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Rogue Nation
« on: 2007-12-02 13:04:00 » |
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US says it has right to kidnap British citizens
Source:Times Online
Authors:David Leppard
Dated :2007-12-2
AMERICA has told Britain that it can "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.
The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.
Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the "extraordinary rendition" of terrorist suspects.
The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.
Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.
The US government's view emerged during a hearing involving Stanley Tollman, a former director of Chelsea football club and a friend of Baroness Thatcher, and his wife Beatrice.
The Tollmans, who control the Red Carnation hotel group and are resident in London, are wanted in America for bank fraud and tax evasion. They have been fighting extradition through the British courts.
During a hearing last month Lord Justice Moses, one of the Court of Appeal judges, asked Alun Jones QC, representing the US government, about its treatment of Gavin, Tollman's nephew. Gavin Tollman was the subject of an attempted abduction during a visit to Canada in 2005.
Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. "The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared," he said.
He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him. If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse "it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s"
Mr Justice Ouseley, a second judge, challenged Jones to be "honest about [his] position."
Jones replied: "That is United States law."
He cited the case of Humberto Alvarez Machain, a suspect who was abducted by the US government at his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1990. He was flown by Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Texas for criminal prosecution.
Although there was an extradition treaty in place between America and Mexico at the time — as there currently is between the United States and Britain — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the Mexican had no legal remedy because of his abduction.
In 2005, Gavin Tollman, the head of Trafalgar Tours, a holiday company, had arrived in Toronto by plane when he was arrested by Canadian immigration authorities.
An American prosecutor, who had tried and failed to extradite him from Britain, persuaded Canadian officials to detain him. He wanted the Canadians to drive Tollman to the border to be handed over. Tollman was escorted in handcuffs from the aircraft in Toronto, taken to prison and held for 10 days.
A Canadian judge ordered his release, ruling that the US Justice Department had set a "sinister trap" and wrongly bypassed extradition rules. Tollman returned to Britain.
Legal sources said that under traditional American justice, rendition meant capturing wanted people abroad and bringing them to the United States. The term "extraordinary rendition"; was coined in the 1990s for the kidnapping of terror suspects from one foreign country to another for interrogation.
There was concern this weekend from Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP, who said: "The very idea of kidnapping is repugnant to us and we must handle these cases with extreme caution and a thorough understanding of the implications in American law."
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: "This law may date back to bounty hunting days, but they should sort it out if they claim to be a civilised nation."
The US Justice Department declined to comment.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #1 on: 2007-12-02 14:41:37 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2007-12-02 13:04:00
<snip>
US says it has right to kidnap British citizens
Source:Times Online
Authors:David Leppard
Dated :2007-12-2
AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.</snip>
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[Blunderov] Not altogether such terrible news as it may seem perhaps - sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Rumsfeld had to flee France in ignominious haste recently due to the possibility of arrest there and perhaps we can look forward to the day when he is, along with numerous of his fellow conspirators, "rendered" to another country, perhaps an Islamic one *, where the legal matters are taken very seriously indeed.
Somewhere out there is a parralell universe in which lavishly benefacted vigilante organistions a la Simon Weisenthal hunt down Neo Con war criminals and hand them over to countries who have a stern sense of duty about such matters. I imagine that no amount of whining from Americans about such quaint notions as "international law" and "habeus corpus" would garner much sympathy in this universe, or for that matter, in any other ones either.
Best Regards
* Boots have a habit of landing up on quiet unexpected other feet sometimes...life does seem to love it's little ironies.
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Hermit
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #2 on: 2007-12-02 16:27:42 » |
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Certainly there is precedent. The (illegal) invasion of several countries in order to drag their leaders off to kangaroo-trials in American courts - and worse - does come to mind.Yet the US still has the embarrassing "Bomb the Hague" legislation on its statute books. One would have imagined that the contradiction here would lead somebody to raise an eyebrow. Would one - or the other - of these not be illegal in terms of the other? Or only if committed by countries other than the US?
At this point it seems as if it might be technically interesting and financially rewarding to explore the legal ramifications of opening a bureau to advise other countries on the kidnapping of American citizens and residents wanted elsewhere in the world; given that the practice of kidnapping is now being argued as legitimate, by the US "Justice" department no less.
Like GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al, the case of one Jose Padilla comes readily to mind.
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Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #3 on: 2007-12-02 16:52:16 » |
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[Blunderov] An interview with Noam Chomsky in which he addresses the role of intellectuals in modern Western society.
