from the federal government.

From the CBC:

Federal government documents on Afghan detainees suggest that Canadian officials intended some prisoners to be tortured in order to gather intelligence, according to a legal expert.

If the allegation is true, such actions would constitute a war crime, said University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran, who has been digging deep into the issue and told CBC News he has seen uncensored versions of government documents released last year.

If the allegation that Afghan prisoners were purposely sent to be tortured turns out to be true, I  want people sent to jail.
And by jail I don't mean country club Conrad Black minimum security jail, either. I want to see them walking the yard at Millhaven. And by people I mean every single person in the chain of command that approved or did not act to stop this - right up to the Cabinet level, including the Prime Minister. If it happened under the Liberals and Paul Martin knew about it, fine, jail his retired ass, too.
This is not about politics or the party currently in power. This about Canada upholding basic human rights. We may have gotten a lot of things related to human rights wrong in the past - from residential schools to head taxes to incarcerating the Japanese during World War Two - whichever party is in power, but we have never tolerated outright evil like this.
This must be investigated, fully and completely and in the full light of day, with nothing redacted or left unexamined to "protect operational security" or any other bullshit reason the people involved want to try to cite to save their asses. My Canada does not include torture.

Update: the Mound of Sound has more here, here and here

What war does

This story is beyond the mere garden variety child abuse nightmare tale. This is something that would not have happened the way it did if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their gang of bloodthirsty ideologues had not decided to invade Iraq. This soldier pretty obviously has PTSD and will probably never be the same. And neither will the four-year-old daughter he waterboarded because she wouldn't say her ABCs.
And sorry to Gerard Alexander if I'm being condescending by pointing this out.
P.S. Gerard, when Obama says to a Republican congressman "That's factually just not true, and you know it's not true." That isn't condescending, it's what Driftglass so accurately described as "unsheathing three feet of Verdad" and using it to carve up the disingenuous, dissembling, mendacious, prevaricating opposition - you know, the lying douchebag Republicans.

From the "It's About Damn Time" dept.

While Barack Obama keeps saying he want to "look forward" and not get mired in the past and his Justice Department plods along in its investigations of torture-related crimes by the previous administration, it is nice to know somebody is doing something, though doubtless this will be used by the right as another example of the need for tort reform to end "frivolous" lawsuits.

The truth won't set Dick Cheney free

For Dick Cheney 9/11 means never having to say you're sorry. His speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute is a masterpiece of self-justification

Over on the left wing of the president's party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they're after would be heard before a so-called "Truth Commission." Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It's hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors

Now let's just break that paragraph down one bit at time and I'll see if I can translate it for you:

"Over on the left wing (those who oppose me are all communists) of the president's party (no real Republican would object to what we did) there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists (The ends justify the means and torture worked, it saved lives-- no really it did, nevermind all those people who argue otherwise--but our opponents don't care, they are just playing 'gotcha'). The kind of answers they're after (they don't care about the truth, they just want something that would make us look bad) would be heard before a so-called (it wouldn't be the truth) "Truth Commission." Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted (the reverse Nuremberg defense- I'm not responsible for what happened, I was only giving the orders), in effect treating political disagreements (ordering torture and other violations of the law and Constitution are merely partisan politics) as a punishable offense (they are being vicious and vindictive and want to hurt me, help!) , and political opponents (war criminals are merely people with whom the left disagree) as criminals. It's hard to imagine a worse precedent (oh noes! people will be held responsible for their actions), filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse (if we start prosecuting people for torture and war crimes, who knows where this whole 'punishing people for breaking the law' thing could go? My buddies at Haliburton could be next) , than to have an incoming administration criminalize (ordering people to be tortured, some of them to death, was not a crime, it wasn't! its only a crime because the Democrats say it is, despite 200 years of law that says otherwise ) the policy decisions (actual crimes) of its predecessors.

The real reason that the former vice president has been all over the TV and newspapers lately is not so much about securing his place in history as it is securing his place outside of the dock in the Hague.

Look, I don't think anyone will argue that the 9/11 attacks were not a horrible thing. Nearly 3,000 people died and that is pretty goddamn awful. But, rightwing pantspisser pronouncements to the contrary, it didn't change anything. The law is still the law. The worst crimes perpetrated do not allow us to ignore the law when it comes to catching and punishing the perpetrators. The Manson Family murders did not give the police the right to shoot suspected Beatles fans on sight.
Just because you're scared shitless doesn't mean you can do anything you want. The notion that "the end does not justify the means" is not just some collegiate philosophy 101 bit of theory, it is pretty much the basis of western law, along with that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing and "habeas corpus" -- but then again, I suppose those were ignored or suspended too during the Cheney regime.

Maybe if Bwana Dick Cheney had thought of the possibility of going to jail a few years ago, the world would be a better place right now, but I suppose given his history in the Nixon and Ford administrations, one can't really expect him to understand that just because the President does it, doesn't mean its not illegal.

