Haiku Politics

In today's Boston Globe, Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese have written a column that makes a compelling case for impeaching Bush and Cheney over their fabricated pretexts justifying war with Iraq.

Because of the constitutional laws of succession, removing Bush by impeachment will not result in the neocons being ousted from power. But it would establish at least some principle of justice and accountability for those at the top who led us into this unnecessary war. Of course, in the real world, impeachment will never take place, for the obvious reason that the Republicans control Congress. But at the very least, the simple act of talking about this matter publicly serves as an important way of keep the subject of Bush's lies in the national discourse. It will continue to remind the public of Bush's crimes and prevent him from changing the subject. And it will help us hold Bush accountable for future actions in the remaining years of his Presidency.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments

Dick Cheney, in response to the criticisms that Amnesty International leveled against the US for human rights violations, had this to say: "I think the fact of the matter is the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world."

This vision of the US as the great liberator is, of course, the standard dogma of the American civic religion, and it is what we are all taught in American schools, in the news media, and by politicians throughout our lives. The reality is something quite different. Ask the citizens of Chile about what happened to them in 1973, when their democracy was overthrown with the help of the CIA and replaced by a brutal dictatorship. Ask the citizens of Guatemala in 1954, or in Iran in 1953, whose democracies suffered a similar fate--once again, at the hands of the CIA. Ask the citizens of Nicaragua whose families and friends were murdered by the US-supported Contra terrorists in the 1980s. Ask the citizens of El Salvador, whose families and friends were murdered by the US-supported death squads there. Ask the citizens of various other brutal dictatorships through history that have been supported by the US government in the pursuit of American corporate interests--from Franco's fascist dictatorship in Spain, to the current brutal dictatorship in Uzbekistan, whose ruler has been known to boil alive his political opponents.

Cheney's claims about the human rights record of the United States in the last century are, of course, false, but they serve as convenient falsehoods. We all know that the current Bush regime supports "democracy" as long as the results give Bush what he wants, as long as they serve US corporate interests. As soon as any government, anywhere in the world, democratically seeks to defy US foreign policy, then suddenly Bush and Cheney sing a different tune. Just ask the citizens of Venezuela, whose democratic government was almost overthrown by a US-supported coup in 2002.

Amnesty International is a respected human rights organization, one that has one a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts, and which has demonstrated ideological neutrality in its criticisms of any nation that violates human rights. The fact that Bush, Cheney, and their right wing cohorts in the news media (such as Bill O'Reilly) have now set their sights on Amnesty International and attacked its credibility is only par for the course for the Right. One thing that is never tolerated in the dominant American political culture, as defined by the US Right, is any criticism whatsoever of the US government or its foreign policy. The US (or at least the Bush regime), according to the Right Wing mind set, is above reproach. Nothing the US ever does is wrong, and anyone who dares to introduce any facts into this discussion that suggest otherwise are simply "anti-American" or "America haters". This is a typical smear tactic, which avoids discussing the substance of the specific charges and instead relies on ad hominem attacks to divert the discussion.

It is thus hardly surprising that, when a credible human rights organization points out that the US is violating human rights somewhere, the Bush regime and his loyal army of right wing pundits would try to discredit the credibility of that organization. Smear tactics are an essential element of the Right Wing arsenal of rhetorical weapons.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

Back in the late 1980s, I had a membership in the human rights organization Amnesty International. I sent them money, I had a little AI bumper sticker on my car, and I participated in some of their letter writing campaigns. AI is, of course, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world, having won a Nobel Prize for its efforts, and having established its reputation for scrupulous fairness in criticizing any nation anywhere when it violates human rights or engages in torture. For someone like me who rarely feels motivated to get involved in organized activism, I suppose that my involvement with their letter writing campaigns was the perfect sort of volunteer activity, since it was essentially solitary; I could quietly, in the comfort of my home, write my letters to human rights abusers overseas, without actually participating in any sort of organizational work.

I had forgotten about my involvement with AI until just now, as I reflect on this year's most recent human rights report by Amnesty International. What is interesting about this report is how much it singles out the United States for criticism. The AI Secretary General's forward to this report, which cites the "assault on fundamental values that is shaking the human rights world," pointedly states that "nowhere has this been more damaging than in the efforts by the US administration to weaken the absolute ban on torture."

Here is a pertinent section of that document:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to “re-define” torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding “ghost detainees” (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity. From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and “counter-terrorism”.

These are powerful words, and serve as a stinging rebuke to the Bush regime. Not that it will make any difference in Bush's policies. Bush has never cared about international outrage over anything he has ever done, and he certainly won't do so this time either. It is worth remembering that Alberto Gonzalez, Bush's Attorney General, once described some of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete", so we know already where Bush stands on the principles of human rights.

AI is not, by the way, the only human rights organization that has severely criticized the Bush regime for its actions. The organization Human Rights Watch, for example, has been giving extensive coverage to this matter. One of the pages on their web site gives considerable coverage to the problem of Guantanamo detainees. Included on that page is a link to an article in which HRW expressed its opposition to Gonzalez as Attorney General. Also interesting is its article on the subject of US interrogators engaging in the religious humiliation of Moslem detainees.

The Bush regime managed to strong arm Newsweek into retracting its story about the desecration of the Koran by US interrogators (there's freedom of the press for you--when the US government can coerce a major news magazine into retracting a story that the government doesn't like), but, in fact, there is overwhelming evidence that this sort of thing has indeed been happening. For example, according to this article by the Chicago Tribune,

Prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility told FBI interviewers in 2002 and 2003 that guards repeatedly desecrated the Koran and that perceived abuses of the Muslim holy book triggered unrest at the prison as well as possible suicide attempts, government documents showed Wednesday.

The allegations include an incident in which guards "flushed a Koran in the toilet," the FBI documents show. In another incident, a detainee refused to cooperate with investigators because of an interrogator allegedly "humiliating the Koran" while questioning another inmate.

The documents, released as part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to shed light on U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, parallel allegations of Koran desecration by prisoners in civil lawsuits against U.S. authorities and in interviews with news organizations.

The Chicago Tribune reported last week that the International Committee of the Red Cross had heard similar accounts from detainees that it deemed credible. An ICRC spokesman told the Tribune that its confidential reports to the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003 included allegations that U.S. personnel had mishandled Korans.

The Human Rights Watch article on this subject reports:

Human Rights Watch said that the dispute over the retracted allegations in Newsweek that U.S. interrogators had desecrated a Koran at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has overshadowed the fact that religious humiliation of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere has been widespread.

“In detention centers around the world, the United States has been humiliating Muslim prisoners by offending their religious beliefs,” said Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch.

On December 2, 2002, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized a list of techniques for interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo, which included “removal of all comfort items (including religious items),” “forced grooming (shaving of facial hair, etc.),” and “removal of clothing.” Each of these practices is considered offensive to many Muslims. These techniques were later applied in Afghanistan and Iraq as well.

The purpose of these techniques, Human Rights Watch said, is to inflict humiliation on detainees, which is strictly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

Strictly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions or not, the Bush regime clearly doesn't care. Any provision of those Conventions that Bush doesn't care to obey can simply be dismissed as "quaint" and "obsolete".

It is good to know that there are human rights organizations that will call Bush to task for his gross violations of human rights. Even if we can't prevent Bush from doing what he does, history will at least be able to judge him for his actions, and history will neither forget nor forgive him.

Posted by The Haikuist at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

Last week the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the FBI regarding its continued practice of spying on political dissidents. This represents the continuation of an issue that stretches back at least to November, 2003, when it was revealed that, as a matter of official policy, the FBI was spying on political activists. In response to this, the ACLU has filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests concerning this matter; however, the FBI has thus far largely stonewalled, and has in fact illegally refused to fully comply with many of these requests. At the same time, the Washington Post reported that the FBI has been conducting what it calls "pretext interviews" of left wing activists, in which individuals have been subjected to questioning, for no reason other than their political affiliation.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), it was also revealed last week that the Bush regime and its allies in the Senate are proposing legislation that would give the FBI the power to obtain any business records any time it wants to, without even needing to go through a judge. This removal of a judicial check against a broad police authority of the Federal Government to spy on people at will represents yet another step in a long trend of restrictions on human rights by the Bush regime, going back to the USA Patriot Act.

In the face of all of this, the ACLU has created a six question quiz to help you determine whether it is likely that the FBI has a file on you. I scored four out six. Two of those questions were for just speaking out vocally against US policies and for attending an antiwar demonstration.

It is always interesting to hear Bush pay lip service to the promotion of "democracy" in other countries. He presumptuously claims to be some sort of authority on this matter. Yet his own record on human rights and democracy is, quite clearly, anything but admirable. He only believes in "democracy" if and when it produces the results he seeks. If democracy doesn't go the way he wants, he seeks to overturn the results. Let us remember that Bush supported the 2002 aborted coup attempt against the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Let us also remember his role in the 2004 coup against the democratically elected government of Haiti. For Bush, democracy is a sham, a word that he throws around with any meaning whatsoever.

Of course, there is democracy as it relates to free elections, and then there are the general principles of human rights. Aside from FBI spying on dissidents mentioned above, we see a whole broad range of human rights violations taking place under the Bush regime. We see indefinite arrests and detentions in places like Guatanamo. We see dissidents and antiwar activists being put on no-fly lists. We see torture in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have an Attorney General who once called some of the provisions of the the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete".

However, it would be easy to blame all of this on Bush and his fellow neocons alone. It would also be easy to overreact and say that all of these human rights violations that we see in the US mean that we are on the road to fascism. But I believe, we have to be careful about how we interpret all of this. It would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it is all about getting the neocons out of power at all costs, which would more or less mean nothing other than supporting the Democrats. The problem is that the Democrats are very much complicit in this whole sordid mess. It is hard not to forget that the Senate Democrats voted almost unanimously (with only a single dissenting vote) for the USA Patriot Act. Yes, that includes John Kerry. That also includes Hilary Clinton, whom many liberals see as their salvation in 2008. I say, God save us from Hilary Clinton. (Clinton and Kerry also both voted for Bush's war in Iraq. Kerry and Clinton epitomize, in my view, everything that is wrong with the Democrats).

I don' t think the diminishing human rights situation in the US means that we are headed down the road to fascism, first and foremost because the ruling class in American society doesn't need to resort to such a brutal, nasty solution in order to maintain power. Instead, as long as the US maintains its veneer of democracy, with the semblance of competitive elections, the essentially corrupt and undemocratic core of American politics will be sufficiently masked such that the ruling class will maintain its hold on legitimacy.

The problems with the US political system are myriad. First of all, the US is hopelessly mired in a 18th century constitutional paradigm. We don't have a genuinely democratic method of electing a President (and the failings of this creaky mechanism led, ultimately, to the 2000 coup d'etat by Bush.) The electoral college is a relic of the slave owning era, and has no place in any democratic society. Our simple first-past-the-post electoral system for all offices is also a relic of a bygone era. More democratic methods of selecting representatives, such as instant runoff voting or proportional representation, are largely missing in the US (we do have instant runoff voting for local elections in San Francisco, but that is the exception). And what did the Democratic Party do in the four years after the debacle of 2000, which cost them the Presidency, to reform the electoral system, to make it more democratic? Nothing. Instead, they spent much effort in the 2004 election trying to keep third party candidates off the ballot. Yet, curiously, because of technicalities in ballot rules in Illinois, George Bush was going to be absent from the Illinois ballot until Democrats agreed to change the rules in that state. Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot, but they changed the rules to put George Bush on the ballot. What does that tell you? We have the case where the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans take care of their own, while excluding alternative voices from the electoral process.

Meanwhile, thanks to skillful Congressional redistricting, there are almost no competitive elections for the House of Representatives anymore. Virtually all members of Congress are thus guaranteed almost certain re-election, making a mockery of the supposedly "democratic" process of 2-year elections. And on top of everything else, the corporate controlled news media reveals very little and questions even less, prefering to focus endlessly on things like runaway brides and Michael Jackson rather than things of substance, such as that a recently-revealed secret British intellgence memo revealed that Bush had decided to go to war with Iraq in mid-2002 and was then engaged in finding a pretext to justify it.

At every step of the way, alternative voices are excluded from the political process, thus making a sham of the elections in the US. Both major parties are in bed with corporate America. Both parties have been cheerleaders for globalization. (For an example from the previous President, just consider that the Clinton administration had close ties with Monsanto and played a major role in promoting Monstanto's genetically engineered food technologies overseas).

And if that isn't enough to make a mockery of the electoral process in the US, we have the almost certain presence of electoral fraud in the 2004 election. The Survey Access Center, a statistical research department at UC Berkeley, concluded after the election last year that there was almost 99% certainty of electronic voting machine fraud in Florida benefiting Bush.

All of this means that elections in the US are meaningless, but they server a useful purpose. They give the corrupt political and economic system of the US the illusion of being a democracy. Meanwhile, the two ruling parties continue their rightward dance, with the neocons pulling the country ever rightward, and the compliant Democrats willingly tagging along.

In today's New York Times, even columnist Paul Krugman admitted that there was a problem, writing:

At a gala dinner in his honor, Tom DeLay cited his party's recent achievements: "bankruptcy reform, class-action reform, energy, border security, repealing the death tax." All of these measures are either irrelevant to or actively hostile to the economic security of working Americans.

Yet as Mr. DeLay boasted, many Democratic members of Congress also voted in support of these measures. In so doing, they undermined their party's ability to claim that it stands for something different.

Seeing that there is so little difference between the parties at the Federal level, Krugman then asks the question, "So where will change come from?" His answer reflects his own liberalism. What he seeks isn't radical change, but rather just a resurgence in the very old-style reform-minded liberalism which (in rejecting radical change and seeking only to reform the existing system) sowed the seeds of its own destruction and left us with the political mess that we are in today. He still has faith in our political system, hoping that this new impetus for reform will somehow emerge out of state politics.

Krugman illustrates the point that many Americans, including those who detest Bush, still have faith in the US political system, its political institutions, or its political parties. But we have to ask ourselves--if one of the worst Presidents in US history, whose agenda is largely rejected by most Americans, somehow manages to finagle a second term, doesn't that tell us that something is horribly wrong with our political and economic system?

Posted by The Haikuist at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

"America has a message for the nations of the world. If you harbor terrorists, you are terrorists." -- George Bush

The above quote is fascinating in light of recent news events. An international terrorist named Luis Posada recently entered the United States illegally and hung out for a couple of months. He is wanted by the Venezuelan government in connection with the bombing of a Cuban airliner back in 1976. You'd think that the United States, which has some firsthand experience with terrorism committed with an airliner, might have immediately taken action against this terrorist, especially since it wasn't exactly a secret that he was in the country. But, funnily enough, when the news first broke that he was hiding out now in the United States, the State Department denied it. In fact, they claimed that this charge was "completely manufactured".

Yet, somehow, this person who the State Department insisted was not in the United States got arrested recently--you guessed it--being in the United States illegally. Go figure.

Why all this subterfuge? Why was the State Department doing nothing but sitting on its hands while this terrorist roamed freely in the US? Why did this terrorist even think that he could safely hide out the United States? Well, my friends, the answer is simple. You see, Posada is what the Bushites consider a good terrorist. It doesn't matter if you kill civilians, it doesn't matter if you blow up airplanes--as long as you are a right wing terrorist, that's okay in the neocon philosophy. Normally, when a suspected international terrorist enters the United States, he is immediately whisked away to some other country to be tried or tortured or whatever the destination government feels like doing. Case in point: Maher Ahar. He was a Syrian-born Canadian who was in the US in 2002, and because of his alleged ties to al-Qaeda, he was sent immediately--not to his home in Canada, but to Syria--hardly a friend of the US, but it is a government where he could be subjected to torture. (This is reminiscent of the frequent Bush regime policy of "rendition", where prisoners are sent off to countries that practice torture, thus allowing a sort of torture by proxy, and allowing Bush to export the acts of torture while claiming to wash his hands of the matter himself.)

Nothing like that happened in the case of Posada, who has now been arrested, and the US government is trying to figure out how to handle him. One thing is certain--they are treating him with kid gloves.

There is no doubt, by the way, that Posada is a terrorist. An article from Canada's National Post points out,

Posada has since admitted, and later denied, to orchestrating the bombing of Havana tourist hotels in 1997 that killed one person...Though declassified FBI reports link Posada to the Cuban airliner bombing, he has long been viewed by the U.S. government as a "freedom fighter" because of his vigorous opposition to Castro's Communist regime....

If Posada was a terrorist, the logic seemed to go, at least he was America's kind of terrorist.

So what is the difference, in Bush's mind, between, say, Mohamed Atta, whose act of terrorism involved a airplanes, and Luis Posada? Answer that question, and you will go a long way towards understanding the mentality of the ostensible Bush policy on terrorism. It is interesting to note that not just the current President, but the entire Bush family has a long association with Posada's band of terrorists. The above mentioned article points out that:

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush pardoned Orlando Bosch, Posada's alleged co-conspirator in the Cuban airliner bombing, who had snuck into the U.S. illegally three years earlier.

The elder Bush intervened against the advice of the Justice department, after interventions from his son Jeb Bush, who was then working for Republican congresswoman and Cuban exile Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Bush's policy on terrorism has a converse side. To borrow a metaphor from the world of medicine, the Posada case is an example of a false negative--he is a terrorist who the Bushites are reluctant to identify as such. There is also the case of the false positive--a political activist who is not a terrorist, but whose politics are left wing, and thus opposed by Bush, and who is consequently banned from the US from entering solely because of his or her politics. The most convenient way to do this is to brand them a "terrorist", without substantiation or justification.

We saw this back in March, the State Department denied a visa to Dora Maria Tellez, who had been a leader of the army that overthrew Nicaraguan dictatorship of Somoza. Being in an army that overthrew a dictator got her labeled as a "terrorist" by the State Department, a charge which was patently ridiculous and, obviously, just a cover for an ideologically motivated act of repression. As an article in the UK newspaper the Guardian put it,

Last year Ms Tellez, now a historian, was appointed as the Robert F Kennedy visiting professor in Latin American studies in the divinity department at Harvard, a post which is shared with the Rockefeller Centre for Latin American Studies. She was due to start teaching students this spring.

The US state department has told her she is ineligible because of involvement in "terrorist acts". A spokesman for the department confirmed yesterday that she had been denied a visa under a section making those who had been involved in terrorist acts ineligible. He said he could not comment further on the reasons for the ban.

"I have no idea why they are refusing me a visa," said Ms Tellez from her home in Managua yesterday. "I have been in the US many times before - on holidays, at conferences, on official business."

A number of academics and writers are protesting against the ban. "It is absurd," said Gioconda Belli, the Nicaraguan writer who was also an active member of the Sandinistas and is now based in Los Angeles. "Dora Maria is an outstanding woman who fought against a dictatorship. If fighting against tyranny is 'terrorism' how does the United States justify the invasion of Iraq? It is an insult."

Of course, Gioconda Belli's rhetorical question about how the United States can justify the invasion of Iraq is itself telling, since there is no justification for that invasion. But then, you knew that.

Of course, it's early in the game to know how the Posada case will play itself out. I suppose it is possible that Bush may somehow eventually bow to international pressure on this issue and extradite Posada to Venezuela, where he is wanted in connection with the airliner bombing. If he does so, however, it will have taken place only after a snail's pace of activity, hand wringing and reluctance to do anything at all. Bush has already shown where his sympathies lie. He has shown that he doesn't treat all terrorists the same way. As pointed out above, whereas his regime didn't hesitate to send a suspected terrorist to Syria without delay, his State Department is currently taking its time in deciding what to do about Posada. There are reports that Bush is considering some way of giving Posada a "soft landing" by sending him somewhere other than Venezuela, which, I might add, has an extradition treaty with the United States and thus has every right to ask for Posada. Funny how Maher Ahar wasn't given a "soft landing" when he was sent to Syria, possibly to face torture. Whether they end up doing that for Posada or not, the very fact that the State Department would even consider such a thing speaks volumes. Really, what is there to consider?

It is valuable to remember that when Bush uses words like "democracy" or "terrorism", he uses them selectively and in ways that only serve to advance his own agenda. Bush does not really believe in democracy, and his definition of terrorism is skewed to mean essentially whatever he wants it to mean.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments