There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract “information” from detainees in that and other facilities.

In a piece in this morning's Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, “the world” did not “change” on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a “very different country” on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen's (and others) claim.

In many ways it is our body of law that binds the past, present and future. The rule of law gives constancy to our “values.” Laws may change but the process of change is, and should be reasoned and deliberate, not an impassioned reaction to the events of the day. That kind of reaction to the passions of the moment is the path of the lynch mob.

If, as is said in legal circles, “big cases make for bad law,” the events of 9/11 and the rapid changes in our laws and public policy that resulted from the reaction to those events gives us the mother of all examples of the aphorism.  An extremely big case led to a series of terrible revisions of our laws.

Among the legion of egregious errors committed by the last Republican administration was the naming of the war that it proposed to fight following the criminal destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of a fourth commercial airliner in a Pennsylvania pasture.

As has been pointed out numerous times “War on Terror” is an unfortunate term which calls for a war on a tactic: terror. You can no more fight a war against “terror” than you can fight a war against “covering fire,” “encirclement” “camouflage” or “surprise.”

Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the Goebbelian PR squad in the White House basement used the term “terror” more for its perceived effectiveness in arousing the public than for any accuracy in describing their strategy, or as Bush put it, “strategery.” It was in the Bush White House that the ad boys gave the word a capital “T” and used it as their “brand” for instilling public fear and acquiescence in nearly any act that they chose to carry out over the ensuing seven years.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 involved specific criminal acts, all of which are spelled out in federal and state law and punishable by lengthy prison terms up to and including life in prison. Under federal law, death penalty statutes would apply for the murder of the thousands of victims of the crimes.

When the World trade center was bombed the first time in 1993 the crime was investigated by the NYPD, the ATF and the FBI with the help, no doubt, of other agencies both here and abroad. A thorough investigation by law enforcement professionals resulted in the arrest, conviction and life sentences for the criminals involved.

The Marines were not sent in, nor were the Army and Navy deployed in force and the country did not go to war. Rather than launching a full scale campaign of “shock and awe,” the Clinton administration, in its wisdom, effectively, sent in “Columbo.”

Following the crimes of 9/11 the mindset of our “leadership” was very different; actually, it now seems that the minds were made up before the event, made up in fact even before the 2000 election.

An investigation quickly confirmed the involvement of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and it was quickly decided to take on the Taliban and al Qaeda, Afghanistan was never intended to be the main thrust, nor was bin Laden to be the main target.

The public was, quite rightly, afraid after the attacks; I was. (I watched it on TV too) It was a time of fear and uncertainty that called for calm leadership and thoughtful action.

That is not what we got. We got a strutting cowboy alternately threatening the world, boasting of American might, and daring potential adversaries to “bring it on.” He sounded like a drunken Saturday night drugstore cowpoke, cranked up on Jack Daniels, inviting any and all to a session of parking lot gravel dancing. “Mano a mano?”

Afghanistan and the Taliban were bottled up quickly, bin Laden isolated and rendered ineffective (at least temporarily) and the public roared its approval. (Cohen cites Bush's 92% approval ratings)

But our leadership kept feeding the collective fear and fanning the flames of public passion with manufactured intelligence, imagined alliances, an “axis of evil” cut from whole cloth and mythical “weapons of mass destruction.”

Afghanistan and bin Laden was not enough, it would not serve as the entree to the Middle East that our “leadership” required, and in fact, his capture or death would retard the main goal of this posse. Saddam Hussein was to be the quarry, Iraqi oil the tool, American hegemony in the Middle East the ultimate prize.

Proof, (at least the appearance of proof) was needed to bind Iraq and Hussein with al Qaeda and bin Laden. Proof was needed to tie bin Laden's ability to acquire WMD to Hussein, to Iran, to anywhere they wanted to make a move.

They spread cash all over Afghanistan, all over Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Wads of hundred dollar bills, five grand here, ten there, were offered for information about al Qaeda members in some of the world's most impoverished countries, places where the annual per capita income is less than I spend on rum, and they got results.

People turned in cab drivers, personal rivals, enemies, tourists, their wife's divorce lawyer, you get the picture. Lots of suspects, never mind that they were often told by locals, by advisers, by interpreters that they were collaring the wrong guys, that many of these people were just hapless bystanders who had wandered into the net. It didn't matter.

It didn't matter because they weren't looking for facts; they were looking for “information.” “Information” was necessary to tie Saddam to the “war on terror,” so electrodes were attached, thumbs were screwed, genitals mistreated, people were “extraordinarily hydrated,” and they got lots of “information.”

Hook me up to the Toquemada machine and I'll confess to anything, any crime, any degradation to make the pain stop, and so will you. In a few days any of us will confess to being responsible for original sin, to make the pain stop.

Did they get facts, sure, cast a net that wide and you're bound to catch something edible, but I expect that the ratio of facts to “information” is, as they say, “highly classified.”

At what cost did they gather these facts? We'll probably never know how many average Joes were destroyed, how many families ruined, how many people were murdered as a result of these “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or how many minds were destroyed in the process.

And that is why we cannot “look forward,” we cannot ignore these terrible, willful crimes, these war crimes, these crimes against humanity.

We must answer as a society for the criminality of our leadership by prosecuting them for what they purported to do in our name.

Cohen adds this:

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives — and maybe were — and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs — not time-stampers who take no chances.

Is the cop on the street who beats a false confession out of a teenage suspect making a “sincere effort” to enforce the law? Is he saving lives?

Are the “finest people” those who can be persuaded to violate all norms of human decency?

Are those who resist power and insist on following the rule of law, now to be called “time stampers,” “who take no chances?”

Cohen writes:

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done — back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

I suggest that blue ribbon commissions are usually hired when whitewashing is felt to be the solution. I think that this is a job for the Justice department and perhaps a special prosecutor.

We don't need to find out what went wrong, there is a world full of opprobrium focused on our country as a result of these crimes, there is a sea of blood and body parts to attest to what went wrong. There is a universe filled with screams of torment to testify to what went wrong; it is time to find out whom, to what degree and to punish accordingly.

Yes we were scared, I too wanted to be secure but I have never been willing to give up my rights or the human rights of others for my personal safety; so don't, Mr. Cohen, try to blame this on me or the American people. We didn't sign on for crimes against humanity.

I'll leave you with this; I am a Marine veteran of Vietnam; twice a year (as I remember) we were instructed in the Military “Code of Conduct.”

Here is a relevant excerpt:

“It is a violation of the Geneva Convention to place a prisoner under physical or mental duress, torture or any other form of coercion in an effort to secure information.”
US Military Code of Conduct

Fact: Torture is illegal under US and international law.

Fact: We hung German officers and civilians for ordering others to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Fact: We executed Japanese soldiers in WW2 for water boarding allied prisoners.

Fact: We punished our troops in Vietnam for the same offenses.

Leadership must be prosecuted for issuing unlawful orders to their troops which require them to violate our laws, treaties and conventions and the troops they lead are required to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders whether from superior officers, from a frightened populace or… from a lynch mob.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Harry Truman in a “bipartisan” moment with Lauren Bacall, a staunch liberal Democrat. This is about as “bipartisan as Harry got.”

Last week was exhilarating for Democrats and, judging by the international media, for people all over the planet who have suffered for nearly a decade from the misguided and often criminal policies of George Bush and his terribly inept administration.

The swearing in of Barack Obama and the departure of the Connecticut Cowboy from our public affairs was something long anticipated, and, after our long dark winter, as welcome as the return of springtime and birdsong, at least in these quarters.

The Republican smear machine however, wasted no time in cranking up to its full powers of bloviation. Their program of attacking nearly every move Obama made and every statement he uttered, began seconds after his swearing in and I’m sure will continue unabated in the immediate future. Here’s hoping that they are afforded every opportunity to quibble and obstruct, to grouse and whine, as a minority party for decades to come.

The moaning and squawking over the slightly bobbled recitation of the oath of office, a gaffe that was meaningless and easily ignored by people who have something other than chowder between their ears, was, in Republican circles, fanned into a twenty four hour cause celebre by the fulminating heads of Fox Noise and soon picked up on the other “open all night,” “all the news that fits,” networks.

The storm so roiled the calm in our national teapot that Obama’s advisers encouraged him to retake the oath, which he did in a private and sparsely attended ceremony in the White House a day later.

All seemed well with the republic until Glen Beck pointed out that Obama had not sworn the oath with his hand on a Bible,” I checked” Beck chirped, “We have never had a president sworn into office without a Bible,”

Beck’s research into the matter was apparently less than skin deep. Ali Frick at Think Progress quickly countered with this:

“Beck is simply wrong. As Slate recently reported, official records kept by the Architect of the Capitol show that Teddy Roosevelt did not use a Bible in 1901; and Lyndon Johnson is rumored to have used “a Catholic missal aboard Air Force One after Kennedy’s assassination.” According to his own letters, John Quincy Adams placed his hand on a constitutional law book rather than the Bible.”

Beck’s investigations didn’t include the “actual Constitution” which clearly states that no religious test for public office shall be required, thereby making the Bible, or any other religious text, token, amulet or magic charm unnecessary. It seems that the “Constitution” so often quoted in Beck’s parallel universe simply doesn’t contain an Article six.

The constitution and strict adherence to the rule of law seemed much on the minds of Republicans this past week, a surprising fact after eight years of their support of a President who famously referred to the document as “just a goddamn piece of paper” and spent much of his two sad terms trampling it underfoot with nearly unanimous republican complicity.

The party that hocked the future of our great grand children to the Chinese, set the world aflame and proved itself completely incapable of anything resembling competent governance during its twelve years of majority now seeks to instruct the new president, who hasn’t yet had time to sort out his new key ring, exactly how things ought to be run.

John Boehner in the House and his counterpart, Mitch McConnell, the replacement for Ted Stevens as the face of irascibility in the Senate, quickly assembled on deck a dozen or so other loose cannon to obstruct the disbursal of the next round of TARP funds and fight against Obama’s stimulus package. Forget the fact that they tripped all over themselves to approve the bailout of banks and brokers under the recent stewardship of jolly King George.

Following their obscene treatment of American automakers and labor they are now delaying the approval of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary because of her support for American Labor and, worse, her support of the “Employee Free Choice Act,” which corporate America is spending vast fortunes to defeat and I assume  Republicans are opposed to out of something more tangible than conservative principle.

They are the same old Republican Party, prowling the mall like jackals or perched buzzard like on the fences waiting for any opportunity to transfer public wealth to the ruling class, any chance to create greater disadvantage for the working class.

The landscape that Republicans envision when they speak of “America” is one far different than that seen by the average Democrat. I for instance see no beauty in long lines of the unemployed waiting for a job at minimum wage or less. To a Republican that is an idyllic image, warming to the heart.

Harry Truman once said:

The Republicans believe that the power of government should be used first of all to help the rich and the privileged in the country. With them, property, wealth, comes first. The Democrats believe that the power of government should be used to give the common man more protection and a chance to make a living. With us the people come first.

In my opinion Obama would be wise to ride his mandate, to maintain the strong cyber link to the body politic and use it to pressure the Democratic majority in the direction it would travel naturally were it not for the corrupting influence of corporate money. I would urge our new President to lose some of his zeal for the grail of “bipartisanship” and simply take his case to the people, and, like an old fashioned Democrat, govern in their name.

Harry also said this:

“I don’t like bipartisans. Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know that he’s going to vote against me.”

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

(My 40th high school reunion is coming up this year.  I too remember scenes across the country like the ones Bob describes.  The images of racial hatred still burn in my mind’s eye.  Tomorrow we meet the dream I have had since I was 17-years-old.  May true equality follow in every venue every day. – promoted by Maggie Gundersen)

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through my sophomore year at WE Stebbins High, an almost completely segregated school in the almost completely segregated city of Dayton, Ohio, a town said at the time to be a southern city that happened to be north of the Mason Dixon line.

The school was “almost completely” segregated because it was located within a good Hail Mary pass of Wright Patterson AFB. I don’t remember exactly the reasons but we were told that because the school received federal funds for students who were military dependents that it had to be integrated.

“Integration” was accomplished by the admission of two young Black kids, The boy was named Sam. I remember because we became friends for awhile until the transparent racist displeasure of my little Quaker Grandmother became thick enough to keep him from dropping by. She wasn’t ready for a black president.

The girl’s name is beyond my atrophied powers of recall. I can see their faces though; both were exceptionally attractive, beautiful in fact, bright, “A” students (National Honor Society), and the son and daughter of Air Force Officers. They weren’t related, although they might have passed for brother and sister (to my eyes) and they knew each other from the Air Base (the Air Force at the time wasn’t a lot more integrated than my high school).

Their presence among the lower and middle class adolescent white children of factory workers, shopkeepers and lower level bean counting managerial types caused no great stir. There were no serious problems (to my eyes) other than an occasional racist taunt, or snub. Civility towards them was rigorously enforced. The powers that be paddled freely and often back then and the sting of that paddle and its humiliation was seldom sought.

