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Buried on page 13 of the paper, I find this very disturbing report:

According to Jean Ziegler of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the number of Iraqi children under the age of five suffering from “acute malnutrition” has nearly doubled under American occupation–from 4% in April 2003 to 7.7% last fall. More than 25% are going hungry. According to Ziegler, this is “a result of the war led by coalition forces” (AP, 3/31/05).

Meanwhile, the American press and public are transfixed by the morbid spectacle of a family fighting over the use of a feeding tube to keep a vegetative woman’s body alive. The press and politicians exploiting this family tragedy aren’t even focusing on principle or policy. The president–who couldn’t be bothered to break off his vacation for a briefing entitled “Al Qaeda Determined to Strike in the U.S.” or a tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands–rushed back from the ranch to pass a law that was rammed through Congress lickety split. The law applied only to Terry Schiavo.

What’s going on, America? Since when do we pass special laws for individual people? Democracies don’t do that. Even weirder, the new “culture of life” we’ve been hearing so much about doesn’t seem to extend to the children dying under our occupation. What happened to “no child left behind?”

Of course, Schiavo’s death was a tragedy. And the question of when to cease medical intervention in such cases is a difficult one for family and society alike. But when the issue of “life” focuses on frozen embryos and braindead bodies but ignores starving children, something is profoundly sick in the soul of America.

For years now, the Bush Administration has justified its illegal refusal to recognize the human rights of its prisoners by claiming that the people it holds prisoner and tortures are “the worst of the worst” – diabolical terrorists who are so evil and so wicked that the normal rule of law cannot be applied to them.

Of course, there’s a funny trick to that claim: So long as the Bush Administration continues to deny its prisoners the right to a fair trial, the American public really has no reason to believe that Bush’s prisoners are guilty of anything at all. The entire system of American law is built upon the idea that guilt is not determined by the whim of any politician, but by a rigorous process of trial by jury. Take out this element of American law, and there really isn’t any law left.

As it stands now, President George W. Bush has granted himself the power to declare anyone, American or not, an enemy of his government, and to create special exemptions from legal procedures whenever he decides it’s necessary. Oh, Bush always says that he has reasons, that he has evidence of guilt, but he insists that his reasons and his evidence are classified top secret. Most of the time, Bush won’t even let Congress see any of what he calls “evidence”.

Under such a lawless state, President Bush could grab your 16 year-old daughter, declare her an enemy of the state, and throw her into a prison like the one at Guantanamo Bay. You couldn’t do anything about it. Bush would just declare that he had secret evidence proving that she was planning a nuclear attack against Green Bay, Wisconsin. Well, how could you disprove that?

It turns out that there have been some good Americans attempting to do just that – to force the government to prove that what it says it’s keeping in secret is really there. Mostly, the Bush White House is able to stymie their efforts, but every now and then, they grab onto something.

The Washington Post grabbed onto something meaty in the basement lockers of the of the Bush Administration this week. What they found was that the Bush Administration has knowingly kept a man prisoner in Guantanamo Bay even though there is evidence that he is completely unconnnected to any terrorist plots by Al Quaida or any other terrorist groups.

The Bush Administration set up a military tribunal to determine whether Murat Kurnaz was, in fact, any threat to the United States. The tribunal looked at “the evidence”, and declared that Murat Kurnaz was one of “the worst of the worst”. The tribunal said that it had come to its decision based on secret evidence.

So, what was that secret evidence? Well, gosh, when the Washingon Post actually got ahold of it, they found out that the files that the military tribunal was keeping hidden from everybody actually proved that Murat Kurnaz was not guilty of anything at all!

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating the point. I’ll quote what the Washington Post has to say about the matter: “…that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.”

So, what do you think the Bush Administration has done with Kurnaz? Released him? No way! He’s still in Guantanamo Bay, being “interrogated” for information that he certainly does not have. Kurnaz doesn’t know anything more about Al Quaeda than you do, and he is no more an evildoer terrorist than you are, but the Bush Administration has kept him in prison, subjected to a brutal regimen of interrogation that may include torture – and done so by lying about “evidence” against him that never existed.

What does Bush’s military tribunal have to say for itself? The member of the tribunal say that it all makes sense, really, and somehow the evidence that proves his innocence really proves his guilt. Somehow. But they say that they can’t tell us how or why, because that’s, um, top secret.

Know the worst part of this story? The American people have largely responded to this story by saying merely: “Hm… Hey did you hear about Terri Schiavo?”

The Associated Press has compiled a list of approximately 100 people reported to have died in U.S. custody in the course of the War on Terror. Slowly but surely, the truth about the dark side of America’s War on Terror is coming out. And it’s not pretty.

