The Trump clown car shed some bozos this week, most notably the media’s favorite cabinet member, Rex Tillerson, former head of Exxon Mobil, who managed to seem avuncular and unthreatening in comparison with most of his colleagues – this while he systematically dismantled the State Department. Still, he did appear to be perhaps the greatest naysayer on tearing up the Iran deal. With the Koch Brothers invention Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, I’m sure we will nudge much closer to the 2000 bombing runs he once suggested as an effective means of halting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. In a saner age, that alone might have been disqualifying, but certainly not today.
So, we’ll now have an Iran warmonger as chief diplomat. And in Pompeo’s old position at the head of the CIA, we will have the current deputy director Gina Haspel, a veteran of the Bush II-era Agency and a big fan of “rough” interrogation techniques (also known as torture). Haspel was directly involved in a CIA black site in Thailand where the Agency perpetrated torture of numerous individuals, including Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded by our operatives 89 times. She arrived after Zubaydah left, but later saw to it that incriminating tapes of this and similar episodes would be destroyed. For all those boning up on obstruction of justice standards in relation to the Trump White House, you might want to apply those standards to Haspel.
The torture crimes – essentially crimes against human dignity – are bad enough. But the fact that Haspel was part of an operation that was instrumental in the abuse of Zubaydah, whose extracted false testimony was key to the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq, raises this to another level. You know the plausible story on this – Bush/Cheney and company had decided upon the Iraq invasion well before 9/11 (and on some level, before taking office), but they needed a plausible pretext. They had no convincing evidence for their claims regarding an Al Qaeda connection with Saddam Hussein or an active nuclear program, so they put the torturers to work at doing what they do best – getting people to say anything … ANYTHING … to stop the abuse. The very fact that they waterboarded Zubaydah 89 times indicates that they were looking for some response in particular. They got it, bogus as it obviously was, and from that proceeded the catastrophic Iraq war that is still killing people 15 years later – a conflict that, three years in, had resulted in more deaths than the 7-year Syrian civil war.
No one has been held accountable for the crime of the Iraq invasion, nor for the torture regime. I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but the least we can do is to stop rewarding the culprits with higher office. Maybe it wouldn’t be entirely fair to start with Haspel, but we have to start somewhere.
luv u,
jp
Yes, yes … we’re polishing up the holiday songs here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. T’is the season and all that. What, you’re not familiar with the dirge of the Christmas Bot? Small wonder. We just made it up. What kind of songwriters would we be if we resorted to used Christmas Carols? It would be a total cop out. So we are resolved to write lame Christmas numbers each and every December, five minutes before we hastily record them and throw them up on the internet. You’re welcome!
This discussion is not limited to the full-on, proud of all we did crew, like the execrable Dick Cheney, snickering from his podium, confident that he will never pay for his crimes against humanity. This is the discussion being advanced by Senators who supposedly oppose these interrogation techniques. They didn’t work, they say. No useful intelligence was gained. What a strange conversation to be having at this moment in history, when we are confronted with detailed evidence of this latest foray (far from the first) into systematic abuse of those we seek to dominate and suppress.
No one seems particularly bothered about this, but Bush’s proud admission, along with Cheney’s, is basically a declaration that our justice system is in a shambles; that the law applies only to the powerless and that cruel and unusual punishment is acceptable. Torture is a violation of U.S. statute and of international conventions to which the U.S. is both a signatory and a primary participant. Waterboarding is torture; it has been recognized as such since the days of Torquemada and before, I’ll wager.
G.O.P. “tsunami” myth from materializing.
Not your monkey. It’s the economy, stupid, to be sure, but what about the economy? If a generalization can be made about the past three decades in U.S. economic history, it’s that the rich have done extremely well and the middle class and poor have lost ground… lots of ground. Someone no doubt has shouted “class war!” already, but friends, there has been a class war underway for thirty years now, and it’s being waged on us. And frankly, we’re losing. Part of the reason for that is that we are atomized, disorganized, and at war with one another. We are encouraged to be so from the moment we become aware of the world around us.
in Somalia facing possible war crimes prosecution in the United States (where he now resides). Some of his torture victims now live in the U.S. as well, and would like to get some justice. Fair enough. While the correspondent took the time to describe how heinous that regime was, she neglected to mention the fact that our government had sent them something like $1 billion over the Carter, Reagan, and Bush I years. Small detail.
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to single out NPR. I just guess I’m getting annoyed with hearing Jim DeMint, Judd Gregg, or some other “conservative” leading light every time I tune in. On Thursday I got to hear from a Democrat…. Bart Stupak. Who’s running Washington again? (Oh, yes. On Wednesday, during the “Political Junkie” segment of “Talk of the Nation”, there was an extended conversation with Mitt Romney, a.k.a. Guy Smiley, a.k.a. Bush redux.) Meanwhile, the daughter of our own Karadzic is reviving McCarthyism with a web commercial attacking what she terms “The Al Qaeda Seven” in the Obama justice department. So not only does the war criminal brag of his guilt in plain sight, but his spawn is somehow treated as possessed of some expertise by virtue of her father’s ill deeds.