I’m sure that Sam and what’s her name saw their experience of being the only “colored kids” among fifteen hundred white kids quite differently than I did but they seemed to smile through it. Again, “to my eyes.”

Dwight Eisenhower was the President at the time, Kennedy, (who would become my boyhood idol, surpassing Chuck Berry) wouldn’t announce his candidacy for another year. Elections in those days were still conducted with a degree of merciful brevity.

“Brown v Board of Education” was only five years in the past; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 five years in the future and Dayton was divided by a river. Black faces were seldom seen east of the river unless on the bus or wielding a rake and although I rode buses frequently I had little contact with and I think, no animosity towards them. In fact, in my budding “beatnik liberal,” barely formed, pre Malcolm and James Baldwin consciousness, I confess to finding them exotic if not damned “quaint”. Please forgive, if you will, my youth and ignorance (and that of my country).

Three years later I would be in the Marines, stationed in North Carolina which was definitely south of the Mason Dixon. I remember distinctly the first time I saw a “Whites only” sign. I remember it taped to the inside of a glass door at a cheap eatery near the base in Havelock. I had heard and read of such things so I was “aware” of them in the abstract but I still cringe today with the horror and embarrassment I felt at the overwhelming “reality” of that sign.

Having sighted the first of these crayoned territorial imperatives I soon became aware of them everywhere. Whites only, colored drinking fountains, walk up windows in the sides of cafes posted with “colored” signs; commerce it seemed was integrated, money changed hands across the racial divide but there was a wall to prevent any mixing at breakfast or lunch of actual people. We weren’t ready.

There was no “river,” no physical boundary, as in Dayton, yet the boundaries were everywhere, carried it seemed, in the minds and hearts of everyone, constantly instilled and amplified by reminders, abrasive edicts scrawled on cardboard or plywood, a ubiquitous ugliness.

A year passed; on November 22 1963 I was driving a jeep transporting a Captain from Camp Lejeune to a chopper base at New River. As we left Lejuene through a back gate we were stopped by MP’s and told to report immediately to our unit, that we were on alert status as the President had just been shot.

In the barracks afterward, watching the news reports from Dallas and the reactions from various regional factions among my fellow Marines I was to discover the depth of the shared ugliness that permeated us all and to get a whiff, a fleeting taste of the ugliness on our shared horizon.

Vietnam followed, in less than a year and a half I found myself along with thousands of others thrust into a racist war in a tiny and largely impoverished third world country where the signs were scrawled not on doors but on the sides of bombs and rockets, racism and empire were promoted and enforced with air dropped leaflets followed by fire and lead. We still weren’t ready.

Bad news, all this blood and death, the foul stench of hatred, of racial, religious and ideological detestation, all the baggage that we carried with us to the domino war, followed us home.

Home, to a maelstrom of protest, home to a country divided, a division as sure as a river but wide as a sea, home to flags waved and flags burned by two vastly different kinds of “patriots.”  

Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and the country blazed with a fire that had smoldered beneath the forest of tinder for a century, for two centuries.

If there were any hearts left unbroken by the murders of Jack and Martin they were demolished wholesale by the sight of Bobby Kennedy bleeding out his life on that grimy kitchen floor in Los Angeles.

That June evening I came out of the woods in northern California following a two week backpack in the Trinity Alps. The unimaginable silence and tranquility of those woods was rudely broken by the sound of my old truck and shattered forever when I reached the highway, turned on the radio and heard the news of Bobby’s murder. Welcome back to America.

We still weren’t ready.

Fast forward through the eighties, rebuffed in our resource war in SE Asia we cast about in Central and South America and finding no low hanging fruit with which to gorge the appetite of our ruling class, we turned our eyes eastward again settling on the world’s oil patch as the key to wealth, empire and power.

A series of business friendly, electorate immune presidents and two decades of corporate control finally brought about a perfect storm of conditions that were ripe for the election of the worst president and the construction of the worst government in the history of the republic.

War and more war ensued, with a single crime as excuse for an eight year pillaging of the public treasury and the greatest transfer of wealth from those who need it to those who already have it in anyone’s memory.

Deeply embroiled in two wars to the tune of a trillion dollars and thousands upon thousands of dead and wounded, incomprehensible numbers of homeless and destroyed, after having transformed large numbers of the population of the Middle East into reeling, traumatized vacant eyed refugees, who are probably reconsidering their initial reticence to sign up as suicide bombers, America, at last, set a record for the longest delayed reaction in history.

We, you and I, an impressive percentage of us, tossed out the representatives of the failed and ruinous ideas and policies of the reactionary conservative past and elected a different man, a black man no less, to be our president. Are we ready now?

I was impressed with us on election day as I was with him, but I ask again are we ready to follow this man? Are we ready to do more than follow, but to demand, to pressure, to push and prod him as well as the rest of government at every level and the opposition party to do all that will be necessary to move us away from the corrupt practices and sordid criminal behavior that led us to this nadir in our history?

I hope so. I’ve waited a long time to have something to believe in again, to have an America to take pride in again.

This is my 12th president, I’m not going to get too many more and I hope to hell we got this one right. For the record, I think we’re finally ready.

Oh yeah, for Sam and the lovely “what’s her name,” I hope you enjoy this inauguration as much as I will and I’m sorry about Grandma, she just wasn’t ready.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

(As usual, Bob Higgins writes another interesting diary.   – promoted by Brattlerouser)

Is there anyone out there who still harbors the delusion that George Bush or most of his administration possesses the slightest shred of human integrity or the tiniest morsel of respect for the truth, for law, for the people of this country or any other?

Sorry, the question was rhetorical and asked out of personal frustration with the evil festering stew of lies, theft, brutality and domestic and international piracy that this administration has created in the place of what was once the USA.

No, I’m not naive enough to believe that we were ever a perfect country, free of guilt from participation in many and various Machiavellian schemes and plots over the last two centuries, the influence of the power lusts of private wealth have always had far too much influence in our public affairs to allow us to avoid responsibility for the results of our contributions to the general level of human misery. We have committed serious crimes against people in places as varied as Vietnam and Chile, and as far apart in space and time as Nicaragua and Iran.

In the generally business driven efforts to support the interests of entities such as United Fruit, Chiquita Banana, Anaconda, various oil giants, mining companies, and financial institutions we have gone to bat for tin horn dictators in Iran, Cuba, Chile, Cambodia and in other places to numerous to name here.  Even the Mafia found support in the efforts to prop up the fascist pig Batista against communist pig Castro.  

Much of our record has not been pretty and, in general, has usually favored and supported wealth and property over humanity and justice.

Revelations last week of more administration lies in the widening “Waterboardgate” scandal came as no surprise to most people and, although many expressed shock and dismay in public, the expressions of astonishment seemed to be presented for dramatic effect rather than as spontaneous displays of true emotion. When it comes to the current administration I don’t believe that there are many rose colored glasses left among the body politic, experience having taught us to assume the worst.

Even the families of the long suffering military who have borne the brunt of the aspirations to Empire of America’s transparently criminal ruling class over the last seven years are now beginning to break ranks with the “commander” who has squandered the lives of their loved ones treated them with such contempt.

I suppose that what depresses me and, in truth, causes me the greatest fear is the fact that the oligarchic forces of fascistic wealth have effectively bought out the opposition which showed it’s true face last month with the passage of the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,” one of the most frightening pieces of legislation since the “Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.”

This legislative abomination, added to the so called “Patriot Act,” and last year’s “Military Commissions Act” helped to spell the end of any pretense to adherence to constitutional principle and democratic rule in this country.

The forces which have so cynically manipulated public opinion to bring about the death of democracy have always been with us and have, at various times, risen and ebbed as evil tides, of “red scares,” “commie menaces,” of “outside agitators,” and the currently in vogue “Islamofascism,” a term popularized by some Goebbelian marketing wonk in the bowels of Dick Cheney’s office and pressed forward by money driven waves of irrational fear, and the malignant energy of powerful and pathologically dishonest men.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, caused in large measure by the abdication of reason by rank and file Democrats, the racist and anti-democratic march to plutocracy, halted and long delayed since the thirties by the common blessings of FDR’s “New Deal,” was born again, hidden behind thinly disguised code words like “silent majority,” “hard hats,” or “family values.”

The incubation of this poisonous philosophical monstrosity did not begin to reach it’s full virulence until large measures of neo-conservative and rabid theocratic ingredients stirred into the mix at the millennium, at which point those who most despised the Constitution and the rule of law were then able, due to a perfect storm of world events, a combination of public dread and apathy, congressional and judicial meekness, and the complete corporate takeover of the fourth estate, to seize control of the very government they long held in such contempt and begin it’s thorough looting, dismantlement and replacement with corporate rule.

Now we have a Department of Agriculture run by agribusiness, the Mine Safety and Health Administration run by corporate mining interests, a Department of Energy thoroughly in the control of multinational oil and gas and coal conglomerates, a health care system run by the insurance and drug industries and on and disgustingly on through every federal department and agency.

The takeover has been so complete and the parties involved so incredibly powerful that the Congress and the courts have, in large measure, knelt in fear and supplication before them as evidenced by the aforementioned “legislation” that would have been laughed out of the halls of congress four decades ago.

But as cowardly as the courts, the congress and the media have become, their cowardice is overshadowed by their addiction to the corporate feed bags of their campaign contributors and advertisers. The lure of hundreds of millions of dollars draws them to the putrid feast like hyenas to the sun ripened carcass of a wildebeest and in their lust to feed at the feet of the ruling class they have lost all sense of shame, all sense of the wretched aroma of their own corruption.

On the horizon looms an election, now entering it’s second painful year, in which nearly two dozen of our most respected flimflams have pandered to the National Association of Manufacturers, the health lobby, the defense lobby, the insurance and energy lobbies along with anyone else who will pay them to turn a trick.

By the time the general election is held just under a year from now the various moneyed interests will have spent nearly a billion dollars to place their man or woman on the puppet throne of public policy and the big dance will go on, the music, the lyrics and the tempo unchanged no matter which “party” is elected to represent their masters in industry.

Looking for solutions? So am I. Finding any? I know of only one.

Write, call, speak out, raise bloody hell, make noise and lots of it. The people who rule will never willingly give up control, they will always strive for more, for absolute control, it is their nature as a class. They will never willingly remove the economic and political shackles they have devoted so much effort to place on the “lesser” classes, they will be satisfied with nothing but total slavery, the complete exploitation of the world’s working people, it is the nature of their class. The people must seize power using many of the same methods employed in shedding the British yoke at the end of the eighteenth century.

In the short term, I will vote for any Democrat over any Republican, even if I have to hold my nose, and when we elect them we must hold their feet to the fire constantly, without letup, to insure a return to open and honest democratic government.

In the longer term we have to insist on the immediate passage of public campaign financing, we must place severe limits on the the ability of corporations to stand above the law and avoid responsibility for their crimes and get rid of the revolving door between elected office and the lobbying industry, and the corporate boardroom. We must enact extremely tough ethics rules for elected and appointed public officials and include within them mandatory jail time commensurate with the seriousness of the crime, in other words, treat violations of the public trust as the treasonous acts that they are.

Along the way we have to seriously revise or reverse much of the misguided and flat out dangerous legislation of this dark era of the neo conservative robber barons and build a new era of progressive populism in which the people truly rule, unencumbered by the tyranny of a cynical and self serving ruling class.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

Links:

Lying Down with Hyenas

The next time Michael Mukasey is called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee I suggest that he be strapped to a stretcher, a rag placed in his mouth and water poured in the rag until he begins to answer completely and truthfully the questions put to him by the committee.

Now that waterboarding has become an accepted form of interrogation in these United States, I recommend that it be utilized not only with Mukasey, but with all future witnesses before committees of the congress. I think that there are subpoenas kicking around out there for Condi Rice and other executive department figures who have been less than forthcoming in past appearances, so perhaps as our favorite republican tough guy Rudy Giuliani says, we should question them aggressively.

It might be a good idea if the voting public were able to use the same technique in questioning the presidential candidates on their positions. For the rest of the debates all candidates should be wheeled in strapped to stretchers and aggressively questioned using this simulated drowning method.

Using these methods we may begin to get the truth from our “public servants” and declared wannabes.

This will not work in Atlanta however, they don’t have enough water at the moment to achieve any kind of satisfactory results.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride?

Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the resignation of Karen Hughes from her post as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a mouthful there, and a job for which she was as ill suited and unqualified as the man who appointed her and in which, during her two year tenure, she accomplished little, if anything.

In truth, she accomplished nothing, unless you want to count convincing large portions of the world that all Americans must be as out of touch with reality, as clueless and unthinking as their current Commander in Chief, and at that she excelled, as anyone might, having been dispatched to the Middle East with the rank of Ambassador, but without knowledge of the language, culture, history, religions, and general pet peeves of the various states and peoples of the region.

