The Largest Minority

June 30th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement regarding the announcement that U.S. troops have left the cities and towns of Iraq and turned over formal security to Iraqi security forces.

“The withdrawal of some U.S. combat troops from Iraq’s cities is welcome and long overdue news. However, it is important to remember that this is not the same as a withdrawal of U.S. troops and contractors from Iraq.

“U.S. troop combat missions throughout Iraq are not scheduled to end until more than a year from now in August of 2010. In addition, U.S. troops are not scheduled for a complete withdrawal for another two and a half years on December 31, 2011. Rather, U.S. troops are leaving Iraqi cities for military bases in Iraq. They are still in Iraq, and they can be summoned back at any time.

“This is not a great victory for peace. On May 19, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Iraqi and U.S. military officials virtually redrew the city limits of Baghdad in order to consider the Army’s Forward Operating Base Falcon as outside the city, despite every map of Baghdad clearly showing it with in city limits. In fact, according to Section 24.3 of the “SOFA” U.S. troops can remain at any agreed upon facility. The reported reason for this decision is to ensure U.S. troops are able to ‘help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the sectarian war.’

“This troop movement should not be confused with a troop withdrawal from Iraq. In reality, this is a small step toward Iraqi sovereignty as Iraqi security forces begin assuming greater control over security operations, but it is a long way from independence and a withdrawal of the U.S. military presence.”

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via AlterNet

May 27th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Any speech in which President Obama announces a change in policy follows the same basic format of denouncing Bush’s policy, taking long thoughtful pauses, then adopting Bush’s policy.

When I was campaigning for Nader, on the rare occasion that I would meet a self-described liberal calm enough to engage in a conversation with me, they would state that they were voting for Obama because they didn’t want a clone of George W. Bush (meaning John McCain) to win the White House. I would often reply that I wasn’t voting for either McCain or Obama for the very same reason. Both men were outright fascists. Of course, stating something like that would often end the conversation. What an absurd thing to say. Right?

h/t FireDogLake

May 23rd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

During a speech in which he attempted to justify the future illegality of his administration, President Obama also committed a crime against logic by setting forth a false compromise often used by moderate progressives to justify their lack of backbone. After criticizing the far-right for their authoritarian policies and prideful ignorance, the president then surmised that those on the exact opposite end of the political spectrum must also be incorrect, therefor leaving the only sane position to be the compromised one in the middle. There is an idiotic inclination in American journalism and politics to be “fair and balanced” by insisting that the truth to any debate must be in the middle even when one side is clearly wrong.

Using that fallacious argument, Obama could have very well said, “On one side of the spectrum there are those who insist that the world is 6,000 years old, and on the other end of the spectrum we have ideologues who insist that the world is 4.5 billion years old. Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not ideologues. They know that the answer lies somewhere in between these two dates.”

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is not happy that President Obama has labeled him an “absolutist” for defending the rule of law. Ratner also rightly criticizes the president for being too weak on matters like Guantanamo. He states: “It’s pretty remarkable to me that he would equate on one side the Cheney et al. people who advocate torture, continuing people at Guantanamo, continuing military commissions, having preventive detention, all of those types of depredations of the constitution, and then put us on the other extreme, saying we’re extreme also or absolutist because we actually want the rule of law. It seems to me that that equation is pretty false and outrageous.“

May 23rd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon’s custody more horrific than anything made public so far. “If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse,” Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse.

Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:

“Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

“It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there’s enough out there, they can’t (Applause). …. So it’s going to be an interesting election year.”

Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong’s blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: “[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil…’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.’ He looked frightened.”

So, there are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn’t he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists — will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? — and what is being done about it?

(Update: A reader brought to our attention that the rape of boys at Abu Ghraib has been mentioned in some news accounts of the prisoner abuse evidence. The Telegraph and other news organizations described “a videotape, apparently made by US personnel, is said to show Iraqi guards raping young boys.” The Guardian reported “formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator.”)

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May 18th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

This video is of course an actor’s recreation of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler’s famous speech in which he denounced American imperialism carried out under the guise of spreading democracy. Sadly, little has changed since then.

May 14th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

The Obama administration said it would seek to block a court-ordered release of photographs which depict what US personnel actually do overseas. This is a major reversal of Obama’s promise over three weeks ago in which he stated that he would not oppose the release of the photos.

