The ” Speaking the
Unspeakable: Is the Bush Administration Guilty of War Crimes and Crimes
Against Humanity?” hit Chicago speaking to a crowd of 150 people at the
Univ. of Chicago and 50 people at Northwestern.
Below is a report from a World Can’t Wait Organizer in Chicago.
On Tuesday, May 9th, the Bush Crimes Commission speaking
tour, “Speaking the Unspeakable: Is the Bush Administration Guilty of War
Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity?” made its second appearance in the
Chicagoland area. This time the panel included global warming expert Ted Glick,
of the Climate Crisis Coalition, C. Clark Kissinger, the convener of the
Commission of Inquiry, and Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.
The tour stopped at two of the area’s most prestigious and nationally important
universities: Northwestern University in Evanston,
and the University of Chicago
in the Hyde Park neighborhood.
Sponsored by the World Can’t Wait and a variety of student
groups and professors at the universities, the speaking engagements aimed to
help change the terms of debate on a national scale about the misdeeds of the Bush
administration. As Clark Kissinger, a long time activist, writer for Revolution newspaper, and University
of Chicago alum, said, “The spontaneous
terms of debate throughout society, influenced by the opinion makers, has it
that this is about flawed intelligence and flawed policy. Does that mean we
would support the war on Iraq
if it was based on good intelligence from honest people? No! This is a war of
aggression- a war crime.”
The events opened with a short clip from a British broadcast
few Americans have seen. Footage obtained from the perspective of the cockpit
of an American F-16 captured a deliberate missile strike on a crowd of human beings
in the Iraqi city of Fallujah
during the US
siege of April 2004. The pilot verifies with his command first, then takes out
the crowd of people running down the street. The audience grappled with the
sight of this methodical targeting of civilians, and were then taken along for
a ride through some of the expanse of the verifiable crimes that this regime is
committing.
Ted Glick started by talking about the gravity of the
situation the earth faces. While the destruction of the global environment is
not classified by international law as a crime against humanity, based on the
strength of the evidence presented, the judges for the Bush Crimes Commission
decided that responsibility to the people of the world demanded a guilty
verdict. The preliminary findings state, “[The Bush Administration’s]
policies and practices appear to support corporate interests while denying the overwhelming
evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are irreversibly damaging the world
environment and causing present day injury to people throughout the
world.”
The process of global warming is only accelerating, warned
Glick. As the ice caps melt, the heat-reflective qualities of ice disappear;
replaced by dark water which absorbs heat. He went on to predict that world
wide water levels will continue to rise alarmingly, an especially destructive
process for low lying countries such as the very populous Bangladesh.
He clarified that all this can be dealt with, if there is coordinated and
determined human action to drastically halt greenhouse emissions.
Craig Murray spoke for some time on his personal experience
and disillusionment as a veteran of many years of service in the UK’s
foreign service. He was appointed ambassador to Uzbekistan
in 2002, and removed in October of 2004. In that time, he came to know and love
this country’s people, understand his (and our) government’s role in the
propping up of its brutal dictatorship, and the horrific torture committed on a
grand scale. With biting wit, he described the situation in Uzbekistan.
It is the world’s second largest exporter of cotton, the birthplace of algebra,
and home to a captive population of slaves to the cotton fields; making $2 a
month for laboring 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. This harsh setting holds even
more horrors, though.
In 2002, the US
gave $500 million to the Karimov regime of Uzbekistan.
$120 million of that went to the army, while $80 million went to security, totaling
more than was given to all of west Africa. This money covers the costs of
ongoing and brutal torture of the possible political dissidents of Uzbekistan,
and the region (as Murray
suspects). People being boiled alive, their fingernails pulled out, being raped
(sometimes with broken bottles); these are the sorts of horrific stories that Murray
started to accumulate once he became known in Uzbekistan
as the one ambassador who would listen.
All these atrocities serve the accumulation of intelligence
for the CIA and the British authorities, who claim ignorance of the
interrogation methods; the names of the tortured suspects are deleted from all
official records. The same story appeared again and again – thousands of Uzbeks
confessed to visiting Afghanistan
(even though an exit visa would have been required), being members of Al Qaeda,
and meeting Osama bin Laden. Murray
recounted the process of bringing these cases to the top levels of his
government. He argued the torture is useless and immoral; only to be told that
the UK and the US
don’t think it’s a problem to use intelligence gathered through torture, as
long as they aren’t told it’s obtained through torture and they don’t specifically
request it. Condoleeza Rice receives the same reports that he saw as
Ambassador, moving from the hands of the Uzbek torturers to their CIA handlers.
Her lies about the USMurray
assured us that she knows where this false information is coming from; and that
she knows it is false. The point, he said, is not to win “the war on terror”
or to catch the real terrorists; but to create an excuse to move in on the
natural resources of the Middle East and Central
Asia. This is best illustrated by the fact that relations between
the US and Uzbekistan
soured once China
and Uzbekistan
reached a new trade deal for Uzbekistan
gas. He speculated that the human rights abuses there could one day be
cynically used by the US
for a pretext to take Uzbekistan
gas by force.
involvement in torture are backed by the “plausible deniability” of
receiving only reports with the names of the detainees removed.
“When they boiled that guy to death, you paid to heat
the water,” Murray challenged
the students in attendance. “There is a scary lack of upsurge.” He
advised us that we are heading down the road that Adolph Hitler took people,
where it doesn’t matter what happens to those other people (in this case, our
Muslim brothers and sisters), and that there is a point of no return on that
road. His message was clear: we must resist before it is too late.
There were approximately 150 people in attendance at UC and
50 at NWU. The debate and questions covered everything from, ‘what can we do and
how can we get others to see?,’ ‘what’s wrong with people?,’ to the possible
9/11 cover-up, the uses of nuclear energy in response to global warming, and a lot
of other debate. One student stood up and said, “I’m from Kyrgyzstan (a country
neighboring Uzbekistan), and I can bear witness that what you say is true; but
most people in this room will go home tonight and go about their lives tomorrow
as if nothing has changed, and this torture will continue.”
One of the student organizers with the World Can’t Wait
responded to that sharply felt sentiment with the announcement of the call for
Oct. 5th; a turning point in the building a movement of real resistance to the
whole agenda and program of the Bush regime. We were left with a sense of the
real work yet to be done to actualize that call, and a deep feeling of the need
to reverse this whole disastrous course.