But Karen Hughes was tapped for her office for the same reasons as all Bush appointees are chosen, not for expertise or experience, not for performance or integrity in public service but for loyalty, for unwavering belief in the Messianic delusions of neo conservatism, and a willingness to march in lockstep, nah, goose step, against all who might disagree or dissent.

As I read Benin’s article I had the thought that he might have written a very similar piece about nearly any federal department and the Bush appointees thereto in the last seven years. Which of the various cabinet level branches of the executive department of this country have not suffered greatly under the politically connected cronyism of the Bush/ Cheney administration?

We witnessed it at Justice, the politicization of the office of the Attorney General, the perversion of law and the resulting descent into the barbarity of denial of human rights and torture.

We saw it at Defense, where the best military minds of a generation were ignored in favor of the views of sychophantic careerists who allowed a lying Vice President and a comic opera Commander in Chief and their apparatchiks to lead them over the cliff and into the abyss of an endless and disastrous war.

We have seen time and again the incompetence, indifference and criminal neglect at “Homeland” Security and FEMA.

We have seen heads of federal departments turned into agents of electioneering, where party politics takes precedence over public welfare and the machinery and energy of the state is turned to the furtherance of private goals.

Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Treasury and the rest are now run by the industries that they are legally bound to restrain, regulate and control in the public interest.

Executive branch departments have been stripped of many of their most dedicated, long serving professionals and replaced with Bush loyalists from business and industry, or, in many cases directly from the most favored campuses, the ivy leagues of Christian evangelism. Regulatory functions have been curtailed, enforcement budgets slashed, and inspection schedules diminished to a laughable degree in nearly every regulatory corner of the federal system.

But this, after all, was the intent, to create central government that would gladly do the bidding of the corporate structure, throw aside all restraints, all regulation and increase its profits and its power.

Nearly every day I encounter a story in the media, a story of illness, injury, death or disaster befalling unsuspecting citizens due to the inattention, incompetence, lack of inspection and failures of enforcement of existing federal laws regulating consumer products, work place safety, environmental prohibitions or other areas where purity, safety and security were once almost taken for granted.

During the last seven years we have devolved into a country whose livestock, produce and other foodstuffs are ridden with bacteria and other contaminants, whose drugs and medical services are becoming untrustworthy, whose ports and borders are dangerously porous, whose bridges and highways are collapsing, whose military is being misused and abused in continuous illegal and futile adventures on behalf of corporate America, whose jobs have largely been moved to other countries and continents, whose pensions have collapsed and whose Barbie Dolls contain enough lead to write a novella. (Or, perhaps, the last paragraph)

The real problem however, the crux of the matter and what may finally deliver us stumbling and stuttering, quavering with dread at the terminus of the road to Fascist hell is the incredible damage that has been inflicted on the American spirit, the American soul, the American psyche. I may be accused of naivete’ but in my world, in my mind and in my memory there was a time when the eyes of America contained a great measure of compassion, of kindness, of simple good will.

Those days are gone. Under the current regime the eyes of America, official America, the America of the ruling oligarchy are now filled with hunger, with avarice, with an insatiable lust for resources and power, for wealth and influence. America’s eyes are no longer the warm welcoming eyes of Lady Liberty but the cold calculating gaze of the largest and most dangerous predator to ever stalk the planet, a predator to be feared and distrusted, to be resisted at all costs.

The eyes of Americans, our citizens, our electorate are filled with a mixture of apathy and fear, of meekness, a cowering attitude and a shuffling posture which is all too heavily reflected in their parliament.

America, in the brief span of my lifetime and largely in the span of a single decade has devolved into a killer of humanity, a dream slayer, despoiler of freedom, a destroyer, the destroyer of America.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

The “Hitler comparison” should be shouted from the rooftops, as should the Goebbels comparison, the Himmler comparison, the Mengele, Stalin, Torquemada, Beelzebub comparisons and all the rest. If it struts like a Nazi, talks like Nazi, tortures like a Nazi and wages aggressive and illegal war like a Nazi… it’s not a duck.

Eighteen months or so ago I wrote a post comparing Bush, Cheney and the boys from PNAC to Hitler, to the Nazi hierarchy and to the wonderful folks who gave the world kristallnacht, the terror bombings of Guernica, of London and conducted history’s magnum opus of human carnage, the holocaust, the destruction of two thirds of the Jews in Europe and millions of other “undesirables.”

I took a moderate amount of heat for what one local (Dayton) commenter called my “classlessness,” and received a few surly EMails from people who are probably, to this day, driving around with “Bush/Cheney” bumper stickers on their Cadillac and Lexus SUVs but since I want so badly to be loved and admired, (or at least not ignored) I resolved to try to avoid using the “Hitler Comparison” after that.

I saw it used by others on the blogs and, guardedly, in the MSM, witnessed their reception of similar treatment and I realized that a taboo (see Godwin’s law) had been created. “Disrespectful to the office of the President,” some cried, “diminishes the horror of the holocaust and the brutality unleashed on Europe’s Jews by the real Hitler,” cried others, “the ultimate ad hominem attack,” wrote one academic seeking to show that such comparisons were childish , demeaning to those who offered them and “kills dead,” scholarly internet discussions.

As the months dragged on and the war escalated, the deaths, the casualties, the carnage mounted, the attacks on dissent increased, civil liberties began to erode and disappear, as the regulatory bureaucracy and the judiciary were stripped of independent professionals and replaced with ideological partisans, as tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayers cash simply disappeared into the black hole of “privatization” and reason itself came under constant attack, I couldn’t help myself, I began to use the “Hitler Comparison” more often in my various rants.

I don’t pretend to scholarship, or journalism, I’m an old carpenter, not an academic, I’m content to be a pamphleteer. As long as the feedback tells me that people are reading my electronic leaflets, not ripping them from under their wiper blades and kicking them to the curb, if I sense that they are following the links, I find a small measure of hope, not a lot, just enough to make me look forward to coffee and another batch of leafleting in the morning.

The war..s continue, and as the fervor grows for another, in Iran and more evidence of official “misdeeds,” of lies, of outright criminality, of incompetence, rampant cronyism and fraud continue to seep out from under the closed doors of what has developed into the most secretive, insular, antidemocratic administration in the history of the Republic, the “Hitler comparison” has grown in my mind and, I believe, much of the public’s to the point that we need to repeal the “Godwin law” and popularize the idea in the hopes that by holding up the mirror to the tyrant we may drive him from our shores. I’m serious, we need “Hitler Comparison” T shirts, by the millions.