I read a disturbing bit of news today in the paper. Buried away on page six was a story from the Washington Post, which reported that “the Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations packaged news stories that do not disclose the government’s role in producing them.”

What’s so disturbing? Well, nothing. Unless you think it’s important to maintain the distinction between independent journalism and government propaganda. Unless it bothers you to see your own tax dollars used for propaganda aimed back at you. Unless you’re concerned about America being the kind of place where there is no news, just the government telling you how it is.

The way democracy is supposed to work, the people tell the government what to do. Not in America if Bush gets his way. If Bush gets away with this, America will turn into one of those places where the government does what it wants, and then tells the people what to think about it.

There have been places and times where there was no independent media, just the government telling you what’s what. Like the USSR back in the Soviet era. Remember that? Is that what we want for America’s future?

No? Then why is George Bush, the supposed enemy of “big government,” trying to sneak government propaganda into the purportedly independent media? Why don’t Americans know about this? Why don’t more of us care?

Navy Vice Admiral Albert T. Church has reported to Congress that his superiors in the military chain of command are not responsible for the widespread torture of detainees. So there we have it. The Bush administration is innocent.

I’m sure this is going to ricochet around in the press for a while, which I’m sure is the intention. Unfortunately, there are serious problems with Church’s investigation.

First, it was not an independent investigation. Church was investigating his own superiors in the military chain of command. He was investigating the very people who give him orders, the very people who could end his career. He was investigating the very people who have a history of firing colleagues of his, like General Eric Shinseki, who say things they don’t like. It is therefore hardly surprising that Church’s findings echo the party line.

Second, Church’s findings contradict a growing body of evidence that points to the Bush administration. New accounts of now-familiar methods of abuse come out almost constantly. It’s becoming clear that the same torture methods were employed in different places, including Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq; they were also employed by different organizations, including Military Police, Army Intelligence, and the CIA. The evidence clearly points to a pattern of abuse that was pervasive in the armed forces and intelligence services, and not to isolated individal cases. Then there are the memos from the highest levels: Alberto Gonzales calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and “outdated,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld approving practices including stripping, waterboarding, and the use of dogs. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has denounced the Church Report as a coverup. Whether it was a coverup, or just a flawed investigation, one thing is for sure. Much as some may want it to be, the Church report is not the last word on prisoner abuse by the Americans. We need an independent, credible investigation.

“Rendition.” Nice word. Good feel to it. Sounds like something neutral or even pleasant, in a sophisticated sort of way–an impressionist’s rendition of a bucolic spring scene, an orchestra’s rendition of a symphony. Maybe that’s why most Americans aren’t too upset about rendition. Doesn’t sound too bad.

Perhaphs that’s the intention. Lately, strategists for the political elite in this country have embraced a principle that’s an oldie but a goodie: People respond more to words themselves than they respond to the reality behind them. So never say “privatization,” always say “personal accounts”; it’s not the “Iraq War,” it’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom”; never talk about “outsourcing,” always talk about “competitiveness,” etc.

The political elite’s euphemisms for the word “torture” include “non-doctrinal interrogation methods” and “setting the conditions for successful interrogations.” Now we’ve got a new euphemism–”rendition”–for what would more accurately be called “outsourcing torture.”

“Rendition” refers to the practice of sending prisoners to be interrogated in countries like Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Jordan, that are known to use torture. According to the New York Times (3/6/05), “The Bush administration’s secret program to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation has been carried out by the CIA under broad authority that has allowed it to act without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice departments, accourding to current and former government officials.” The Bush administration gave the CIA this power following 9/11, in a directive that remains sectret to this day.

Nobody’s denying that. But hold onto your hats folks, this is where it starts to get tricksy. Bush says “The United States did not hand over people to face torture.” Well, no. But apparently he did send suspects to be interrogated in countries known to routinely torture prisoners. Did the United States come out and explicitly ask countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria to commit torture? Probably not. The U.S. just handed over prisoners to known torturers and told them we needed information out of them fast. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.

The closer you look, the tricksier it gets. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal last year, Bush announced that he “never ordered torture.” Now it appears that the Bush administration empowered the CIA to outsource torture without case-by-case approval from the White House. So yeah, he never personally “ordered torture.” Get it?

Sometimes Bush seems to have trouble pronouncing words or formulating complex sentences. It can be tiring just to listen to him speak. It’s almost impossible to tell whether Bush’s odd, stilted speech is a carefully crafted cover, or a genuine struggle toward self-expression. So nobody’s really anticipating the kind of trickery we see in the subtle reformulations of his language from time to time.

