Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking thousands of classified messages to Wikileaks, has been held in solitary confinement under conditions that approach, if not satisfy, the definition of torture. Read a description of his conditions on Alternet and ponder what kind of a chief executive would condone what amounts to torture, especially after having been elected by the people as a decent, ethical alternative to the moral dwarfs that ran the White House for the previous eight years. It recalls the treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus after having been convicted of treason in 1894 on fabricated evidence by a kangaroo military court.

Manning may have indeed leaked the classified information to Wikileaks, but under the U. S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his confinement, particularly when he has not been convicted and sentenced, is illegal if it amounts to torture.

Tags: Bradley Manning, prison, Solitary confinement

I am speechless and typeless. Read;

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-shaming-of-america-2115111.html

Tags: Wilileaks

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
           neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse
           you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
           despitefully use you, and persecute you;

—Matthew 5:43-4 (Authorized Version)

The Iraq War is a moral black hole. It’s there, it won’t go away, it’s dangerous, and it has become virtually invisible. Words go in, nothing comes out. Anyone who touches upon it suddenly becomes a non-person because the ears that should be listening dare not listen lest they themselves be drawn into the abyss.

Our Lord commanded us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us.

Praying for one’s enemies is easy. Forgiving those who unjustly injure us is easy. It often gives us a sense of moral superiority over those with power over us.

Praying for those we have injured—our victims—that is a different matter. Praying for somebody means, at the least, wishing them well. It is quite a trick to oppress someone and at the same time wish them well. Praying for one’s victims (rather than someone else’s victims) tends to shove our own offenses back into our teeth. Until we stop hurting people our prayers on their behalf mean nothing. In fact, they stink.

It recalls the scene on the stairs in which Hamlet forgoes stabbing a praying King Claudius because doing so in the middle of his prayers might send him to Heaven, rather than Hell, where he belongs. Unknown to Hamlet, however, King Claudius has just uttered a desperate and hopeless soliloquy:


O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murther! …

My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murther’?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murther-
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law; but ‘tis not so above.
There is no shuffling; there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? What rests?
Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it when one cannot repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engag’d! Help, angels! Make assay.
Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!
All may be well. He kneels.

—Hamlet, Act III,Scene iii

Because he was still benefiting from the crime that he committed Claudius could not find forgiveness.

We might as well acknowledge that even though we personally may not be profiting from the war and occupation in Iraq, some of the most powerful corporations and individuals in the world are profiting handsomely. After the administration announced that it would invade Iraq, members of the administration were openly holding seminars in Washington DC and other locations, explaining to potential contractors how to board the gravy train of war contracting. There was simply no question that the motive for war was economic—that the Bush administration and the contractors involved were bent on plundering both the American taxpayer and the unfortunate Iraqis. Joseph Stiglitz, economist and Nobel laureate, has estimated that the war will cost the American people upwards of $3 trillion. The cost to the Iraqi people in innocent lives, undeserved suffering, and massive economic loss, is incalculable.

Like Claudius, many of us are profiting either directly or indirectly from the war and occupation. So with Claudius, our unspoken song is “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below./Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Ibid.

May one be pardoned and retain the offense?

Because Claudius’s victim, the elder Hamlet, was his brother—by all accounts, a good king and a virtuous man—Claudius could not solve his moral problem with the usual rationalizations.

Our government invariably seeks to justify its aggression by demonizing the enemy (the victim), whom we are conditioned to perceive as unfathomably evil and utterly unworthy of our prayers. If we believe the enemy is a devil, it follows that prayers for the enemy are not only unnecessary, but actually ineffective, since we have already let ourselves become convinced that the enemy is an inferior sort of human being, left behind by evolution, led astray by evil doctrine, or stunted by some other unfortunate circumstances that are no fault of ours.

Unlike Claudius, who knew his brother well, most of us have little or no personal knowledge of Iraq or its inhabitants. It is therefore easy to demonize the “enemy” through psychological projection, a pathology in which we literally project parts of our own dark side onto people whom we have never met and of whom we know virtually nothing. Most of the faults we attribute to Iraqis actually come from deep within our own individual and collective psyches.