Sunday night I watched Naomi Wolf on PBS as she was interviewed about her recent book by “guest interviewer” Viet Dinh, a former Assistant Attorney General, and principle author of the Patriot Act, greatly admired by none other than Rupert Murdoch, in other words, as Adol George W is wont to say, no cream puff. Ms Wolf more than held her own, after all, she knows her book and the research on which its based and defended it well against a wholly predictable neo-con cross examination.

Her book may represent, albeit in a much more scholarly and reasoned way, the ultimate in “Comparisons,” (I confess I haven’t yet read it) She says that she charts the closing of various previously open societies, from Hitler to Stalin to Pinochet and on to our current rapidly closing system, and finds the comparisons striking, the trends frightening, ant the peril, imminent enough to cause her to run around the country like a latter day Paul Revere shouting that the redcoats brown shirts are coming, while making astute “comparisons” between current and past events, motives and personalities.

It is, of course, a book tour and yes, the object is to sell the book but there is much more here, I hear a clarion call in her voice and feel truth in her message.

Would that several million people, Germans perhaps, in 1933, 34 or 35 had been possessed of the poor taste and “classlessness,” had been willing to succumb to the gaucherie of loudly and publicly comparing Adolph Hitler to… well ..what the hell, lets go for it.. Adolph Hitler, I wonder what result might have ensued. Or, back in the USSR, had Russians stood up and said “hey this Stalin guy is becoming a real Hitler or maybe even a Stalin,” how many of the fifty million Russian dead might have been spared, the cold war, arms race avoided, at least greatly reduced.

There is a responsibility of those who govern to speak truth to the governed, but, when they fail in that responsibility, there is a greater responsibility on the part of the governed to speak truth to power, to spit in its eye and to dethrone it as necessary to insure the continuity of the rights, freedoms and welfare of the public, for that is what finally matters, not the government, nor the corrupt interests of the criminal oligarchs that it represents.

I listened to the GOP candidates a bit the other night, a little goes a long way with these birds, and heard the words “personal responsibility” several times, a phrase which is nothing more, on Republican lips, than a code word for racism, sexism and a continuation of the war they have waged against the “lesser classes’ for all of modern history.

I agree with them in this sense, it is time for a large percentage of the population to take personal responsibility for themselves, for their country, to unite in the name of freedom, in the name of economic, political and spiritual liberty, to rise up and seize control of the whole package, the big damn shebang, to wrest control from the five percent who have kept them enslaved, who have enforced ignorance and poverty and to throw aside the twenty percent who guard the prison.

It may be “classless” and a violation of “Godwin’s law to “Compare” George Walker Bush, the arrogant young scion of eastern establishment wealth and power, grandson of Senators and son of Presidents, cowboy of windshields and owner of chainsaws, to the beer swilling gutter scum of the beer halls of Munich and Berlin but I’m afraid it is unavoidable, it is inescapable, obvious, and it is historically necessary.

Terrorism? 9/11? The attack on the World Trade Center was their Reichstag fire, the invasion of Iraq, comparable to the blitzkrieg into eastern Europe. They share the same motives and ideology, the same vision, they exhibit the same compassion, and wield power with the same ruthless disregard for the lives, for the welfare and dignity of common humanity.

Make no mistake, these people, the architects of the last six years of international turmoil, of domestic division, of war and death, of crushing despair and hopelessness, are Nazis, perhaps not yet in the full bloom of adulthood, not yet grown to the evil proportions of their twentieth century predecessors, but they have emerged from their larval stage and are prepared for full flight, They have all the weapons, they lack nothing, nothing, but to complete their rewriting of our laws and of course, they need those handsome uniforms.

The only thing that can prevent them from fulfilling their wretched and terrible goals of oligarchy, universal slavery and domination of the world is your voice, your derision, your hand, raised in resistance, your lips mouthing a simple no.

Hurry, I think the uniforms have been ordered.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

I am sick to death of all the pussyfooting around the subject that has occupied the media for the duration of this premeditated, illegal war of terror that we the people of the United States have allowed to be waged against the people of Iraq, in our name, for the last several years.

No matter how much lipstick and rouge we smear on the face of this war no matter how we attempt to  dress up the evil and bestial acts that have been performed in its unholy name, it still has the hideous countenance of an evil swine from hell.

It is an illegal war, begun and conducted under false pretenses, by a group of criminal liars and thieves in the United States Government, abetted by a cowardly congress who abrogated their constitutional duties in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds and furthered by a complaisant press that ignored their obligation to remain independent from government, from their sponsors and report the facts. 

The members of the completely rogue executive department acted in their own self interest in a quest for personal power and wealth, in concert with the usual domestic and international corporate pirates who, in the depths of their insatiable greed, continually amplify human conflict to their own ends and bring poverty, war, suffering and death down upon the world.

There is no such animal as extraordinary rendition, nor do I know of the existence of any beasts called enhanced interrogation methods.

The first is kidnapping, it is illegal, a felony and the second word is torture, its meaning is clear:
NOUN:

  1. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
  2. An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
  2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
  3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

Torture is illegal in this country, a felonious act, it is illegal in the world at large, according to several conventions that we are legally bound by. Anyone committing torture, causing it to be committed, directing its commission, or training others in its techniques is guilty, guilty of war crimes, of crimes against humanity and crimes against “Nature’s God.

The people who lied us into this war are not statesmen, nor are they patriots acting out of a misguided love of country, as I have heard in some quarters. They are murderers, murderers, modern day Nazis or Fascists if you prefer, cold dispassionate sociopaths, heinous criminals, without conscience, without mercy, without humanity.

I read in the press and heard in the media yesterday and this morning of the “murky legal territory” in which the “private contractors” operate in Iraq and the murky area of law in which our dedicated public servants must operate as they determine just how far they can go in the extreme physical abuse of human beings before they stray in to a “gray area.”

Bullshit, I think that when a lying pig of a lawyer like David Addington describes a “murky legal area” it means that he thinks he can get away with it. The legal situation in Iraq was intentionally  designed to protect the mercenary scum that we send there to perform high priced serial murders as they fulfill bloated contracts to protect our criminal leadership, thieving diplomats and cowardly congressmen.

I believe that the actions of following people must be investigated and, if warranted by the evidence, tried in criminal courts, and if convicted, face the full consequences of both US and International law:

George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Scooter Libby, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Andrew Natsios, Dan Bartlett, Mitch Daniels, George Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, David Addington

There are more, in every corner of the executive, the congress, among the highest levels of the military as well as the intelligence community, various think tanks, news organizations, public and private corporations and other NGOs.
This is a cancer that must be quickly, loudly and publicly removed from the heart of America.