Remember late 2002 and early 2003, when the Bush administration was telling us it knew for sure Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and warned us about the impending threat of “mushroom clouds?” When we invaded and couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, the story changed. Bush said he had always maintained that Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction programs.” Then it became clear Hussein hadn’t had an active weapons of mass destruction program for years, and Bush switched to saying Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” To this day, a substantial percentage of Americans, including a solid majority of Bush’s supporters in the 2004 election, believe Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Bush got away with it.

The same pattern of deception is emerging in Bush’s denials of his administration’s role in torture. As this scandal unfolds, watch for subtle shifts of wording, vague general denials, tricky evasions of questions with canned soundbites that sound like a lawyer wrote them.

Bush is going to try to weasel his way out of this one too. But he can only get away with it if we let him.

The news that came out this weekend should have been on the front page, but I found it after news about Vin Diesel’s new movie in which he makes jokes about changing diapers. Diaper jokes get better play than news about the President of the United States breaking the law to enable to CIA to torture people these days. I call that a shadow across the dignity of America.

It turns out that President Bush himself authorized a plan to round up people in the United States, then send them to countries like Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, where the prisoners would be “interrogated” in ways that are not legal in the United States. In short, President Bush authorized torture.

Reuters news agency cites a high-ranking source within the Bush White House as saying that this is okay, because, although many of the prisoners were tortured, none of them died as a result of the torture.

This is the new standard of morality in the Republican Homeland, once known as the United States of America: Torture is just fine, so long as you torture people in such a way that you don’t kill them.

Yet, I don’t see anyone today who seems very bothered by this news. “Things happen,” they say, and go about their ordinary business.

Someone, somewhere in America needs to stand up and ask in a loud voice, “Do we have no shame?!?”

No one else will ask the question, so let me be that person tonight. Do we in America have no shame anymore?

It is clearly, explictly against the law for prisoners to be shipped overseas to nations that are known to torture their prisoners. Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are nations that are known to torture their prisoners. President Bush ordered prisoners to be sent to these nations to be interrogated using extreme methods. President Bush broke the law.

It is also clearly, explicitly against the law for anyone in the American government to order torture to occur – anywhere at all, not just within American borders. Yet, President Bush sent prisoners to nations knowing that they would be tortured there. Indeed, President Bush appears to have sent these prisoners overseas so that they would be tortured. President Bush ordered torture. President Bush broke the law.

It is also clearly, explicitly against the law for the President of the United States to take people prisoner within the United States and deprive them of their legal rights to be told what crime they are being charged with, to be tried in a court of law by a jury of peers, and to be represented by legal counsel. President Bush ordered prisoners to be held without being charged with a crime, without trial, and without legal representation. President Bush ordered prisoners to be sent overseas so that the government could keep the prisoners secret, and make the prisoners incapable of making appeals for their rights under the law. President Bush broke the law.

President Bush broke the law, over and over again, not just to keep his wife from finding out that he got a blow job on the side, but in order to torture hundreds of human beings.

This is serious stuff, America! This is the kind of thing that Americans fought to be free from back in 1776! Are you so lazy, America, that you will allow a new King George to treat the law like a little plaything that he owns, and can use and abuse at his will?

What will it take, America, for you to stand up and demand that President Bush be brought to justice for his crimes?

Have you no shame, America? Have you no shame?!?

Some people say that it really doesn’t matter whether U.S. President George W. Bush breaks American laws, so long as he is doing so in order to further the cause of democracy and freedom around the world. These people say that critics who worry about matters of legality are missing the point of all the good things that President Bush is trying to do.

The problem that these apologists miss is that, as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, President Bush is setting an example by what he does, not by what he says that he wants to do. The truth is that very few people in foreign countries bother to translate Bush’s speeches, with all their lofty language. Instead, they watch President Bush’s actions, and use them as justification for their own actions. Through his casual dismissal of the rule of law, President Bush makes it easier for the leaders of other nations to ignore the law as well.

China is a chilling example of the danger of President Bush’s lawless style of leadership. Two days ago, China sent out a statement criticizing the United States of America, pointing out that the USA “frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks.” The statement continues, “No country should exclude itself from the international human rights development process or view itself as the incarnation of human rights that can reign over other contries and give orders to the others.”

Of course, the Chinese are right. The problem is that China is guilty of the very same things that it deplores in President Bush’s government. The Chinese critiques seem insincere to us Americans, because we know that the Chinese government is despotic and abusive.

What too many Americans fail to perceive is that the citizens of the rest of the world increasingly regard the United States as we regard China. Because of the lawless abuses of the Bush Administration, the world brushes off any demands that America makes for other nations to respect human rights and international law.

The USA has lost its standing as a defender of law, freedom and democracy because the world watches what we do, and sees that our actions do not match our words. When the most powerful nation on Earth sets such an example of lawless hypocrisy, we should not be surprised when other nations decide that the new order of international relations is that might makes right, and following the rules is a burden to be carried by the weak.