Recent News

February 26, 2005

Since we’re talking about resistance to the illegal war in Iraq, let’s lead off with a story about that war. Our not-so-beloved Emperor says it’s all about liberty; but we all know that’s as big a lie as the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie he and his trained dogs pulled on the world before our criminal invasion of the colony – excuse me, the nation – of Iraq. Liberty requires a free and uncompromised press, right? Not in US-controlled territory, you don’t! According to a news story in The Guardian of Great Britain:

“The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the ‘wrongful’ arrest and apparent ‘brutalisation’ of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq. The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter crash.

“The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were ‘enemy personnel’ who had opened fire on US troops and refused to release them for 72 hours. ‘They were brutalised, terrified and humiliated for three days,’ one source said. ‘It was pretty grim stuff. There was mental and physical abuse.’ He added: ‘It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis.’

“The US military has so far refused to apologise and has bluntly told Reuters to ‘drop’ its complaint. The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked ‘press’. They drove off after US soldiers who were securing the scene opened fire on their Mercedes, but were arrested shortly afterwards. Last night the nephew of veteran Reuters driver and … cameraman (Salem) Ureibi said that US troops had forced his uncle to strip naked and had ordered him to put his shoe in his mouth.

“(The nephew said,) ‘He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: “If you don’t shut up we’ll fuck you.” He added: ‘His treatment was very shameful. He’s very sad. He has also had hospital treatment because of his leg.’

“A spokeswoman for the US military’s coalition press and information centre in Baghdad hung up when the Guardian asked her to comment.”

You can read the entire story – and all the stories I’m passing on to you tonight – on my web site, www.tom-davis.org. Select the “Liberty and Justice for All” link in the left frame there, and then click on the date, February 2005. You’ll see the news I’m giving you right now, with hyperlinks to the complete versions of all of tonight’s stories.

This isn’t the first time US forces have tried to kill – or actually killed – reporters who won’t toe the party line. If you saw the movie The Control Room, you saw actual coverage of an Al-Jazeera cameraman being murdered by US soldiers. Why are they doing it? The United States government, and its military, don’t want us to know what’s really going on over there. They learned, back in the Vietnam War, that if Americans find out just how barbarically our soldiers are behaving – under orders from the top – then we’ll put a stop to it in short order, no matter how much our Fligh-Suit-in-Chief lies to us about “liberty” in his safe little speeches.

Speaking of a free and unmanipulated press, I guess you’ve all heard about question asked at last week’s Presidential press conference by the fellow who calls them Jeff Gannon. There’s more to this story, though, than the corporate media are telling you about. In the article “Midnight Cowboy in the Garden of Bush and Evil,” Sidney Blumenthal reports:

“The latest incident began with a sequence of questions for President Bush at his Jan. 26 press conference. … A man then known as Jeff Gannon, Washington bureau chief of Talon News, rose from his chair to speak in a way that did not seem designed to elicit information. ‘Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. … How are you going to work – you said you’re going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?’

“Each of his assertions was false, gleaned from right-wing talk radio, where Gannon himself was frequently quoted and highlighted as an expert guest. On Fox News, one host hailed him as ‘a terrific Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent.’ For almost two years, in the daily White House press briefings, Gannon had been called upon by press secretary Scott McClellan to break up difficult questioning from the rest of the press. But who was Gannon? His strange non-question to the president inspired inquiry.

“Talon News is a wholly owned subsidiary of a group of Texas Republicans called GOPUSA. … It (turns) out that Jeff Gannon’s real name is James Dale Guckert and that he had no journalistic background whatsoever. His application for a press credential to cover Congress, a process handled there by reporters, was rejected. But at the White House the press office arranged for him to be given a new pass every single day, a highly unusual and deliberate evasion of the regular credentialing that requires an FBI security check, which likely would have discovered more about Guckert.