Enough.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Related stories,sources and links:
The Architects of War
Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
Convention Against Torture
Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
Red, white and mercenary in Iraq
Yet More Impeachable Revelations
http://existentialis…

(Wow. This one took some serious time. – promoted by odum)

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation’s wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.The dark truth about Blackwater

The idea of privatization of American public and governmental functions has been at the center of the neo conservative movement and over the last decade has been presented as the cure for everything that ails us from Social Security to Medicare, prison administration to public education, law enforcement and even the waging of war.

This idea that private enterprise can accomplish governmental functions more efficiently, at less cost while providing better service is, of course absurd and, in fact, is nothing but an enormous lie, and, like all enormous lies, if repeated often and loudly by the right authority figures and affirmed in “scholarly” studies performed by the Heritage or American Enterprise think tanks, it will take hold and seem, to a sizable portion of the uncritical public, to be the truth, simply because they have heard it so many times from so many familiar voices.

The marketing/propaganda professionals of the Cheney /Bush administration have carefully studied their Goebbels and know that the truth is what they can sell to those gullible enough to believe it especially when delivered in a climate of xenophobic, racist or religious fear, and due to the fact that a large percentage of our citizenry are either unable to look at their government and the wider corporate culture which largely dictates public policy, with a properly suspicious eye, or simply doesn’t give a damn as long as no one threatens to take away their snowmobiles, shotguns and cheap access to the mind numbing inanity of popular culture and celebrity, the great lies become public truths and “common knowledge.”

Seven years ago the people of this country nearly elected a federal administration that came to office expressing a hatred of government and an intention to reduce the size and influence of it in regulating the affairs of the ruling capitalist class, while at the same time charting a course to invade the lives and privacy and reduce the fundamental freedoms of the lesser classes. How anyone could expect those who despise government and representative democracy to govern effectively and efficiently is well beyond my understanding.

After their near election and illegal appointment to the highest offices in a government that they had absolutely no respect for, Cheney and Bush along with their corporate mafia criminal associates began to strip the federal regulatory agencies of dedicated professionals who took the job of regulating business and industry in the interest of public health and safety seriously, and started replacing them with industry cronies who simply stopped enforcing the laws so that businesses could achieve greater profits.

Pause for a brief digressive rant
“The business of America is business,” Cal Coolidge said eighty some years ago, and these guys heard the phrase in Grandpa’s Sunday sermons and Grandma’s lullabies before they learned to read.

“Need a comprehensive national energy policy? Just holler down the hall from Cheney’s office and a half dozen current and former big oil Poobahs will write it up for you including emphasis on the necessity of gaining pipeline routes through Afghanistan and control of Iraq and Iran’s oil. They’ll phony up the intelligence, everything, a turnkey operation”

“Need to increase profits for some buddies in the coal industry? No problem, we’ll put one of our boys in charge of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Make a recess appointment, you’ll get any mining plan you need approved, no matter the cost in death and injury to the miners who have to implement it.”

“Having trouble with the EPA, the FDA, OSHA or any other pesky collection of bureaucratic acronyms? We’ll gut it for you and have our boys in industry pay for bogus scientific opinions to justify our continuing rape of the environment and pollution of our air and water supply.”

“Labor costs out of line, we’ll loan you money at low interest, what the hell, make it no interest to build factories and send the jobs offshore. We’ll get you a subsidy to take your jobs to Asia or Central America where you’ll have no environmental regulations. You’ll be able to pollute at will and you can pay people in dirt. No kidding these people will work for dirt, you’ll love it there, the government over there shoots the bastards if they’re late for work. Its an entrepreneur’s Disney World.”

“The Iraqis won’t agree to your terms for oil leases? Fuck em, We’ll send in the troops, give em a little taste of shock and awe. Iran too? No problem bring it on. If these pussy Generals drag their heels we’ll send Blackwater.

During the first Gulf War the ratio of “private contractors” to regular troops was something like 6 or 7 to one, in Iraq today it is closer to 3 to 1.

“They use their machine guns like car horns.”
America’s Private Army – Psycho Cowboys For Hire

When she saw the gunmen turn toward the bus, Ms. Sattar looked at her mother in fear. “They’re going to shoot at us, Mama,” she said. Her mother hugged her close. Moments later, a bullet pierced her mother’s skull and another struck her shoulder, Ms. Sattar recalled.

As her mother’s body went limp, blood dripped onto Ms. Sattar’s head, still cradled in her mother’s arms.

“Mother, Mother,” she called out. No answer. She hugged her mother’s body and kissed her lips and began to pray.The bus emptied, and Ms. Sattar sat alone at the back, with her mother’s bleeding body.

“I’m lost now, I’m lost,” she said days later in her simple two-bedroom home.

“They are killers,” she said of the Blackwater guards. “I swear to God, not one bullet was shot at them. Why did they shoot us? My mother didn’t carry a weapon.” 8 deadly days for Blackwater

Blackwater claims that they were attacked by armed insurgents and acted only in self defense. As reports surfaced of indiscriminate firing from Blackwater helicopters they denied that the choppers had fired at all. How to explain the large holes that had been blasted in several car roofs from above? That pesky al Oaeda in Iraq Air Force up to its usual mischief I suppose.

An Advertising Pitch For Serial Killers In Corporate-ese?

Blackwater Worldwide efficiently and effectively integrates a wide range of resources and core competencies to provide unique and timely solutions that exceed our customer’s stated need and expectations.

We are guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world. Blackwater Worldwide professionals leverage state-of-the-art training facilities, professional program management teams, and innovative manufacturing and production capabilities to deliver world class customer driven solutions.

Our leadership and dedicated family of exceptional employees adhere to an essential system of core corporate values chief among them are integrity, innovation, excellence, respect, accountability, and teamwork.

Blackwater USA website

By now you’ve probably seen videos of Blackwater and other mercenary outfits racing down Iraqi roads firing indiscriminately at innocent civilians to the tune of rock and roll music and raucous laughter. Paid at a rate four to ten times what we pay our legitimately serving soldiers, Bush’s army of “rent a thugs” has become yet another hairy wart on the perception of America in the eyes of the international community.

A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al-Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad.

As Ms. Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater USA security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Ms. Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

Before the shooting stopped, four other people were killed in what would be the beginning of eight days of violence Iraqi officials say bolster their argument that Blackwater should be banned from working in Iraq. 8 deadly days for Blackwater

You may have also seen pictures of hired goons from the same company swaggering their way through the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The fact that private security firms were being hired to perform public law enforcement functions made my skin crawl two years ago and everything that I have learned since increases my sense of dread about this company, its political connections to the Cheney/Bush gang and the prospects of what its future “missions” may mean for Americans and our fundamental freedoms.