If the victims happened to have given us civilization, as the Iraqis have done, we have another mental trick: the imperial fantasy that our intentions are honorable and that our war of aggression and subsequent occupation is just what the victim needs, a character and civilization-building treatment for which he will one day thank us. The victim, so goes the story, is like a child that needs the discipline of military and colonial occupation, or else he will destroy himself in an orgy of cannibalism, civil strife, communism, tribalism, nationalism, Islamism, terrorism, or whatever ism seems appropriate—in the opinion of the propaganda Pooh-Bahs—to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise unbelievable, if not preposterous, official narrative.

Those who refuse to accept these rationalization can either take refuge in silence or speak the truth to power, with all its unpleasant personal consequences. It is this profound moral and spiritual conundrum that has led to the pervasive silence in the pulpit. The occupation of Iraq has not even been mentioned in my church in months, and I suspect that this tacit agreement to remain silent holds wherever the war is not being actively promoted.

If we pray for our victims, we must think the unthinkable. We must confront our own evil—our lack of concern, our greed and even our viciousness. Officially, this is impossible. Because our intentions are noble, what we are doing is selfless and good. It is we who are making the sacrifice, not the people of Iraq. So goes the official story.

So we sit mute and listen to the Sounds of Silence coming from the pulpit.

God help us.

Should the Department of Justice or a special prosecutor prosecute the Bush administration officials responsible for the authorization of torture? David Corn explores the problems in a thoughtful article on the Mother Jones web site.

The question is “What do we want?” Do we want to know what really happened, or do we want convictions? We may not be able to get both.

As Corn points out, Patrick Fitzgerald unearthed far more wrongdoing than he was able to disclose, due to the rules and regulations that control the prosecutor’s office. Since he concluded that he did not have enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rove, Chaney and a number of other officials were guilty of crimes, the evidence he had collected could not be disclosed. His hands were tied.

In other words, if the Obama administration prosecutes we may get neither truth nor convictions.

Congressional hearings and even independent commissions have their weaknesses, too. The members of the 9/11 Commission were clearly chosen to favor the government’s version of events and to ignore evidence that conflicted with the that version.

Congressional hearings can turn into three-ring circuses when the stakes are high and one party feels threatened. When members of both parties are compromised, the truth will never emerge.

As I mentioned the other day, Obama’s decision to release the secret memos authorizing torture was most likely designed to test the level of outrage among the public, and thus enable him to gauge the support that he would receive were he to prosecute.

Prosecuting the previous administration carries serious political risks, not the least of which is that the Supreme Court could declare the president immune from prosecution for acts taken in his capacity as commander-in-chief on matters of national security. If you think this is far-fetched, consider that in 2000 the court , on specious legal grounds, stopped the vote recount in Florida and thus determined the outcome of the presidential election in favor of George Bush. The justices appointed since then, having been ideologically vetted before being nominated by Bush and confirmed by a Republican Senate, have not demonstrated that they would have any more scruples about stretching the Constitution to protect Bush and Cheney from prosecution.

It’s a tough question. The only workable solution may be truth and reconciliation commissions modeled partially after South Africa. Persons who are willing to appear before a commission and confess their crimes get a break, ranging from amnesty in the least serious cases, to a reduced sentence in the more heinous ones.

There are serious moral and legal problems inherent with truth commissions, however. As a general proposition, persons who have abused the public trust should not be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions, especially when their misdeeds have resulted in the death and suffering of so many innocent persons. To persuade guilty parties to submit to the commissions, the government must be willing to back up such commissions by prosecuting those who either refuse to appear, perjure themselves, or hold back from telling the entire truth.

Individuals without remorse would have to face the full force of the criminal law. This would probably involve, at the very least, putting Dick Cheney on trial, as he is unlikely to ever admit wrongdoing.

Tags: Special Prosectutor, Ken Starr, Lawrence Walsh, Patrick Fitzgerald

A long time ago, in a nation that has almost disappeared, I received a 2 CD set named “The Fire Next Time”. It was before the U. S. invasion of Iraq. In going through my collection of CDs I came across it and played it again. The first CD is the narration of the modern history of Iraq. The second CD is the music alone

It was profoundly moving. The destruction and suffering that this nation had already wreaked upon the unfortunate people of Iraq by 2001 was only the prelude to the unspeakable horrors we have visited upon them since then.