“Thus a phony journalist planted by a Republican operation, used by the White House press secretary to interrupt questions from the press corps, called on by the president for a safe question, protected from FBI vetting by the press office, disseminating innuendo and smears about critics and opponents of the administration, some of them gay-baiting, was unmasked not only as a hireling and a fraud but as a gay prostitute, with enormous potential for blackmail.”

Our next story is from the Arabic news service Al-Jazeera, about the country that, in the race for the most criminal international terrorist nation, is only number two (after the US, of course) – Israel. They’re number two, so they try harder. As reported by Laila El-Haddad, a journalist based in the occupied Gaza Strip:

“Ten-year-old Nuran Iyad Dib went to school as ecstatic as any schoolgirl should be. But this crisp winter day was special: she would receive her bi-annual report card. As it turned out, she passed with flying colors, which meant a gift from her parents, who had been saving up their dwindling funds for this occasion. The teacher’s comment on top of her report read, ‘We predict a very bright future for Nuran.’

“But Nuran would have no such future, and her gift lies abandoned in a corner of her family’s grieving home. On the afternoon of 31 January 2005, Israeli sniper fire ripped through her face as she stood in her school’s courtyard, lining up for afternoon assembly.

“Her death has many here questioning Israel’s commitment to a ceasefire amid a one-sided truce and virtual period of calm. ‘We extended an olive branch to them and instead of reciprocating they cut our hand off,’ Nuran’s mother cried, sitting in an unpainted cement-block bedroom with nothing but thin foam mattresses on the ground.

“But Nuran was not the first innocent Palestinian schoolchild to meet such a violent death in occupied Gaza. In fact, she was the fifth to be shot dead or maimed by Israeli occupation forces while on the premises of their UN-flagged schools in the past two years.

“According to (United Nations Relief and Works Agency)’s spokesperson Paul McCan, the … organisation has repeatedly protested against the Israeli military’s indiscriminate firing into civilian areas in the occupied Palestinian territory. Nuran’s school, which is about 600 metres away from the border, has been hit on numerous occasions since the start of the conflict, he said.

“Witnesses say the children were clapping their hands and singing the national anthem when the firing started. One bullet pierced the hand of Aysha Isam al-Khatib, while the other hit Nuran in the head. She fell to the ground at once. Bystanders say they assumed she was unconscious until they noticed the pool of blood beneath her shattered skull.”

You heard, I guess, that John Negroponte was appointed to head the nation’s intelligence operations? Our new “intelligence czar” has been ambassador to Honduras, and most recently ambassador to “liberated” Iraq. Who is he? Listen to this article from the web site “Think Progress”:

“You may remember him best as one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. John Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. While there, he was directed the secret arming of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua to help them overthrow the Sandinista government.

“At the time, he also was ‘cozy’ with the chief of the Honduran national police force, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. Martinez ran the infamous Battalion 316 death squad. Battalion 316 ‘kidnapped, tortured and murdered’ dozens of people while Negroponte was ambassador. Negroponte, however, turned a blind eye to the death squad and ignored the gross human rights abuses so Honduras would allow bases for U.S.-backed Contras.

“Negroponte maintained he knew nothing about them, leading to his nickname, ‘the ostrich ambassador.’ The abuses, however, were widely chronicled in local papers. That means he either willfully ignored the mass murders and torturing of citizens or he was so out of touch that he didn’t see the atrocities going on beneath his very nose. Neither of these scenarios is what the United States needs in a National Director of Intelligence.”

Why not Negroponte? After all, our new Attorney General is the man who handed down the official ruling that torture – in the pursuit of “liberty” – is neither illegal nor immoral. Oh – and speaking of torture, do you remember that man who was tortured to death at Abu Ghraib? You probably saw pictures of the American soldier grinning over his corpse and holding his hand in the “V for victory” gesture? Well, there’s more to the story. Seth Hettena, filed this report for the Associated Press:

“An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA interrogation while suspended by his wrists, which had been handcuffed behind his back, according to investigative reports reviewed by The Associated Press. The prisoner died in a position known as “Palestinian hanging,” the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position – which human rights groups condemn as torture – was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations.

“Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA’s ‘ghost’ detainees at Abu Ghraib – prisoners being held secretly by the agency. His death in November 2003 became public with the release of photos of Abu Ghraib guards giving a thumbs-up over his bruised and puffy-faced corpse, which had been packed in ice.

“Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA’s Inspector General’s office. One Army guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said the prisoner’s arms were stretched behind him in a way he had never before seen. Frost told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi’s arms “didn’t pop out of their sockets,” according to a summary of his interview.”

This torture, called “Palestinian hanging” in the article, was actually used first by the Roman Catholic Church, in their torture and mass murder of my spiritual ancestors during what we call the Burning Times. The torture was called “the question” back then, and it involved tying the victim’s hands behind his – or her – back and attaching them to a rope hung over a roof support. He or she was then lifted off the ground with the rope – which is painful enough – and then lowered in short, quick drops, each one forcing the arms more and more out of the shoulder sockets.

This is what our young men and women are being told to do – and doing – in Iraq. The entire war is illegal – and immoral – and must be stopped, whatever it takes. Remember the last “moral war” in history? We were the “good guys” in that one – never mind that the cruel reparations we forced onto Germany after World War I drove them into the degradation that made them ideal customers for Hitler’s insanity. Never mind that; just remember that after World War II, the United States convened the “Nuremberg trials,” at which hundreds of Nazis were convicted of war crimes.

In an article from the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, we learn what the implications of Nuremberg are for us today:

“The Nazis tried at Nuremberg were charged with war crimes and crimes against peace and humanity. Among other things, individuals and organizations were tried for breaking the law in the course of their duty, and it was ruled that one should not obey an immoral order. This judgment has subsequently been expressed in international conventions and in the legislation of many nations.

“We learn from the Nuremberg Trials that the accused should have refused to obey their orders. In other words, the Nuremberg Trials resulted in the creation of an international legal norm, according to which one should not obey a particular law or order, even if it has been legally and democratically accepted into the statute book, if objectively (in legal terminology) it is illegal. Moreover, any soldier obeying an illegal order, even during war, is a war criminal because he should have realized when he received the order that he could not hide behind a dubious duty to obey which he might now claim was inherent in the order he received.

“The problem is to know when to disobey a legal order. Hitler was a legitimate ruler of Germany, and the Third Reich was democratic: Hitler was supported by the vast majority of the German people. The problem was that Hitler was given unlimited powers, which allowed an abuse of the rules of democracy. Therefore, Eichmann was not necessarily hanged for obeying illegal orders; the orders he received – even though it is hard to accept this – were legal and democratic in Germany at that time. But an international constellation was later created which saw these democratic laws of Germany as laws which should not be obeyed and should never have been obeyed because they led to atrocities.”

The kind of atrocities this nation is committing – at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and who knows how many other locations around the world. Committing in your name. The Nuremberg principles – which have become part of our law by treaty – require soldiers to refuse to obey illegal or immoral orders. The war of aggression in Iraq is illegal and immoral. Young men and women in this country – whether in the military or out of it – have an obligation to refuse to participate in that war. And we have a duty to support them in that, in whatever ways we can.

And while we’re on the immorality of the war, remember, too, what those hundreds of billions of dollars could be doing in this country, to protect our children’s health, to repair our decrepit infrastructure, to build schools that will turn out responsible citizens, and on and on. Oh; wait: if our schools turn out responsible citizens, then they might decide to obey the law, and refuse to participate in CheneyBushCorp’s illegal war. Oh. Never mind.

What I want to leave you with tonight is: never give up. Never stop telling people how wrong – how criminal – this war is; never stop working to open people’s eyes about the barbarism with which our rulers are pursuing their aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we, who understand the horrors into which this country has sunk, don’t speak up – don’t do everything we can to stop the atrocity, then history will judge us in the same way we judge the “good people” of Germany during the Holocaust – and we will be condemned right alongside the criminals now in power who led us to it.