The president claimed that the photos would “further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” Funny, I thought an imperialist foreign policy was what inflamed anti-American sentiment and that forcing Americans to occupy those “anti-American” countries was what actually put them in danger. It’s our actions that actually need to change if we’re to curb anti-American sentiment. Disclosure of these embarrassing photos could actually help our image by showing the world we’re making a break with the past.

Lets take a further look at the president’s claim that the publication of these photos will unarguably “put our troops in danger”. According to Donald Rumsfeld, as horrific and disgusting as the photos from Abu-Gharib prison were, they were just a small percentage of the photos and tapes that existed. They were actually the least offensive photos of the bunch - those deemed safe for public consumption. And yet as shocking as photos of sexual and physical abuse were to the American public in 2004, their reception was fairly low-key in Iraq because Iraqis already knew what was happening. The photos were tame in comparison to their everyday reality and what they’ve already heard. There was no surge in anti-American sentiment beyond that which already existed from the actual acts themselves. Simply put, President Obama’s justification for secrecy doesn’t hold up. The rest of the world already knows what we’ve done. It’s the American public that he’s trying to keep ignorant.

The president additionally stated that “the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.” Now there’s an interesting motivation for withholding information. President Obama has declared that disclosure won’t benefit anyone. That seems like an oddly familiar line of reasoning. Does the president really have the authority to decide what we can and can’t publish? Is he declaring himself “The Decider”?

Executive Director of the ACLU Anthony D. Romero stated, “The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department’s failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”

Like all imperialits, Obama is not concerned with the safety of American soldiers. If he was he’d bring them home where they actually would be out of harm’s way. No, the president is much less concerned with the lives of the proletariat and much more concerned with blocking the exposure of the criminality of the government. The more he discloses, the more likely it is that fellow members of the ruling elite will be prosecuted (including members of his own party like Pelosi). That would be a dangerous precedent for an administration that has decided to continue many of the same crimes of their predecessors - including criminal wars and domestic spying.

The Obama administration is not appealing to us with any new argument that the Bush administration didn’t already put forth, and should therefor not be treated any differently by liberals and human rights advocates than the previous administration. We must have the same tenacity for justice when faced with the same obstacles. In a democracy, citizens have the right to know what is being done in their name and officials do not have the right to withholding information they deem inappropriate.

While the entire world has been demanding prosecution of the Bush administration, Obama has simply stated that we need to “look forward” and not go down the dangerous path of accountability. Self-described pragmatists (aka apologists) argue that if we did our whole damn government might be behind bars. Not such a bad thing in my opinion.

May 11th, 2009 by Guest

In the wake of President Obama’s decision to not seek criminal prosecutions of U.S. officials who violated criminal statutes against torture, maybe this would be a good time to revisit the case of Tomoyuki Yamashita. He was a World War II Japanese army general in charge of troops in the Pacific. After the war, he was executed by U.S. military officials for being a “war criminal.”

Why did they consider Yamashita to be a war criminal? Not because he himself had committed any war crimes but because he had failed to prevent men under his command from committing war crimes.

Never mind that Yamashita had never authorized or condoned the commission of such war crimes. And never mind that as a military officer, he had stood in steadfast opposition to war crimes and had even executed some of his men for having committed them. And never mind that Allied bombing campaigns had destroyed his command and control over his troops. U.S. military officials said that as the commander, his failure to prevent his subordinates from committing such crimes rendered him subject to being prosecuted, convicted, and punished for being a war criminal.

Now, imagine if the Yamashita doctrine were to be applied to every single person in the chain of command in the Abu Ghraib torture, sex abuse, and murder scandal, starting from the commander-in-chief and going all the way down to the CIA agents and U.S. military personnel who actually committed the crimes.

Under the Yamashita doctrine, it would be difficult to see how those in the chain of command could escape criminal responsibility. After all, it’s undisputed that they failed to prevent the commission of the war crimes at Abu Ghraib.

In fact, it seems to me that U.S. officials are in a much worse position than Yamashita was, owing to the considerable evidence that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the logical outgrowth of the White House torture memos and the orders authorizing the use of “harsh interrogation methods.”

Of course, no one would expect U.S. officials to apply the same standards to themselves that they applied to Yamashita. But at least the Yamashita case can give us valuable insights into why foreigners resent so deeply the hypocrisy and double standards of the U.S. government.

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May 7th, 2009 by Manila Ryce