The CD set is still available from the website, which has moved.

THE FIRE THIS TIME

The New York Times reported Wednesday that our president-elect is now talking about withdrawing combat troops for Iraq within 16 months, “... with the understanding that it might be necessary—likely to be necessary—to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq.” (I haven’t the slightest idea what “potential training,” means within the context—or in any context—and would appreciate some enlightenment if a reader would like to comment. I suspect it didn’t mean anything, but served as a placeholder until his mind could catch up.)

We are now seeing in the result of an intense and concerted effort by the established agencies of the federal government, particularly the Pentagon, to infuse into the head of the incoming president and his closest advisors the worldview held by the permanent government. It is an indoctrination difficult to resist, in no small part because much of it is classified, which limits the ability of the president to tap sources of information outside the security establishment. George Bush, whose lack of curiosity has been commented on for many years, apparently saw little reason to question the official worldview of the neocons, even when it became obvious that much of their worldview was pure fantasy.

But for a president to properly do his job, he must be able to develop his own sources of information outside of the almost hermetic cocoon that is designed to envelop and protect him, not only from physical harm, but from whatever might interfere with the official streams of intelligence that are intended to reach the president thoroughly vetted. We know from bitter experience, however, that a president who relies exclusively on official intelligence places himself at the mercy of those who supply the intelligence, and that intelligence can far too often be filtered in such a way that his decisions are flawed, or even disastrous. A president must have independent sources of intelligence.

A president requires independent intelligence for two reasons: first, it gives him an accurate idea of how well his advisors and the agencies charged with gathering and vetting intelligence are performing. Barring an intelligence disaster, the only way to test one’s intelligence sources is with other sources of intelligence. Roosevelt often surprised his closest advisors with information of which they had just come to inform him. His friends around the nation and the world privately fed him news on a daily basis.

Second, government intelligence agencies are not infallible; they have institutional blind spots, sometimes for political reasons (Douglas Feith is a classic example), and sometimes for structural reasons, such as when management simply doesn’t believe a matter is important when it is actually critical. And then there is the unavoidable human tendency to tell the ruler what the speaker thinks the ruler wants to hear. An informal intelligence network can quietly inform the emperor about his new clothes when he might otherwise find out too late.

Owing to the ability of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI to monitor communications worldwide, it has become considerably more difficult for any president to maintain unofficial communication with his own informal intelligence sources, but somehow the president must find a way. His advisors will be hesitant to shade the truth when they know he has ways of checking what they tell him, and thus his decisions are more likely to be based on reality.

Tags: Roosevelt, NSA, CIA, FBI, bush, intelligence, president

It pained me last night that Obama was quoted as saying that the surge has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. That’s the message of the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the mainstream media who haven’t bothered to investigate.

Project Censored has helped to pull back the curtain on the awful truth about the invasion and occupation by listing as the Number One censored storie for 2009: Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation:

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

As a result, the flow of refugees has not abated. Iraq is a hellhole:

Iraqis’ attempts to escape the violence have resulted in a refugee crisis of mammoth proportion. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, in 2007 almost 5 million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country, the vast majority of which had fled since 2003. Over 2.4 million vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq, up to 1.5 million were living in Syria, and over 1 million refugees were inhabiting Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and Gulf States. Iraq’s refugees, increasing by an average of almost 100,000 every month, have no legal work options in most host states and provinces and are increasingly desperate.

Yet more Iraqis continue to flee their homes than the numbers returning, despite official claims to the contrary. Thousands fleeing say security is as bad as ever, and that to return would be to accept death. Most of those who return are subsequently displaced again.

Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail quote an Iraqi engineer now working at a restaurant in Damascus, “Return to Iraq? There is no Iraq to return to, my friend. Iraq only exists in our dreams and memories.”

Eventually the truth will rise up and hit us in the face. That time is coming.

While it may be true that the Republicans have been reading Sun Tzu for election strategy, it is equally obvious that Bush and Cheney have not read it in connection with the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Throughout The Art of War, Sun Tzu manifests appreciation for the awsome costs of military engagement. He especially warns against a prolonged war, which brings about the ruin of a nation.

Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished. (II:10)

* * *

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue." (II: 2-4)