Onward Christian soldiers

Just when you think that what you know about the George W. Bush administration's depravity, rank hypocracy and sadististic bullying masquerading as patriotic piety has hit the bottom of the barrel, someone comes along and points out that there is a whole other barrel underneath this one. Apparently Donald Rumsfeld, not content to have things like prayer meetings going on at the Pentagon and a chief of Special Forces who make Gen. Jack T. Ripper look like the moderate wing of the GOP/military axis, took it upon himself to make special title pages for the regular top secret briefing he delivered to the president and handful of others. Pages with heroic, glamorous images of America's Heroic Glamorous Defenders of Heroic Freedom Heroically Defending Freedom in Glamorous ways, overlaid with stirring passages from, yep - you guessed it - the Bible. (image lifted shamelessly from Jesus' General )

See them all here

Keep in mind that this was not an attempt to play to the religious rubes out there in the hinterlands or a pose adopted to curry favor with the evangelistic electorate. These covers were for super-secret executive level only reports that were circulated only to the most senior people.
One wonders what the "Prince of Peace" would make of that. One also wonders why none of these pictures were included with suitable biblical quotes:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth

Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.

Suffer the little children to come unto me

If you are American, write your president, your congressman, your senator, your newspaper and demand that the people responsible for starting this hideous human meatgrinder on false pretenses for their own selfish reasons be brought to trial.

Gratitude to fellow Fez enthusiast Atta J. Turk

When The Geneva Conventions

Were Thought to be "Quaint"

Just when you thought we'd hit the bottom of the barrel on the revelations of torture, abuse and crime under the Bush regime, you realize that buried under this barrel is a whole other barrel of festering evil.

"Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking. " (emphasis mine)

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, it hasn't just been the big companies like Haliburton and Blackwater that have made a fortune shafting the taxpayer and the Iraqi people. It appears some of America's Shiny Perfect Heroes in Uniform aren't so shiny after all.

In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers. (emphasis mine again)

What the heck is Obama waiting for? He won the election. He has the votes he needs in the House and Senate even if every Republican decides to walk out on the vote. He has the public support. Is he afraid the truth will make bipartisan baby Jebus cry or something? Bring on the trials!

No one is above the law

Speaking of douche bags, Calgary is going to have a very special visitor on March 17. I hope he's given an appropriate reception.
Somebody make a call to The Hague and tell them to sweep out a holding cell. If the British and the Spanish can arrest and hold Augusto Pinochet, surely we can have the mounties grab an admitted violator of the Geneva Conventions who has bragged about having people tortured. It would be a shame if they had to taser anyone in the process. Surely, we can at least stop such people at the border.

War sucks
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible events which deserve to be mourned as a tragedy. However in this week of national veneration of victimhood in Japan, we would all do well to remember that such events did not happen in isolation or for no reason.
I do not wish for a moment to suggest that one act excuses another, as my mom always used to point out "Two wrongs don't make a right." Making war against civilians is always reprehensible, no matter what form it takes.

"What crime did these children commit?"
Holding up a picture of a boy horribly burned by the heat of the atomic bomb, Iccho Itoh made this impassioned plea before the International Court of Justice some 12 years ago, not long after he was elected mayor of Nagasaki.

I would ask what crime the people of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere committed. Or what crimes the "comfort women" and forced laborers committed. Or what crime the people of Nanjing committed. Or what crime they continue to commit that has caused the Japanese state to deny the wrongs done against them.

There have been plenty of official apologies by the Japanese government about the war crimes committed in the service of the state and in the name of the emperor. For the most part they have been a matter of tatemae (polite, expected, official, socially required, but not heartfelt). Some veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army have truly tried to make amends, to make a honne (private, personally real regardless of social convention) apology. As the the war fades from living memory, more and more revisionists are trying to paper over what happened with weaseling about specific numbers and the wording of treaties and bitching about how it is unfair that Japan gets flack for its "supposed" misdeeds while Germany doesn't. Germany has built monuments to those killed in the Holocaust, it has outlawed Nazism, it purged former Nazis from the government, it has paid restitution. One doesn't hear the German government or media quibbling about whether it was six million Jews or 5.8 million Jews that were killed and using the discrepancy to argue that if the numbers can't be agreed on it probably never happened. In fact, shitheads that do this can be jailed in Germany. In Japan, they get elected to high office.

I sympathize with the victims of the atomic bombings. I sympathize with their descendants and their pleas for peace, but I would sympathize a lot more if the former slave laborer and comfort women got a real apology and compensation. I would take the pleas for peace a lot more seriously if Japan wasn't the top spender on arms in Asia and seventh in the world.

If the three non-nuclear principles of not producing, possessing or allowing nuclear weapons into the country weren't convieniently forgotten everytime a U.S. nuclear sub or aircraft carrier docked here, then those principles might actually mean something, instead of amounting to so much happy talk.

I've lived in Tokyo for ten years and there is much to love about Japan and the Japanese. Theirs is an incredible culture, history and tradition. Saying sorry is common; meaning it is sometimes another matter.

If the victors in World War Two can admit that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki, the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the internment of American and Canadians of Japanese ancestory were all terrible things in a heartfelt and collective way and offer compensation for misdeeds of the state, is it wrong to expect any less from Japan?