CODEPINK : Women Say No To War

CODEPINK : Women Say No To War

Slow Justice

Okay, the following is the story as I wrote it. I think you'll agree I showed very admirable restraint. It is not always easy maintaining objectivity. You have no idea how much I wanted to insert my comments on this one.

Mark Clements spent 28 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. On Monday, he and a group of activists and other torture victims found themselves in the federal court building in downtown Chicago, waiting for the verdict in the Jon Burge trial.

Clements choked up when he heard the news. Burge had been convicted of all counts against him: one count of lying under oath and two counts of obstruction of justice.

Jon Burge is a former Chicago Police Lieutenant who led unit of cops that tortured black suspects in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Burge’s trial lasted five weeks. Five victims testified about how they signed false confessions after being suffocated, electrically shocked, beaten and threatened with guns placed in their mouths.

Burge was not on trial for the tortures themselves, but for lying under oath in a 2003 civil lawsuit about what he knew about the torture. The statute of limitations on the tortures ran out long ago.

Mark Clements was 16 years old when he was tortured by men under Burge into signing a false confession. He cried when he talked about how he felt about Burge’s conviction.
“My daughter is 29 years old,” said Clements through sobs. “I missed all those years with my daughter, sitting in those prison cells for a crime I didn't commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge."

Many call the guilty verdict significant. One juror said it was hard to find a police officer guilty because most people, by instinct believe an officer’s side of the story. Many human rights groups believe that is why New York City officers were not convicted in the killing of Sean Bell or why the LA Police who were caught on tape beating Rodney King got off.

Whether or not this verdict reflects a shift in the public’s willingness to hold police accountable for their actions is not clear, but Clements said that he’s “Relieved that at least one of these people is now going to finally feel the pain.”

And that was the objective story I wrote. Good work. Straight and to the point without a lot of my input.

Now that I'm here on my own time, I can commentate, right? (Right, Josh, go nuts!) Because writing that without bursting out into a tirade took a lot of self-control and I think I've earned a rant.

Okay, forget the fact that innocent men like Mark Clements, Ronnie Kitchen, Melvin Jones, Martin Reeves and countless others suffered at the hands of police like Burge and his thugs. Forget the 22 torture victims who are still in prison because of confessions that were forced from them.

Wait, don't forget them. Never forget it. Let's just put it aside for a second so I can make an intellectual appeal to those reading this who aren't the bleeding heart type.

Because I know what many of you are thinking.

You're thinking, even if you're not going to say it out loud, that at least some of these guys probably did the crimes they were locked away for, regardless of whether their confessions were beaten out of them.

Actually, I take that back. I've gotten tired of making intellectual appeals to people who don't care.

Are you really okay with police doing anything they want with impunity? Have you stopped to think what kind of person wants to become a cop under those circumstances?

Two kinds of people: naive idealists who really want to help people and Droogies.

This is not about hating cops.

This is about living in a society that allows monsters to be police. Nothing gives a sadistic bully a hard-on like the idea of walking around with a gun, a badge and absolute impunity. And as long as we refuse to hold police accountable, we will have psychopaths lining up, just itching to join the force.

This isn't an insult to police who truly want to help their fellow man. Quite the opposite.

If we let the thugs and monsters blend in with them, then we're dishonoring all of them, aren't we?

So try to understand that celebrating the conviction of Jon Burge has nothing to do with hating cops.

Next stop, Stark County, Ohio. If there is a God and if he is just, maybe Sheriff Tim Swanson and the 7 sexual predators he has been protecting will be prosecuted at some point.

But that's another post. And you know what? I think it's gonna come soon.

And in case any of you care, I know I should be listening to Rage Against the Machine or N.W.A. or something like that given the topic, but I'm in an ethereal pop mood, so I'm listening to a gorgeous new 180g re-release of:

Make that Change

The political center of America has been moving decidedly to the right for decades.

Actual liberals have been all-but banished from the Democratic Party.

Ask yourself, do we have any heroes in America like Marek Edelman, who left us this past October? Uncompromising and fierce, even in the face of death, even in the face of the scorn of his countrymen and allies?

The Democrats will not get their shit together on issues like marriage equality or reproductive rights and they have caved on every economic issue there is.

The Clinton 90's heralded an era of Democratic Reaganomics.

The Democrats are now on the wrong side on the death penalty, the war on crime, the war on drugs, and more or less every other aspect of both our foreign and domestic policy.

Gains are small and usually immediately taken away. Resistance is met with either scorn, or muscle.

We, the left, caught a great deal of grief from the Democratic Party when we dared to refuse to support Gore and Lieberman who might as well be Republicans.

I’m sorry, but you can’t move that far to the right and then complain that the left has abandoned you.

And anyone who has spoken out in the last eight years, from Ward Churchill to Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks can tell you what it’s like be responded to with simple, brutal, unmoving force.

And now, we are at a crossroads. Did we really mean what we said when we voted for change, or are we just jerking off?

Are we pissed off enough about this recession to demand that the people we just put into office reverse the past 28 years of systematic deregulation that led to this whole mess?
The hubris of the last eight years, the prioritizing of power over party, and party over country has imploded the Republican Party and we have been given a magnificent opportunity. It would be a crime to waste it. But the Democrats have indeed wasted the opportunity.

They could not get meaningful health care for all Americans even with a Super-majority in both houses. You know why? Because they didn't fucking try!

They talked of bi-partisanship as if it were the primary virtue for any politician. As if making friends with the enemy were more important than principle.

They've put Blackwater into Pakistan for Christ's sake!

No more. I've come to a crucial decision. When you choose between the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

Go ahead and tell me I'm throwing my vote away.

But from now on, every vote will go to a Socialist, Green or Independent candidate.

I used to think the Democrats' problem was weakness. Now I see that it's a lack of conviction.

And for the record, to you, the Democratic Party, you left us. Adieu.

The UK Inquiry With No Teeth: It's Better Than Nothing

There was a very interesting article in the Socialist Worker on the UK inquiry into the Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq.

At the heart of the inquiry is the question of whether Tony Blair’s administration promised to join the U.S. in invading Iraq with or without UN approval as early as 2002.

And the article has a point. The inquiry is largely meaningless and impotent because its bite has no fangs.

There are going to be no real repercussions for anybody except for some public discomfort.

That’s true. However, this public discomfort does have some value.

Nobody here in the U.S. is going to have to answer for their crimes, even in a meaningless PR nightmare of an inquiry.

What do you think Bush is doing right now? Fishing? Drinking? Duck hunting? Undocumented worker hunting? Maybe he’s out there participating in a couple of these sports at the same time?

One thing I’m sure he’s not doing is squirming.

He’s not somewhere with advisors and lawyers worrying about what he’s going to have to tell prosecutors or a Congressional Committee or even a journalist.

He has nothing to worry about and he knows it.

So, even if the U.K. hearings have no bite, at least they’re happening.

The hearings culminated in the testimony of Tony Blair at the end of January.

Incidentally, someone tried (unsuccessfully) to make a citizens arrest of Blair outside the proceedings.

Hell, there’s a website, http://www.arrestblair.org/ that has a bounty for anybody who makes a citizen’s arrest on the bastard. (Incidentally, yours truly did a piece on this. That’s right, I’m not above shamelessly pimping myself.)

Also, people arriving at the Westminster underground station were greeted by people gathering signatures for a petition for Blair to be tried as a war criminal.

So, some good has come out of this.

To me, the highlight of the Blair's testimony was when he talked about threat versus perception.

"It wasn't that objectively he (Saddam) had done more, it was that our perception of the risk had shifted," Blair said.

Holy Jesus, did anyone catch the significance of those words? Blair said that we went to war because our paranoia level went up even though the actual threat didn’t. And he’s unapologetic about that! Holy Jesus!

Blair did deny promising military aid at the 2002 Crawford meeting.

"The only commitment I gave (at Crawford) was a commitment to deal with Saddam," Blair said. He said he told Bush "we will be with them in dealing with this threat."

A former legal advisor to the Blair administration, Michael Wood told then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in January of 2003 that any invasion in Iraq would be illegal.

Wood testified that his warnings fell on deaf ears. “He took the view that I was being very dogmatic and that international law was pretty vague and that he wasn't used to people taking such a firm position. When he had been at the Home Office, and had often been advised things were unlawful but he had gone ahead anyway and won in the courts."

The reason these warnings went unheeded may have been that the decision to go to war had already been made.