I wonder if there is some relationship between the suborning of the press and the abdication of intellectuals generally? Once again I wonder where we would all be without the internets tubes! Firmly under the jackboot I've little doubt. Keyboard warriors of the left, you're doing a great job! Keep those memes marching. "Nil carborundum illegitimae".
http://www.artsandopinion.com/2007_v6_n6/chomsky-4.htm
NOAM CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky, University Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder of the modern science of linguistics and political activist, is a powerhouse of anti-imperialist activism in the United States today. The interview is republished with the permission of ZNET.
________________
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS
GABRIEL MATTHEW SCHIVONE: What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it's worth 'speaking truth' to the professional scholarship as well or differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here?
CHOMSKY: I'm always uneasy about the concept of "speaking truth," as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavour. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.
As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.
Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.
GMS: In your view, what is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which, as you assert in some of the things you've written, correlate with them a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?
CHOMSKY: Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that's kind of elementary, I don't know how it can be discussed.
And the people who we call 'intellectuals' are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom-not a hundred percent, but quite a lot-and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.
GMS: I think it may do well for us to go over a bit the beginnings and evolution of the ideological currents which now prevail throughout modern social intellectual life in the U.S. Essentially, from where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes having been referred to as a 'bought' or 'secular priesthood'?
CHOMSKY: Well, it really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion -- not just in the United States but in Europe, too -- of what was then sometimes called 'a new class' of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role-and of course they liked that idea.
Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called 'scientific management'. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a 'responsible class' of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world's problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the 'vulgar masses' who might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present.
Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it's a very attractive conception that, 'We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.'
Actually, as I've pointed out in some of the things I've written, it's very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it's strikingly similar. In both cases there's a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the 'meddlesome and ignorant outsiders,' namely, the population, who just get in the way.
It's not an entirely new conception: it's just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn't have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.
There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, 'the best and the brightest.' The 'smart guys' who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.
It's a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you're dedicated to it. It's one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the 'ignorant and meddlesome outsiders' to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.
Now, that's the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they're authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking. So, economists tell you, 'We know how to run the economy'; the political scientists tell you, 'We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don't have special knowledge and training.'
When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It's not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretence, and sometimes, some justification for the claims. But what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.
GMS: Given the, albeit, self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?
CHOMSKY: My feeling is that they're nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society-or when McNamara wrote about it, or others -- there's a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they're not going to be in the planning sectors. So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.
And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this -- in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the 'left commentators' of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he's conforming to power interests and that he's keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily-and correctly-that nobody tells him what to say. He writes anything he wants -- which is absolutely true. But if he wasn't writing the things he did he wouldn't have a column in the New York Times.
That's the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not want -- or often are not able-to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free -- and indeed they are-as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That's as old as history in the modern period. It's often very explicit.
Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out that the merchants and manufacturers-the economic forces of his day-are the 'principal architects of policy', and they make sure that their own interests are 'most peculiarly attended to', no matter how grievous the effect on others, including the people in England. And that's a good principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty much to the present. When you get people with management and decision -- making skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual decisions-within a framework that's set within the real concentrations of power. And now it's not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith's day, it's the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on. But, stray too far beyond their concerns and you won't be the decision-maker.
It's not a mechanical phenomenon, but it's overwhelmingly true that the people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework of the people who fundamentally own and run the society. That's why you have a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different ideas.
GMS: What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?
CHOMSKY: You almost never find anyone, whether it's in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, 'I'm really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.' Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: 'We're working for the benefit of the people.' The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who's trying to bring freedom and justice to the world-and they probably all believe it. I'm not suggesting that they're lying. There's an array of routine justifications for whatever you're doing. And it's easy to believe them. It's very hard to look into the mirror and say, 'Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.' It's much easier to say, 'That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it's for the benefit of everyone.'
Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called 'the theologian of the establishment.' And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it's what you do if you're an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, 'Even if you try to do good, evil's going to come out of it; that's the paradox of grace.' And that's wonderful for war criminals. 'We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.' And it's influential. So, I don't think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they're doing, they'll say: 'We're trying to preserve the peace of the world.' People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they'll say, 'Well, that's the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice,' and so on.
But, we don't take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They'll give you the same answers. But, we don't take that seriously because they can know what they're doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that's their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that's their choice. But it doesn't change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It's very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.
In fact, one of the-maybe the most-elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he'd be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It's not even discussable. Because we don't apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.
There's a lot of talk about 'terror' and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it's considered highly moral; it's considered self-defense. Now, their terror against us, that's awful, and terrible.
But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that's accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.
GMS: What about criminal responsibility and intellectuals? Nuremberg is an interesting precedent.
CHOMSKY: The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. First of all, the Nuremberg trials -- of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until today – is by far the most serious. Nevertheless, it was very seriously flawed, and was recognized as such. When Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be crimes. So, it was ex post facto. 'We're now declaring these things you did to be crimes.' That is already questionable.
Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we didn't do it.
So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden aren't crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it's not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, 'Yeah, that's the kind of thing we did.' And, therefore, they weren't sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that's the way it ran through. Now, that's a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that's the most serious one.
When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution, spoke to the tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they were doing, he said, to paraphrase, that: 'We are handing these defendants a poisoned chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same punishments, otherwise this whole trial is a farce.' Well, you can look at the history from then on, and we've sipped from the poisoned chalice many times, but it's never been considered a crime. So, that means we are saying that trial was a farce.
Interestingly, in Jackson's opening statement he claimed that the defense did not wish to incriminate the whole German populace from whence the defendants came, but only the "planners and designers" of those crimes, "the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness of this terrible war."
That's correct. And that's another principle which we flatly reject. So, at Nuremberg, we weren't trying the people who threw Jews into crematoria; we were trying the leaders. When we ever have a trial for crimes it's of some low-level person-like a torturer from Abu Ghraib -- not the people who were setting up the framework from which they operate. And we certainly don't try political leaders for the crime of aggression. That's out of the question. The invasion of Iraq was about as clear-cut a case of aggression than you can imagine. In fact, by the Nuremberg principles, if you read them carefully, the U.S. war against Nicaragua was a crime of aggression for which Ronald Reagan should have been tried. But, it's inconceivable; you can't even mention it in the West. And the reason is our radical denial of the most elementary moral truisms. We just flatly reject them. We don't even think we reject them, and that's even worse than rejecting them outright.
I mean, if we were able to say to ourselves, 'Look, we are totally immoral, we don't accept elementary moral principles,' that would be a kind of respectable position in a certain way. But, when we sink to the level where we cannot even perceive that we're violating elementary moral principles and international law, that's pretty bad. But that's the nature of the intellectual culture -- not just in the United States -- but in powerful societies everywhere.
GMS: You mentioned Doenitz escaping culpability for his crimes. Two who didn't escape punishment and were among the most severely punished at Nuremberg were Julius Streicher, an editor of a major newspaper, and Dr. Wolfram Sievers of the Ahnenerbe Society's Institute of Military Scientific Research, whose own crimes were traced back to the University of Strasbourg. Not the typical people prosecuted for international war crimes given their civilian professions.
CHOMSKY: And there's a justification for that, namely, those defendants could understand what they were doing. They could understand the consequences of the work that they were carrying out. But, of course, if we were to accept this awful principle of universality, that would have a pretty long reach -- to journalists, university researchers etc.
GMS: Let me quote for you the mission statement of the Army Research Office. This "premier extramural" research agency of the Army is grounded upon "developing and exploiting innovative advances to insure the Nation's technological superiority." It executes this mission "through conduct of an aggressive basic science research program on behalf of the Army so that cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the general store of scientific knowledge will be optimally used to develop and improve weapons systems that establish land-force dominance."
CHOMSKY: This is a pentagon office, and they're doing their job. In our system, the military is under civilian control. Civilians assign a certain task to the military: their job is to obey, and carry the role out, otherwise you quit. That's what it means to have a military under civilian control. So, you can't really blame them for their mission statement. They're doing what they're told to do by the civilian authorities. The civilian authorities are the culpable ones. If we don't like those policies (and I don't, and you don't), then we go back to those civilians who designed the framework and gave the orders.
You can, as the Nuremberg precedents indicated, be charged with obeying illegal orders, but that's often a stretch. If a person is in a position of military command, they are sworn, in fact, to obey civilian orders, even if they don't like them. If you say they're really just criminal orders, then, yes, they can reject them, and get into trouble and so on. But this is just carrying out the function that they're ordered to carry out. So, we go straight back to the civilian authority and then to the general intellectual culture, which regards this as proper and legitimate. And now we're back to universities, newspapers, the centers of the doctrinal system. GMS: It's just the forthright honesty of the mission statement which is also very striking, I think.
CHOMSKY: Well, it's like going to an armoury and finding out they're making better guns. That's what they're supposed to do. Their orders are, 'Make this gun work better.' And, if they're honest, they'll say, 'that's what we're doing; that's what the civilian authorities told us to do.'
At some point, people have to ask, 'Do I want to make a better gun?' That's where the Nuremberg issues arise. But, you really can't blame people very severely for carrying out the orders that they're told to carry out when there's nothing in the culture that tells them there's anything wrong with it. I mean, you have to be kind of like a moral hero to perceive it, to break out of the cultural framework and say, 'Look, what I'm doing is wrong.' Like somebody who deserts from the army because they think the war is wrong. That's not the place to assign guilt, I think. Just as at Nuremberg. As I said, they didn't try the SS guards who threw people into crematoria, at Nuremberg. They might have been tried elsewhere, but not at Nuremberg.
GMS: But, in this case, the results of the ARO's mission statement in harvesting scholarly work for better weapons design, it's professors, scholars, researchers, scientific designers, etc., who have these choices to focus serious intellectual effort and to be so used for such ends, and who aren't acting necessarily from direct orders but are acting more out of freewill.
CHOMSKY: It's freewill, but don't forget that there's a general intellectual culture that raises no objection to this.
Let's take the Iraq war. There's libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking 'What should we do?' Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that 'carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows' (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I've written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that's part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? Do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that 'to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows?'
So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who's responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice -- they're responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can't. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.
And take Iran. Both political parties -- and practically the whole press -- accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honourable, that 'all options are on the table,' presumably including nuclear weapons, to quote Hilary Clinton and everyone else. 'All options are on the table' means we threaten war. Well, there's something called the U.N. Charter, which outlaws 'the threat or use of force' in international affairs. Does anybody care? Actually, I saw one op-ed somewhere by Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist close to the government, who pointed out that threats are serious violations of international law. But that's so rare that when you find it it's like finding a diamond in a pile of hay or something. It's not part of the culture. We're allowed to threaten anyone we want, and to attack anyone we want. And, when a person grows up and acts in a culture like that, they're culpable in a sense, but the culpability is much broader.
I was just reading a couple days ago a review of a new book by Steven Miles, a medical doctor and bio-ethicist, who ran through 35,000 pages of documents he got from the Freedom of Information Act on the torture in Abu Ghraib. And the question that concerned him is, 'What were the doctors doing during all of this?' All through those torture sessions there were doctors, nurses, behavioural scientists and others who were organizing them. What were they doing when this torture was going on? Well, you go through the detailed record and it turns out that they were designing and improving it. Just like Nazi doctors.
Robert Jay Lifton did a big study on Nazi doctors. He points out in connection with the Nazi doctors that, in a way, it's not those individual doctors who had the final guilt, it was a culture and a society which accepted torture and criminal activities as legitimate. The same is true with the tortures at Abu Ghraib. I mean, just to focus on them as if they're somehow terrible people is just a serious mistake. They're coming out of a culture that regards this as legitimate. Maybe there are some excesses you don't really do but torture in interrogation is considered legitimate.
There's a big debate now on, 'Who's an enemy combatant?' a big technical debate. Suppose we invade another country and we capture somebody who's defending the country against our invasion: what do you mean to call them an 'enemy combatant?' If some country invaded the United States and let's say you were captured throwing a rock at one of the soldiers, would it be legitimate to send you to the equivalent of Guantanamo, and then have a debate about whether you're a 'lawful' or 'unlawful' combatant? The whole discussion is kind of, like, off in outer space somewhere. But, in a culture which accepts that we own and rule the world, it's reasonable. But, also, we should go back to the roots of the intellectual or moral culture, not just to the individuals directly involved.
GMS: There seems to be some very serious aberrations and defects in our society and our level of culture. How, in your view, might they be corrected and a new level of culture be established, say, one in which torture isn't accepted? (After all, slavery and child labour were each accepted for a long period of time and now are not).
CHOMSKY: Your examples give the answer to the question, the only answer that has ever been known. Slavery and child labour didn't become unacceptable by magic. It took hard, dedicated, courageous work by lots of people. The same is true of torture, which was once completely routine.
If I remember correctly, the renowned Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie wrote somewhere that prisons began to proliferate in Norway in the early 19th century. They weren't much needed before, when the punishment for robbery could be driving a stake through the hand of the accused. Now it's perhaps the most civilized country on earth.
There has been a gradual codification of constraints against torture, and they have had some effect, though only limited, even before the Bush regression to savagery. Alfred McCoy's work reviews that ugly history. Still, there is improvement, and there can be more if enough people are willing to undertake the efforts that led to large-scale rejection of slavery and child labour -- still far from complete.
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #4 on: 2007-12-03 14:15:17 » |
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Bluderov
Quote:| I wonder if there is some relationship between the suborning of the press and the abdication of intellectuals generally? Once again I wonder where we would all be without the internets tubes! Firmly under the jackboot I've little doubt. Keyboard warriors of the left, you're doing a great job! Keep those memes marching. "Nil carborundum illegitimae". |
I am certain that if it wasn't for the Internet 1) making foreign sources for domestic news so readily available and 2) providing viability of non-admintration-friendly domestic opinion and news source - the current US administration would have succeeded in nearly identical ways that the nazi propaganda machine did. As it is they still keep roughly a quarter to 30% of all US citizens under an unyielding and dogmatic trance of blind allegiance. Its the only thing that saves the administration from impeachment or even an outright rebellion/coup in my estimation.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Blunderov
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #5 on: 2007-12-04 02:31:02 » |
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Quote from: Mo on 2007-12-03 14:15:17 | <snip>As it is they still keep roughly a quarter to 30% of all US citizens under an unyielding and dogmatic trance of blind allegiance. Its the only thing that saves the administration from impeachment or even an outright rebellion/coup in my estimation.</snip> |
[Blunderov] Much of the trouble stems from the fact that America has drunk the Kool Aid about the "American Way" being the best of all possible systems. "That's the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not want -- or often are not able-to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free -- and indeed they are-as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere" as Noam Chomsky previously remarked.
Appended is a piece extolling the potential of "the internets" to produce a new political dynamic in America. The author is perhaps a little precipitate in his enthusiasm - at what exact point does a person become "too rich" for instance? His heart is in the right place though, at least I believe so. But the new American legislation with regard to "homegrown* terrorism" might have a different view. Now that would be cat's-cradle of note; an American prosecuted in America for being too "radical" in his defence of democracy whilst his elected leaders inflict that same "democracy" on other parts of the world by force of arms.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_w__chris_071203_an_internet_party_ca.htm
An Internet Party can be created without endless political donations!
by W. Christopher Epler (Bill) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com
An Internet Party can be created without endless political donations!
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Wow, let's say that again: an Internet Party can be created without endless political donations.
Well, we all know about financial donations, don't we, but what about an "Internet Party"?
Internet Party meaning what? Well, there are some rough answers to this question, but basically it means we're creating a radically new social form for expressing the public will.
OK; simple question. Is the Democratic Party the will of the people, or the will of the elites? Alas, most of us well know by now that America has a ONE dem/pug party system whose sole purpose is the lick the boots of America's pig, pig rich (the one percent or less).
So, does the Democratic Party represent the will of Americans or not? [we should probably pause to give us a chance to throw up] NO, it absolutely doesn't represent the will of the people -- but as a matter of fact NOTHING in American politics honors and promotes the will of the people.
So politics belongs to the elites? You can bet the farm that politics belongs to the elites -- and the dems belong to the elites just as much as the pugs.
So, where does this leave us?
Its leaves us with what may be the life and death challenge of this millennia. Civilization almost certainly hangs on the degree to which we aggressively replace traditional/establishment politics with radically new social forms which ARE grounded in freedom and Democracy!
Relatedly, evolution loves Democratic species and selects out the biological cancers (e.g., the elites) who/that are killer parasites of vast social/biological infrastructures. When an airhead heiress has the wealth of a small country, such an infinitely immoral imbalance of wealth has murderous consequences on the health of the human species.
The good news of scientific truth is that the Earth is all for freedom and Democracy! Lots of opportunities of survival experiments and medically healthy life forms. But the pig, pig rich are deadly tumors in the biosphere and their one dimensional greed is a like metastasized cancer.
BUT (unlike us), the Earth know very well how to treat its cancers. "One way or another" they get selected out. And it isn't always pretty.
But back to the Internet Party (maybe eventually we can come up with a better name, but for now, let's use this one).
The net is information, knowledge, and data beyond our dreams. But that's enough for our needs. Who needs money (well, maybe a little from time to time but NOTHING like the bottomless pits of traditional politics) when we have virtually limitless information and knowledge AND the means to brainstorm and communicate in the millions.
Two words: Information and Communication. That's where the 3rd millennia is heading, and these two words will make possible social forms in the very near future which WILL be the will of the people (and even more specifically, the will of the majority).
let's start the wheels turning to bury the dinosaurs of the Republican and Democratic Parties. Or more generally, to bury elite-dictated traditional/establishment politics.
The next point is tad "intellectual", but it's that the "structure" of establishment politics (which is vast and immoral) IS ITSELF the problem. It's a structure which will NEVER represent the will of the American people. Of course, no one should be surprised by this since it was invented in the first place by the elites to make absolutely certain that pig, pig rich people (i.e., the vampire elites) STAY pig, pig rich people.
In other words this "social form" is contaminated with elite/fascist greed. The thing is, politics works . . . but not for us. NEVER for us.
Moral: we need radically new social forms to save our country. We need radically new social forms to express the POWER OF THE PEOPLE, not candyass, elite "political games" in which the dice are always loaded and the deck is always stacked. Remember the much sacrificed for "Democratic Congress" which PROGRESSIVES elected in 2006, only to discover that it contained a higher concentration of elected cowards and traitors than any elected body for the last several hundred years. Wimps, wimps, and wall to wall wimps -- and wimps on the payroll of the elites.
See, it's really hopeless. The Democratic Party is UNFIXABLE. Even if we worked at it for the next hundred years, it can NEVER be liberalized, because it's made up slob/slaves of the astronomically rich.
So any expression of the public will has to come from politics-transcending forms. We tried the old way and look at the trash in Washington: liars, cowards, hypocrites, and bought and paid for monkey puppets of the elites. NONE OF THIS WILL EVER CHANGE. It may be painfully disillusioning to admit this, but NONE OF THIS WILL EVER CHANGE.
What has to change is US! We have to start an Internet Party to save America and the Earth.
But what could an Internet Party "do". That's actually easier to answer than you may think, since there's LOTS of power of the people things we can do with internet information and communication.
For openers (and I know you've heard this before, so please bear with me) the time has come for carefully orchestrated and VERY selectively targeted national (or maybe even international) boycotts.
The first critical thing to say here is PLEASE do not respond to this peaceful, legal social revolution strategy (for that's what it could be) with cynicism and passivity, because that's enabling the status quo and the status quo is a living hell. The status quo is our country and planet are rapidly DYING because of the fascist/elites, so if this all seems passé or idealistic, may I suggest you take a hike and leave this REVOLUTIONARY concept to those of us who have the passion (and ability?) to make it happen.
This is not the time of niceties! We are fighting for our very world and we MUST stay open to apolitical possibilities and strategies which could literally be a tipping point of human civilization. And boycotts, massively organized and orchestrated (ON THE NET) would blind side these vampire pigs beyond their dreams. Corporate fascism is impressive on the outside, but it has a very soft and vulnerable underbelly to laser boycotts. We could hurt these Earth killing (and they ARE killing the Earth) corporations MASSIVELY. How hopeful for the Earth it would be to watch their bottom lines plummet when they find themselves at the top of a list of say, 10 circulating cancerous corporations that conceivably would be boycotted by MILLIONS of consumers. It would be like watching a balloon slowly deflate. Of course, the truly responsible challenge would be to target first those corporations and advertisers who are murdering our nation and the Earth the most voraciously.
So, boycotts on a national and/or international scale would be "new thing" on the planet. They would be a "new thing" in the realm of what we used to call politics (we would no longer need that word).
But boycotts would only the first step. We can also do national strikes and constitutionally mandated referendums. The truth of the matter is that NON political strategies abound, but the elites have just been tragically successful at keeping us playing the political game. Remember that donkey chasing a carrot tied on a string in front of his head? That's establishment politics. And just as the donkey will NEVER get the carrot, neither will we EVERY get political representation from these pugs and dems at the hog trough. Listen, you can hear them grunt and snort as they laugh at what fools we are to trust them.
SO much more can be said. Not only by this one citizen, but by ALL of patriotic Americans who know with absolutely certainty that looking to traditional politics for "help" is like eating ground glass.
Point blank: Politics is Death. Radical NEW FORMS for revolutionary social change are LIFE. It's that simple. It's that point blank.
And one last thing. Remember and celebrate that we are liberals and progressive and that means (among a thousand other things) that we can think circles around these one dimensional greed heads. Also remember that the elites are biologically/culturally "in grown" (they certainly never want to marry a cattle consumer -- that's us). So they "inbreed" and as the Royal Family of England has shown us, that's a pretty stupid thing to do.
Inbreeding = Stupidity, whether it's biological or social, so, hey, we live in a different IQ universe from these elite morons. They may be rich (with inherited money!), but they're "primates" compared to us. And please don't think this is hyperbole (look it up George). This is the way it is. Our democratic intuitions have kept us in the genetic soup, so we aren't stunted by inbreeding.
So, really we have three things going for us. One: the information "organism" of the internet. Two: the nearly infinite communication permutations the internet makes possible in our town hall meetings (e.g., this site). Three: We're so G. D. much smarter than these vicious goons (and not to forget the loony tunes Armaggedonites!) that it's pathetic. Most of them are probably hominids anyway (look it up George). And who cares about the exceptions that prove the rule?
How can we lose?
So let's get these "alternative forms" airborne as soon as possible. I want to see EXXON and Cheney/Halliburton brought down in 2008, but mostly I want to see my beloved country, "The Land of the free and the home of the brave," resurrected. And even more, I want our revered Mother Nature to be healed and nurtured, just as she has nurtured us since the beginning of human existence.
Each of us (and our children) doesn’t have to die like a dog. And the Earth doesn't have to die like a dog. We can TURN THIS ALL AROUND with kickass IQ, apolitical, hardball strategies. We can take back our world and we can start immediately.
BUT NEVER WITH ESTABLISHMENT POLITICS.
Viva America! Viva Mother Nature! And Viva national/international boycotts!
********************************************************************************
W. Christopher Epler (Bill)
<http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>
*[Bl.] I'm fascinated by the folksy characterisation "homegrown". Why not simply "domestic" for instance? It is quite skillful propaganda actually. It invokes, from the fascist point of view, a useful set of associations. Illegal cannabis cultivation. Weeds. Subculture. Non conformism. Deviance. Ruby Ridge.
"International" terrorists can be refused admission to the USA or otherwise interdicted. "National" terrorists are a different problem because they have certain legal rights not enjoyed by foreigners. Necessary therefore is a mechanism with which to remove these rights. Consequently the rights of the citizen, previously held to be inalienable, are now subject to the approval of a committee. (Apparently not much remains of the former American constitution if such legislation can become law.)
It has long been a contention of the fascisti that "terrorists" (or whatever the currently fashionable term of approbrium might happen to be) "exploit" democratic freedoms to advance their anti-democratic agendas and that these freedoms are therefore a liability to the electorate. ISTM that this is a specious and transparently self serving argument. Of course people do not wish to be blown up, but the price of total serfdom seems a bit steep to pay in return for safety from an event which is even less likely than death in an aircraft accident. In this context it is interesting to note that death in motor vehicle accidents are, I think, the fourth leading cause of deaths in Western societies. This is accepted as a necessary sacrifice on the altar of economic progress. Somehow though, the occasional terrorist outrage is not at all accepted as a necessary price to pay for social progress and freedom, even though the terrorist body count is far, far less than the persistent carnage on the roads.
Anyone would think that it is only these "freedoms" which make it possible for "terrorists" to operate at all. How absurd. Normal security and police measures are sufficient to keep terrorist inflicted casualties well below the rates we accept as being the "normal" consequences of our other endevours.
Of course I do not mean to suggest that because some evils are accepted as "necessary", terrorism should be viwed in the same light. What I am suggesting is that the fascist response is clearly disproportionate to the actual threat. Equally clearly there is a hidden agenda. What are they so afraid of? Revolution perhaps?
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letheomaniac
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #6 on: 2007-12-04 04:49:58 » |
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[letheomaniac] I have always struggled to discern the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, and have therefore regarded the US as being a one-party state disguised as a democracy. Good to hear that someone 'on the inside' seems to be having the same difficulty.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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Blunderov
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #7 on: 2007-12-06 00:26:15 » |
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Quote from: letheomaniac on 2007-12-04 04:49:58
[letheomaniac] I have always struggled to discern the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, and have therefore regarded the US as being a one-party state disguised as a democracy. Good to hear that someone 'on the inside' seems to be having the same difficulty.
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[Blunderov] You are not alone in your puzzlement. The Mighty Tim speaks:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_timothy__071205_republicans_and_demo.htm
Republicans and Democrats have Become Obsolete
by Timothy V. Gatto
http://www.opednews.com
The American political landscape has changed and I believe the change is permanent. The two main political parties should be disbanded, because they are irrelevant. Most Americans that don’t make their living in politics see no great difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The issues that separate them no longer apply.
The Republican Party that once believed in smaller government and a smaller role in social programs while favoring business and States Rights (A great departure from the party of Abraham Lincoln) now believes in government interference in everything except the corporate bottom line.
The Democrats, once the party of the Middle Class and large scale involvement in social programs while defending the American taxpayer from corporate class-warfare is a thing of the past, both political parties and the people that comprise them can’t be recognizes from each other without a pundit telling us which side they are on.
There are two separate and distinct political views in our nation today. They are not the Republican view or the Democratic ideas of government. The two main schools of political thought in America today are the politicians that support involvement of big money and corporations to lead this nation, and the people that want a return to constitutional law and exclusion of multi-national stateless corporations in running the affairs of this country.
We may just as well call these two differing sets of people political caucuses. In fact, the divide is so great that this country would be better off scraping the two political parties that dominate this nation and forming two parties that accurately reflect the political realities of today’s political climate. We could call these two differing parties the Corporatists and the Constitutionalists. This would be a better way to differentiate the politicians that run for office, and make the process easier for the people of the United States.
To illustrate my point, let us take the current field of candidates and separate them not by the confusing labels of Democrats and Republicans which mean absolutely nothing in today’s political reality, but separate them into the two political divisions I mentioned above. It is apparent that the party lines would not only be drastically different, but it would also be much easier to differentiate these politicians by ideology.
Corporatists; Biden, Dodd, Clinton, Obama, Romney, Guiliani, Tancredo, Huckabee, Thompson, McCain. Hunter, Keyes
Constitutionalists: Kuchinich, Edwards, Richardson, Paul, Gravel
Makes quite a difference doesn’t it? I would rather see a debate along these lines than a debate among so called “Democrats and Republicans”. These two parties have outlived their usefulness. To use an old expression, for most of the candidates that claim membership in either party, there is not a “Dime’s worth of difference” between them. Either you accept that corporations are covered by First Amendment rights which of course they are not (see my article “Revolution by any Other Name…” which explains why this is not the case) or you accept the myth that corporations have “personhood”. Either way, at least you will understand what you are voting for.
Blindly trusting the corporate class to lead this nation is the worst development to come out of the last fifty years (or longer). When you trust businessmen to lead the most powerful nation on Earth, you are setting the stage for an Orwellian society where individual rights are pushed aside for profit and greed. This is just commonsense. To understand how our government is being transformed, ask someone that works for a large corporation how they are treated when they express their individuality.
That’s the way I see it.
http://liberalpro.blogspot.com
Former Chairman of the Liberal Party of America, Tim is a retired Army Sergeant. He currently lives in South Carolina. A regular contributor to OpEdNews, he is the author of Kimchee Kronicles and is currently at work on a new novel.
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Blunderov
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Re:Rogue Nation
« Reply #8 on: 2007-12-07 13:19:39 » |
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[Blunderov] Presumably the USA would also have no objection to Israelis being kidnapped, having declared that the USA is comfortable with the procedure. Under the circumstances it's a bit of a mystery that the USA should have made such a caterwhauling about those Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped a while back.
Isn't it interesting how, if the Zionist foreign ministry is to be believed, it could only be the "extreme left" that would be gauche enough to wish to press charges against Dichter. The assumption seems to be that everybody else understands that there is one law for Israelis and another law for the Eichmanns of this world. "Nudge, nudge, wink wink. Say no more." (It also goes without saying that anyone who insists on standing on principle in this way must also be an anti-semite of course...)
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=16234
Israeli avoids UK arrest threat
An Israeli minister has cancelled a visit to the UK over concerns he could be arrested on war crimes charges.
The foreign ministry said an "extreme leftist" organisation was likely to file a legal complaint against Public Security Minister Avi Dichter.
He was the domestic intelligence agency chief in 2002 when Israel bombed a Hamas military leader’s house killing him, his bodyguard and 15 civilians.
British law allows private citizens to file complaints of alleged war crimes.
"Minister Dichter has cancelled this trip following threats of him being arrested in Great Britain. This is an intolerable situation," said his spokesman Barak Sari.
He had been invited to London as keynote speaker at a counter terrorism seminar at Kings College.
The visit was called off after the UK government had been unable to guarantee him immunity, his office said, in the event of a private citizens complaint leading to an arrest warrant for war crimes.
’Mistaken attack’
The Shin Beth agency, headed by Mr Dichter between 2000 and 2005, helped plan the assassination of Hamas military commander Saleh Shehada in July 2002.
Nine children were killed in the raid. A one-tonne bomb was dropped on Mr Shehada’s house. The dead included his wife and his three children.
In the face of international condemnation, including Israel’s main ally the US, Israel conducted an investigation and concluded that the raid had been a "mistake".
In 2006, the Israeli army scrapped plans to send one of its generals to a course at a British military academy over fears he could be arrested on war crimes charges.
A year earlier, former Gen Doron Almog narrowly avoided arrest for his involvement in the Shehada assassination. He refused to leave his aircraft after a tip-off by Israeli diplomats.
Correspondents say this is the first time an Israeli minister has cancelled a visit over fears of a private citizen’s complaint.
Story from BBC NEWS:
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