U.S. First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them
By Glenn Greenwald
As vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended far beyond waterboarding), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 people and more likely over a million. As such, he is one of the planets most notorious war criminals.
President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obamas immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use.
But now, the Obama administration has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing over them in public. Yesterday, the House of Representatives unveiled a marble bust of former Vice President Cheney, which until a person of conscience vandalizes or destroys it will reside in
At the unveiling ceremony, Cheney was, in the playful words of NPR, lightly roasted as though hes some sort of grumpy though beloved avuncular stand-up comic. Along with George W. Bush, one of the speakers in attendance was Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke movingly of Cheneys kind and generous soul:
As I look around this room and up on the platform, I want to say thank you for letting me crash your family reunion. Im afraid Ive blown his cover. I actually like Dick Cheney. I can say without fear of contradiction, theres never one single time been a harsh word, not one single time in our entire relationship.
Leading American news outlets got in on the fun, as they always do, using the joviality of the event to promote their news accounts and generate visits to their sites:
As NPR put it, This was not an event for Cheney critics on the war or torture or related topics. Totally: why let some unpleasant war criminality ruin a perfectly uplifting ceremony?
It is a long-standing trope among self-flattering Westerners and their allies that a key difference between us and them (Muslim radicals) is that they honor and memorialize their terrorists and celebrate them as martyrs while we scorn and prosecute our own.
Yesterday, the U.S. government unambiguously signaled to the world that not only does it regard itself as entirely exempt from the laws of wars, the principal Nuremberg prohibition against aggressive invasions, and global prohibitions on torture (something that has been self-evident for many years), but believes that the official perpetrators should be honored and memorialized provided they engage in these crimes on behalf of the U.S. government. Thats a message that most of the U.S. media and thus large parts of the American population will not hear, but much of the world will hear it quite loudly and clearly. How could they not?
In other news, U.S. officials this week conceded that a man kept in a cage for 13 years at Guantánamo, the now 37-year-old Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri, was there due to mistaken identity. As Joe Biden said yesterday, I actually like Dick Cheney.
With permission
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43616.htm
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth."
-Voltaire
Though he said relifious crimes I think this absurbity and honor of Cheney
falls within the parameters of incomprehensible and unjust acts.
xocet
(3,871 posts)bobthedrummer
(26,083 posts)CHENEY WATCH
http://www.cheneywatch.org
bobthedrummer
(26,083 posts)Report Concludes C.I.A. Torture Program was Bolstered by American Psychological Association (Ross French University of California-Riverside Today August 13, 2015)
http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/30749
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)had comrades that were tortured by the Japanese who were either killed
or their minds destroyed for the rest of their lives and talked to the living ones afterwards.
I talk to him about what this nation was doing way back when Abu Garbi came out...and sent him the photos since we didn't see them on TV......... he said WAR CRIMES and he worked for the Joint Chiefs at one time during the cold war.
There is something seriously going on with the manipulation and psychological conditioning of the public, either through TV, movies or news that has changed what should be normal moral outrage to one of indifference, approval or moral ambiguity of what is right and what would be morally reprehensible in our former enlighten culture.
And now this is put on the back page if at all.