By Malcolm Shore, World Can’t Wait
Is it just me, or is the Bush Regime still in office?I had to ask, after the recent deluge of news reports showing Americans of all ages gathering in bars, drinking beers named after presidential candidates, or massed in the thousands at victory celebrations, cheering as though their favorite rock band had just walked on stage for an unexpected second encore.
{xtypo_rounded_right2}Related Stories:
What Change Will Your Vote Bring About?
Super Delegates: Who Are They?{/xtypo_rounded_right2} I had to wonder, after millions of Americans, including so many of its youth-seemingly asleep since the 2004 presidential campaign-have suddenly reawakened, discussing politics with unbridled enthusiasm everywhere you go. Yes, across the nation, the message is clear: Bush is over! Change is on the way!
Of course, while millions of Americans may have bought into this concept, one million dead Iraqis will never have the chance to do so.
The spirit in the air can be summarized by Obama’s recent words to supporters in Chicago. On the night of February 5, he told an exuberant crowd, “We are more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are always and will always be the United States of America.” He was interrupted by chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Later, towards the end of his address, he touched on a by-now familiar campaign theme of change. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time,” Obama said He even employed a phrase that has so often been articulated by activists with The World Can’t Wait during the past few years: “We are the ones we”ve been waiting for.”
Meanwhile, on Super Tuesday”
“Politics as usual cannot meet the enormity of this challenge, and people sense this.”
Controversy continued to rage in Berkeley, California, four days after riot police arrested protestors who were non-violently blocking access to the city’s military recruitment center. In arresting the demonstrators from The World Can’t Wait, Code Pink, and other groups, police broke their initial promise; they had told the protestors that because the City Council supported their actions, as exemplified by a council resolution that deemed the recruiters “unwelcome intruders,” there would be no arrests. On February 5, an editorial appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle by Debra Saunders which blasted the stand taken by the demonstrators and by the Berkeley City Council. Noting that the council resolution also gave a parking space to Code Pink and encouraged them to “impede” recruitment, Saunders accused the city council and the protestors of suppressing the free speech of those who wanted to join the military.But surely, the action of those who blocked military recruitment offices is exactly what Obama, the “antiwar candidate” had in mind when he spoke of those who refused to wait “for some other person or some other time” to effect change. Naturally, he will now throw his full support behind these Berkeley activists. Right? Let’s watch. But we could perhaps get a hint of the answer reading further on in the same editorial by Saunders. The author notes that, at a debate in January, the candidates were asked by moderator Tim Russert if they would uphold the Solomon Amendment, which allows the government to cut funds to campuses that refuse to allow military recruiters. Both Obama and Clinton said yes, they would uphold this amendment.Meanwhile on Super Tuesday”
“Your government is openly torturing people, and justifying it.”
On February 5, Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted to Congress for the first time that his agency waterboarded three detainees. That’s right, in the year 2008, the leader of one of the government’s most powerful agencies acknowledged using a form of torture that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition, in which a prisoner’s mouth and lungs fill with water and they experience suffocation and drowning. The power of juxtaposing this development with the flurry of election primaries happening the same day was not lost on San Francisco Chronicle columnist and former U.S. Diplomat Edward Gomez. “What a contrast in values,” began Gomez’s February 5 article.Two days later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, officially declared waterboarding torture. She added that those who violated the U.N. Convention against torture should be prosecuted.The New York Times announced this news with a grand total of 4 sentences, buried in a tiny sidebar in the bottom left corner of page 8.Meanwhile on Super Tuesday”
“Your government puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.”
On February 5, the New York Times reported that Abdul Rezhak Hekmati, an Afghani man held at Guantanamo for five years without ever being charged, became the first detainee there to die of “natural causes”; Hekmati had cancer. Of course, the mere phrase “natural” can only be an absurdity when applied to a place where prisoners are held in secret and torture is a standard part of daily life.
Hekmati was accused by the Bush Regime of being a Taliban commander. Hekmati asked his captors to reach out to members of the Afghani government who would have testified that, in fact, he was not a Taliban commander. But, according to Times reporter Carlotta Gall (who helped break the story of the U.S. military’s murder and torture of another innocent Afghan, Dilawar the taxi driver), no serious effort was made by the U.S. military to contact these witnesses. As a result, the witnesses were never called. Hekmati was never tried. And he died in the midst of a living nightmare at Guantanamo, without ever having a lawyer or being given the opportunity to know or confront his accusers. Gall’s article ends by noting that Hekmati’s son could not even attend the funeral of his own father in Afghanistan, quoting a family friend who explained “He is scared of the Taliban, and he is scared of the government and the Americans, too, because the Americans took his innocent father and they could take him too.”
Meanwhile on Super Tuesday”.
“There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it.”
Censored blog (censored-news.blogspot.com) featured a story of the Tuscon courtroom appearance of three anti-torture protestors arrested at an Arizona military base. The three activists were attempting to pass out flyers and talk to officers there about torture. After passing through barricades at the main gate, they were charged with trespassing on a military installation and failure to comply with an officer.
As Brenda Norrell of Censored Blog described it, the court hearing turned into an opportunity to speak out against torture. “The drama that unfolded in Federal Court was of epic proportions,” Norrell wrote. “It was the sort of dialogue the world benefits from, including a serious look at US torture, the war in Iraq, and the courage of those willing to suffer and make a difference.”
The attorney for the protestors highlighted the outrage that there are anti-torture demonstrators who have served more prison time than those who actually carry out the torture. The three resisters were given $5000 fines, two years probation, and 500 hours community service.<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
<!–[endif]–>One of the protestors told the court, “I’m willing to spend a lot of time in prison if I have to. I can’t promise you that I won’t risk being arrested again.” Meanwhile on Super Tuesday”
“Your government, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.
February 5 marked the five-year anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations justifying an attack on Iraq; an attack that has so far has claimed one million Iraqi lives and nearly 4000 American lives, and displaced more than 2 million Iraqis.Among the high lies – err, highlights– of Powell’s Feb 5, 2003 speech:
* “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.”
* “But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network.”
* And for those who say that Colin Powell wasn’t lying, but rather expressing what he believed to be true at the time: “Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.”
Looking back on Powell’s speech, former CIA official- turned -outspoken -Bush critic Ray McGovern recalled a memorandum that he and other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) wrote that same day. The memorandum warned that an attack on Iraq was unjustified, and was likely to fuel terrorism rather than prevent it.
McGovern noted that VIPS showed their memorandum to Hillary Clinton that same day. “Thus, she still had plenty of time to raise her voice before the Bush administration launched the fateful attack on Iraq on March 19,” McGovern pointed out.
Did she?
February 5 also brought one relatively small-but nonetheless outrageous-reminder of the cost of Powell’s lie. That day, the U.S. military acknowledged killing an innocent woman and wounding a young girl during a raid in the town of Dour, north of Baghdad. Only three days earlier, the military had killed nine civilians in an airstrike south of the city, which it also admitted to.
According to IraqiBodyCount.org, a total of 85 Iraqis died on Feburary 5.
Meanwhile, the same week as the Super Tuesday primaries, Bush announced his 2009 budget, which included a combined $661 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, national defense, and “anti-terrorism” efforts, making it the largest military budget since World War II.
In his February 5 column for truthdig.com, veteran journalist Robert Scheer cautioned those throwing their hysterical support behind the Democratic candidates. “Curb your enthusiasm,” Scheer’s column begins. “Even if your favored candidate did well on Super Tuesday, ask yourself if he or she will seriously challenge the bloated military budget that President Bush has proposed for 2009.”
Looking at Obama and Clinton’s recent voting record justifies Scheer’s concern. While it is true that each voted against the May 24, 2007 war funding bill because it did not contain any benchmarks for withdrawal from Iraq, each voted in favor of massive war funding bills with withdrawal timetables in the two previous months; in March 2007, they gave $122 billion to the wars, and in April they authorized $124 billion.
So let’s get this straight, Clinton and Obama: You”re promising to bring the troops home and end the war, but in the meantime, you”re offering hundreds of billions of dollars to continue it?! It seems the best characterization that could be offered for this logic is: “Here’s billions of dollars. Let’s hope the U.S. military hurries up and achieves its objectives, and then we”ll bring home the troops.”
When you consider that the U.S. military’s objectives are to murder, torture, and bludgeon its way to empire, this is pretty frightening logic!
Meanwhile, on Super Tuesday”
“There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.”It’s time to wake the fuck up. The elections are not a hopeful vehicle for change, they are a deadly distraction from it-from the daily crimes against humanity committed by this administration, from the stake candidates of both parties hold in the commission of these crimes, and from the genuine acts of resistance that have sprung forth in the past several weeks. Just remember: Every single moment that the candidates are on the campaign trial talking to cheering supporters about a “new direction for America,” thousands of people around the world are being tortured or held in secret prisons. Hundreds of Iraqis are about to lose their lives. The phone call you just made could be monitored. Immigrant children live in fear of being literally ripped out of their mothers” arms.In the current election season, John McCain’s campaign theme song is Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me.” Hillary Clinton has opted for Big Head Todd and the Monsters” “Blue Sky.” Barack Obama has garnered the assistance of Black-Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am to make his own campaign theme song, “Yes We Can.”
But if the Republicans and Democrats are looking for more honest musical inspiration, they might borrow from Guns and Roses album titles: “Use Your Illusion I and II.”