The House began a round of hearings yesterday before the Oversight and Reform Committee chaired by California Democrat Henry Waxman. The hearings come as a result of the deaths of as many as 20 Iraqi civilians in what looks like yet another in a long series of “shoot first and cover it up later” operations which seems to be the stock in trade of many of these “private security” firms. The committee will also be looking into the dozens of unanswered questions regarding the funding and even the number of “contractors” engaged in Iraq and elsewhere.
The hearings may be another toothless effort on the part of our limpwristed legislature as they have already agreed to defer to the FBI and the State Department. If they believe that they will get the truth from Blackwater’s enablers at State or any part of the Bush Department of Justice.. well, I have a bridge for sale.

So, Blackwater was a subcontractor to Regency, which was a subcontractor to ESS, which was a subcontractor to Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary, the prime contractor for the Pentagon — and each company along the way was in business to make a profit.
U.S. Pays Steep Price for Private Security in Iraq, WAPO

Privatization has led directly to the doubling of our national debt during the Cheney/Bush era. Rather than performing public business more efficiently they have embroiled the world in a series of brutal and illegal wars while engineering the rape of the American treasury in the conversion of enormous amounts of public treasure to private hands. Fraud, waste and theft abound and what is done within the confines of the law is shameful.

For all the hubbub over the recent Blackwater incident, the American public remains largely unaware of the private military industry. While private forces make up more than 50 percent of the overall operation in Iraq, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they have been mentioned in only a quarter of 1 percent of all American media stories on Iraq.

Yet, at the same time, contractors are one of the most visible and hated aspects of the American presence in Iraq. “They seal off the roads and drive on the wrong side. They simply kill,” Um Omar, a Baghdad housewife, told Agence France Press about Blackwater in a report in mid-September. A traffic policeman at Al-Wathba square in central Baghdad concurred: “They are impolite and do not respect people, they bump other people’s cars to frighten them and shout at anyone who approaches them … Two weeks ago, guards of a convoy opened fire randomly that led to the killing of two policemen … I swear they are Mossad,” he said, referring to the Israeli spy service, which is a catch-all for anything perceived as evil in the Arab world.The dark truth about Blackwater

I don’t know what it will take for the people of this country to reverse this course, to stop this mad dash into the the abyss of fascist tyranny that I see on our horizon. Aside from responding to public opinion polls people seem to be sleepwalking through the ongoing destruction of our Constitution. During the Vietnam war the voices of protest increased every year until the government was forced to heed the crescendo and bring an end to the madness. Perhaps the press, the media in those days was more independent of the mega corporations that now determine public policy by buying every available politician, they are certainly quick to preach the Bush doctrine today, they are greatly to blame.

I don’t see anything from the general public but meekness, fear of being impolite, of creating a disturbance and that meekness is sustenance for those who would enslave us, our meekness is the very bread and wine of their existence.
I think though, that we, all of us are public enemy number one, I did not work hard enough, write effectively enough or shout loudly enough, we acquiesced quietly in the face of authority figures and “experts” when we knew better.

The fundamental rule of democracy is to distrust authority and demand accountability and somewhere along the line we forgot that and abrogated our responsibility to stand firm and demand freedom and justice in the face of would be tyrants.

I hope that I get interesting cell mates in the gulag. The guy on the left may be our guard.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Related stories, sources and links:
Subcontracting the War

Blackwater Banned In Iraq

U.S. Pays Steep Price for Private Security in Iraq

Amid uproar, Blackwater stops land deal

Pentagon Issues Blackwater New $92 Million Contract

Death From All Sides

GOP Occupied America: Does the GOP “Vision Thing” Include Blackwater Patrolling America’s Cities, Innocent People Awaiting Death?

Private contractors threaten U.S. democracy

The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater

Blackwater Portrayed As Out of Control

From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths

Guards in Iraq Cite Frequent Shootings

The progress being made in our 4 1/2 year war of terror on Iraq is phenomenal. So impressive are our recent gains that the “top tier” Democratic candidates who have lined up in competition to become the heirs of this great struggle for freedom, for Middle Eastern democracy, for oil and gas rights for western corporations and of course for lucrative contracts in arms sales and private security for campaign contributors, last night went way out on a limb and declared their goal of removing our troops from the quagmire in Mesopotamia by the end of their first term in office in 2013.

Despite their boldness, they did not report whether or not they could guarantee the colonization of Mars, a cure for cancer, or flying pigs within that time frame.

The Congress of the United States of America, a legislative body established by the American Constitution over two centuries ago has declared itself to be toothless, spineless and ultimately meaningless. Yesterday they condemned a reputable political organization for running a completely truthful newspaper ad and voted to declare the military of a sovereign nation a terrorist organization in order to present their Fuhrer with a gift wrapped excuse for his next adventure.

They were asked by Bush’s Defense Secretary for an additional 190 billion ($190,000,000,000) dollars to continue their criminal enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite the fact that a sizable majority of the people of our country want to end this war, the cowardly swine will approve it. That will bring the total publicly reported expenditures to 800 billion dollars ($800,000,000,000). Most of this has been spent, squandered, swindled, bamboozled away since our chief arrogant little asswipe stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared that the mission had been accomplished.

Hell, they sacked one of our principle Generals at the outset of this insanity for declaring that the war would cost as much as 25 billion when Rumsfeld and Cheney’s various staff were reporting that it could be done for seven billion which would be financed through the sale of, get this,Iraqi Oil.

Congress will of course, make another face saving gesture and ask for full progress reports, which will be dutifully drawn up by the neocon advertising/marketing/propaganda staff in the white House and fed to an “ass kissing little chicken shit” general for presentation to our parliament of gutless wonders and we will continue, down the same path following some vague vanishing point into a future where the only things that are certain are the deaths of thousands more of our troops and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. 

Since our current crop of wars of empire are progressing so swimmingly (as planned at the highest levels) they now are preparing to embroil us in another war with Iran and this time they plan to pull out all the stops and use the nukes that they have been slathering over all these long years.

Last week on television, I witnessed a room full of mostly young college students sit pacifically and watch passively as a half dozen hired goons brutalized another student with Tasers, for speaking. For Speaking.

I felt that I was seeing a vision of America’s future.

No matter what this criminal government and their corporate masters do, no matter what the excess, no matter what the crime, no matter what horrors they commit in our name the people of this country are sitting, sitting as acquiescently as that room full of meek children, sitting and cowering in the face of authority.

America in the first decade of the twenty first century is beginning to look a lot like Germany in the third decade of the last century and I’m beginning to be relieved that this is my last decade.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust