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Acting with impunity and
wielding the moral authority of pedophiles, Bush and his fellow
Neocons have decimated what was left of America's good name while
severely crippling our nation’s capacity for advancing and
protecting human rights. Setting a sanguineous course in their
reckless pursuit of wealth and power, they have afflicted humankind
with their perverse agenda. With alarming consistency, these
sociopaths have demonstrated their utter disregard for humanity and
the well-being of our planet.
While the US has a
history of imperialism, deep cruelty, and mass murder, including
slaughtering one million civilians in the conquest of the
Philippines, legalizing the institution of slavery, and committing
the Native American genocide, by World War II America had arguably
begun to demonstrate a reasonable level of commitment to
humanitarian ideals. While it was a long, painful process,
Abolitionists, Women Suffragists, Populists, Labor Activists, Civil
Rights Protestors, and the like forced the United States to strive
for truly noble causes. From the end of World War II up until the
1960's, one could reasonably conclude that the nation primarily
responsible for the defeat of militaristic fascism in both Europe
and Asia had earned a degree of moral authority, in spite of its
remaining flaws.
Abandon all
hope, ye who enter here…
Vietnam marked the
beginning of America's descent into a fetid moral sewer,
high-lighted (or more appropriately low-lighted) by the deaths of
3,000,000 Vietnamese civilians and the devastating after effects of
Agent Orange (compliments of Monsanto). America's light as a beacon
of hope for humanity was rapidly extinguished. Ignoring Eisenhower's
prescient warning, his successors chose the sword over the plowshare
repeatedly. Funneling outrageous percentages of our precious
resources into the coffers of the bloated and malevolent military
industrial complex, they carried out murderous agendas through
direct military intervention, covert CIA operations, and proxies
like the Shah of Iran. Sadly, under the last 7-8 presidencies,
Democrat and Republican alike, the United States government has
evolved into the most powerful terrorist organization on the planet.
Bush and his criminal
cohorts have assured US victory in its race to the bottom. Dropping
the cloak of altruism, they have come out of the closet and revealed
their wicked proclivities. In openly murdering innocent civilians
and torturing suspected terrorists under the pretenses of
"pre-emptive" military action and the nebulous “War on
Terror”, Israel’s Neocon operatives have secured America's place
in the pantheon of egregious violators of human rights. Despite
having stolen the last two elections, these depraved war criminals
continue to act in the name of the American people as they
repeatedly urinate and defecate on virtually everything that was
truly virtuous in our nation.
Perhaps torture
and murder are the values of this “Christian nation”…
Human Rights First
recently released a particularly damning and extremely
well-researched report entitled Command's
Responsibility. I spent several hours perusing
this disturbing analysis of homicides committed by our own
government (to further the cause of “spreading freedom and
democracy”). A shocking number of alleged enemy combatants have
been murdered by the US military and the CIA. Apparently justice
vanishes without a trace if one is of Middle Eastern descent and
suspected of terrorism.
According to the report,
100 such individuals have died since August of 2002. By the US
military’s own admission, 34 of those cases were "suspected
or confirmed homicides". Human Rights First determined that the
"facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh
conditions of detention" in 11 additional cases. The report
also reveals that 8 US detainees "were tortured to death".
How is the "bastion
of human rights" policing itself? "Only 12 detainee deaths
have resulted in punishment of any kind for a US official."
Human Rights First also uncovered the facts that "while the CIA
has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a
criminal charge". The harshest sentence issued for those
responsible for torture-related deaths? An unbelievable slap on the
wrist: five months in jail for homicide! Meanwhile, America's
"justice system" eagerly metes out the death penalty for
murder, mostly to our poor and/or black citizens. Just ask
California’s “Terminator”.
Israeli peace of
mind and oil are worth the annihilation of millions of human beings,
aren’t they?
Still high enough on
hubris to believe the Bush Regime is righteous in passing
judgment and proclaiming that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea form an
"Axis of Evil"? While you are grabbing stones to cast at
this trio for their deplorable records on human rights, consider the
acts of barbarism, terrorism, and deceit the United States has
committed against the first member of the so-called "Axis"
over the last two decades. Since Reagan swaggered into office,
America has been committing genocide
against the Iraqi people in multiple ways. Bear in mind that these
"evil" Iraqis never attacked the United States or its
citizens. Their crime? Ostensibly it was that their tyrannical
leader, Saddam Hussein, needed to be deposed, they possessed weapons
of mass destruction, they were a threat to the United States, and
eventually were complicit in 9/11. But for those who live in
reality, the Iraqis’ true "sins" were possessing vast
quantities of oil, daring to sell their oil for Euros instead of the
almighty Dollar, and posing a "threat" to poor little
Israel, a nation bristling with military firepower and enjoying the
unflinching support of the most powerful military in the history of
humanity.
As an aside, if the
“infinitely benevolent” United States bore the responsibility of
removing Hussein to “liberate the Iraqis”, a question naturally
arises. Which nation will liberate the world from Bush and his team
of despicable Neocons?
A Little
Duplicity, a little hypocrisy…whatever it takes, right?
In 1982, the Reagan
Regime removed Iraq from the State Department's list of nations
sponsoring terrorism. This enabled US corporations, including
members of the military industrial complex, to capitalize on the
abundant profits to be had in the Iraqi marketplace. In 1983, Ronald
Reagan sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet
with US ally Saddam Hussein to "normalize
relations" which had been terminated during the Arab-Israeli
War of 1967. Despite full knowledge that Hussein used chemical
weapons against Iran and on the Kurds of his own nation, the United
States continued its cozy relationship with Saddam. The United
States and its allies in Western Europe provided Hussein with
military helicopters and the precursor agents necessary to
manufacture the very weapons of mass destruction which later became
one of the pretexts for the Neocon invasion of Iraq.
Former US Assistant
Secretary of Defense Noel Koch said this about American support of
Hussein:
"No one
had any doubts about the Iraqis' continued involvement in
terrorism....The real reason was to help them succeed in the war
against Iran."
Confirming the initial
US acts of genocide against the Iraqi people through its support of
Hussein are some quick facts provided by the US
State Department. Bear in mind that Hussein was
an American ally when these atrocities occurred:
-- Documented
chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some
30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
-- Human Rights
Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against
the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000
Kurds.
-- The Iraqi regime
used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in
attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The
largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately
5,000 deaths.
-- 2,000 Kurdish
villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
Leave it to
American ingenuity to find a better way…
Ongoing US support of
Hussein became virtually impossible when he invaded Kuwait, a US
ally which had slant-drilled $14 billion worth of oil from Iraq
(using equipment supplied by a United States corporation). Despite
United States Ambassador April Glaspie's assurances to Hussein that
the US "takes no position" in the conflict (just days
before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait), Bush the elder unleashed the US
military beast on Hussein. The US war machine defeated Iraq by
burying thousands of Iraqi troops alive, employing depleted
uranium, and murdering thousands of retreating
Iraqis during the Basra Road Massacre.
Research
by Beth Osborne Daponte, who ran afoul of
"straight shooter" and then Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney for "inflating" body counts related to the Gulf
War, and who has since been exonerated, published by two scholarly
journals, and awarded a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon
University, demonstrates that 205,500
Iraqis died as a result of the Gulf War. Perhaps
the rulers of the American Empire tired of committing genocide
through their proxy, Hussein. Recasting him as an enemy certainly
increased their capacity to eliminate the Iraqi people.
Keeping our
hands clean while “killing them softly”
Shortly after the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait (on August 6, 1990), the United Nations, under
intense pressure from the US, imposed severe economic sanctions
on Iraq. A year later, with Iraq defeated, the sanctions continued.
From the initial implementation of these draconian measures, the
United States utilized its powerful influence within the UN to
ensure that the sanctions remained in place. The alleged targets of
the sanctions were Saddam Hussein and his government. However, the
people of Iraq were the ones brutally victimized by this twelve year
campaign of economic terror.
According to the UN Food
and Agriculture Organization, by late 1995, over a million Iraqis
(including 567,000 children) had died as a direct result of the
economic sanctions. Based on UNICEF's research, 4,500 children were
dying each month and 825,000 Iraqi children were at risk of
suffering acute malnutrition.
Demonstrating the
Clinton Regime’s complicity in the Iraqi genocide, Secretary of
State Madeline Albright appeared on 60 Minutes in May of 1996. When
asked about reports of the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to
the sanctions, she stated:
"We
think the price is worth it."
Even the Oil for Food
Program implemented in 1996 (to enable Iraq to exchange its oil on
the world market for food and humanitarian supplies) failed to stem
the tide of suffering and death. Supporters of the American Empire
claim that corruption, inefficiency and abuse caused the failure of
this "noble rescue effort". However, despite the fact that
the program did not end the misery for Iraqi civilians (regardless
of the reasons), the US saw to it that the sanctions remained in
place until Bush II launched his illegal invasion. To protest the
ongoing sanctions, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Dennis
Halliday ended his 34 year career with the UN in
1998.
Noam Chomsky has
postulated that the ultimate goal of US foreign policy in Iraq is to
reduce it to a sparsely populated nation, providing the American
Empire with a readily attainable, strategically located piece of
real estate sitting atop one of the largest oil reserves in the
world.
Evidence does exist to
support Chomsky's speculations. Slow
Motion Holocaust by Stephanie Reich and The
Secret Behind the Sanctions by Thomas Nagy both
reference DIA documents which expose US intent with respect to
the economic sanctions:
Reich: A
series of recently revealed Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
reports show that the US attack on Iraq's civilian population was
deliberate and calculated. A DIA
report of January 1991 stated that
sanctions would prevent the import of chemicals and equipment
required for the provision of safe drinking water, resulting in
epidemics. A
second DIA report listed as likely causes of epidemics
in urban areas the fact that US bombing had destroyed
water, electrical and waste disposal systems, and had largely ended
distribution of preventive medicines. The report itemized the
predicted disease outbreaks, highlighting those that strike
children. A third DIA report dated March 1991 explicitly connected
outbreaks of gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases to the war,
stated that children in particular were affected, and noted that
potable water had been reduced to 5% of prewar supplies.
Nagy: Over
the last two years, I've discovered documents of the Defense
Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the
Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions
against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf
War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly
children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.
Patience is not
a Neocon virtue
Once the Bush Regime
seized power, the "slow motion holocaust" was no longer
satisfactory. In enabling or causing 9/11, they had the Pearl Harbor
they needed to launch ”full speed genocide". Spinning
incredibly absurd yarns linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden
while "proving" that Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction (and the means to unleash them), the nefarious ones
whipped the American public into a "patriotic" fervor.
Driven by fear of the "terrorists" and the lies of the
mainstream media, the American public zealously supported the
"Shock and Awe" campaign.
Conveniently, the
Neocons and their media handmaidens neglected to inform the American
public that as a former ally, the US had a degree of complicity in
Saddam's crimes against humanity. They also failed to mention that
our government had committed similar offenses during the Gulf War and
had engaged in the passive mass murder of hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis by strong-arming the UN into maintaining the economic
sanctions for 12 years. Or perhaps by Neocon moral reckoning, two
wrongs do make a right and they decided it would be frivolous to
rehash America's "heroic efforts" to end Hussein's
tyranny.
In December 2005, George
Bush himself publicly admitted that his Regime bears
responsibility for at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths
since the start of the illegal Occupation in 2003. The Lancet
Journal released a study in October 2004 which
concluded that the number was close to 100,000 at that time. A
more recent study referenced in an article in The
Canadian places
the number at 250,000. The Neocons certainly have
accelerated the pace of the Iraqi genocide.
“Collateral
Damage” in the Homeland
Iraqis are not the only
victims of the Empire's most recent efforts to exterminate them.
Americans are reaping the wages of Bush's sins against the Iraqi
people. Over 2300 Americans have died carrying out the twisted
bidding of Rumsfeld and company. Hundreds of billions of wasted US
taxpayer dollars, virtually certain federal bankruptcy, and the
steady asphyxiation of domestic programs which benefit the poor, the
sick, the elderly, the working people, and most importantly, our
children, closely parallel the passive mass murder perpetrated
through the US-driven UN economic sanctions against Iraq. Want
evidence? Look to New Orleans.
In light of the Downing
Street Memo, which clearly demonstrates that
Bush constructed
a false case to justify the invasion of a
country that posed no real threat to the United States, based
on the accompanying needless deaths of American soldiers, and
considering the resulting economic sanctions placed upon the
American people, Congress has a sacred obligation to truly represent
the interests of its constituents and remove Bush and his fellow
criminals from office. It is time to impeach Bush and Cheney.
Once removed from office, these two and the rest of the cabal need
to face trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes,
genocide and crimes against humanity.
We the People
and the Iraqis deserve better
Click the link
below to take action:
"Congressman
John Conyers has introduced three new pieces of legislation aimed at
censuring President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and at creating
a fact-finding committee that could be a first step toward
impeachment."
Americans are not an
evil lot, but we are culpable for having allowed a string of truly
despicable human beings to perpetrate the Iraqi genocide that has
been taking place since the Reagan Regime. The monstrous psychopaths
now infesting the White House have taken malevolence to a whole new
level. Let us remind ourselves that The White House belongs to us and
that Bush serves us.
Bush and his rotten
associates are guests in our home and ultimately,
mere public servants. One simple step that you can take toward
evicting and firing them is to click on the linked paragraph above
to email your Congress Member with a demand that they support
Conyers’ courageous initiatives. Remember, removal from the White
House will put these scoundrels one step closer to the Big House and
to suffering the consequences they so richly deserve.
Jason Miller is a 39
year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is
not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or
writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of
Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International
and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com
or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
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