Britain's former ambassador to the U.S., Christopher Meyer, has told the inquiry that Bush and Blair used an April 2002 meeting at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, to "sign in blood" an agreement to take military action.

Senior Blair aides deny that. Former British Secretary of State for Defense Geoff Hoon said that Britain did not unconditionally decide to resort to military action before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Hoon said he did not think Blair gave a promise to Bush to support war come what may.

Hoon’s major concern wasn’t the legality of the war, but the logistics of the whole affair.

He testified that he had shared his concerns about planning with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in February 2003, a month before the invasion.

He said the British government also did not fully understand the challenges occupying forces would face.

He criticized Britain's Foreign Office and Department for International Development for delays in sending civilian staff to take over reconstruction work from the military.
With the bloodthirsty amateur hour carnage that Blackwater, (now Xe Services) caused in 2007 that nobody in the Bush administration or at Blackwater is willing to accept any accountability for, it’s good to hear somebody saying that outsourcing military work to civilian staff might not be such a good idea.

Since it's obvious that nobody here is going to hold companies like that accountable for their actions, at least somebody is speaking up.

But back to the invasion of Iraq.

If there's one thing that Bush is, it's decisive.

He's not the kind of man to sit and do nothing when action has to be taken.

I mean, you can't imagine the guy just sitting there for several minutes during a crisis not knowing what to do.

No, he's a take charge kind of guy.

Oh, wait.

Hoon said that former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had initially been suspicious of the British Government. I’m wondering what exactly he meant by ‘suspicious.’

Like if Britain wasn’t going to be as willing as we wanted that somehow that would make them less of an ally?

That attitude is chilling. It’s the ‘you’re either with us or with the terrorists’ mindset. This is a sentiment I resent the hell out of by the way since my response upon hearing that was, “No, I’m not with you or the terrorists.”

I think that by ‘suspicious’ he meant that Rumsfeld thought that Britain might turn out to be a holdout like France and would need to be vilified as such.

Hoon also said it was obvious as early as the summer of 2002 that the U.S. wanted to invade Iraq.

He testified, "There was a real sense of the Americans thinking through in a very practical way the consequences of the 'axis of evil' speech and focussing on Iraq, so we had no doubt at that stage in the summer that they meant business."

British officials worried before the invasion of Iraq that the Americans weren't putting enough thought into postwar planning, the head of Britain's defense ministry at the time said Tuesday.

Hoon told the inquiry that planning was not as "detailed and comprehensive as we would have liked."

He acknowledged the aftermath of the 2003 invasion "did not go as well as we wanted it to go."

No fucking shit, fuck-nuts.

To me, the hero of the hearings (if indeed a hero was to be had) was Former British International Development Secretary Clare Short.

I know nothing about her career up to the invasion. I had never even heard of her until these hearings, but I now adore her.

She talked about the need to speak the truth to friends.

"I think this gets to the root of why we went (to war.) And I think now you can see the leaked documents, the Americans were determined to go, Blair had said he'd go with them, he couldn't get Britain there without going through the UN but in the end if the Americans were going he was determined to go with them. And I repeat, I've said it before but it's very important - there was no need to go at that time, there was no emergency."

She went on to say that, "Britain needs to think about this - the special relationship. What do we mean by it? Do we mean that we have an independent relationship and we say what we think or do we mean we just abjectly go wherever America goes because we think that puts us in the big league. And I think that was it and it's a tragedy. That is the tragedy."

She is absolutely right. Being an ally does not mean blindly following, right or wrong.

By the way, Short resigned in protest of the invasion. A politician with a conscience. I love this woman.

Sometimes our friends our wrong and when they are, it’s our responsibility to stand up and tell them ‘no.’

Meanwhile, outside the hearings, the people who knew what they were talking about more than anybody and had the most authority to speak did so very loudly.

"The Iraqi people are having to live every day with aggression, division, and atrocities," said protester Saba Jaiwad, an Iraqi who opposed the war. "Blair should not be here giving his excuses for the illegal war, he should be taken to The Hague to face criminal charges because he has committed crimes against the Iraqi people."

It’s true. Now we need to have to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld. We have the documentation.

His signature is on virtually every memo authorizing torture. The paper trail is there and the Justice Department could easily prove his guilt as a war criminal beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think they could make a case against Cheney, too.

What are they waiting for?

I think it’s our arrogance as a people.

We want to be untouchable as a country and as much as these men should be in prison, we’re not going to punish them because we want to live in the country that can act with impunity.

Sure, we'll hold the occasional demonstration and protest the actions of those in power, but deep down, we don't really want to punish them.We simply do not hold our leaders responsible for their actions. And, as Ms. Short pointed out, that is tragic.

Perspective

I have bitched and bitched about Obama's impotence and inaction. And for the record, I intend to keep doing so.

Anybody with a super majority who can't even keep the most basic of his promises is inept.

Any President who fucks around with Congress with something like Don't Ask, Don't Tell when he has the power to issue an executive order is disingenuous.

Our war in Afghanistan has escalated on his watch and bled over the border into Pakistan.

His health care reform is a joke. It's a bigger 'fuck you' to poor people than the shit system we have now.

His administration has put me squarely in the 'throwing-my-vote-away-on-third-party-candidate' category.

As a socialist, you have no idea how grating it is to hear conservatives call him a Socialist. Obama is squarely establishment.

Then, I saw this...

...and remembered that as unhappy as I am with our current President, we just came out of eight years of the worst, actually the single worst American President that history has seen so far.

It's true, Obama is as bad as Clinton.

But at least we're not where we were.

Willing To Torture

No surprise, it's now a scientific fact. We just can't goddamn wait to torture people.



A Psychology Professor at Santa Clara University has repeated the Milgram Experiment of the sixties. Remember that?

That was where the subject was told to push a button that would shock a person for every wrong answer they gave to a test.

The goal of the experiment was to find out whether people were willing to go against their conscience and inflict pain on another person because they were told to.

Of course they were.

At 150 Volts, the subject hears reactions like, “My heart is starting to bother me,” and “Let me out.”

At this point, 70 percent of the subjects were willing to continue administering the shocks.

In my opinion, and the good professor said this too, the difference between the seven and the three was accountability.

If you're being told to do something, you can defer the responsibility. You're not the bad guy.

It was a test. The scientist told me to do it. The University told me to do it. It's a study. It must be okay. I'm just a guy pushing the buttons. Surely the people running the test know better than I do.

Only three out of ten will say, "No. I'm ultimately accountable for what I do and fuck you but no."

The study ended just before the electricity reached lethal levels because the administrators just didn't want to know what percent of the population at large was willing to kill somebody just because they were told to.

Start with an unfamiliar and surreal situation, like war and throw in amoral, sociopathic leadership.

Then the bad behavior increases in small increments. Before you know it, you have a generation of monsters.

This sheds very sad light on situations like Abu Grahaib, what continues to happen at Guantanamo Bay, and the actions of the seven sexual predators with badges and guns working for Sheriff Tim Swanson of Stark County, Ohio.

This explains how police officers can act like sociopaths and then go home, play with their kids and sleep like babies at night.

When the atrocities you commit are 'on the clock,' there is disassociation. You're not the one doing it. It's your job and you're just a tool.

Just like the people in the study pushing the button. It's just how the test is run. Surely they wouldn't have you shocking people while they screamed and sobbed for help if they didn't know that it was all okay.

That responsibility, the determining between right and wrong belongs to those above us, not to us ordinary people. That's the dangerous mindset that we have been lulled into.

That is what religion, our education system and our government have drilled into us. There are rules that we follow even if it means ignoring our conscience.

And don't forget human nature. We have to come to terms with the fact that each of us, every single puppy-loving, 'i'-dotting-with-a-heart, cutie pie, 'Hello Kittie' backpack wearing, outwardly innocent, quilted flowered Bible cover toting one of us has a sadistic streak. Without exception.

Science prov es it. 70 percent of the population are willing to torture someone else.

Ultimately, the people who consider themselves accountable for their actions are more likely to do what is right.

But those who blame the situation or their circumstances, making it easy to defer that responsibility, can and do commit abuses. Orders or no, we do what we do. And we are responsible.

And if anyone cares, I'm listening to:

Our Definition of Spreading Democracy

Pictures of the New Iraq:

Thank God we ousted an oppressive monster so the people of Iraq could be free.

I know you can't hear the tone of my voice, but I'm being mother-humping, jesus-banging sarcastic.