- Americans traditionally thought of their country as a
"city upon a hill," a "light unto the world." Today
only the deluded think that. Polls show that the rest of the world regards
the United States and Israel as the two greatest threats to peace.
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- This is not surprising. In the words of Arthur Silber:
"The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans,
that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination
to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture,
and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home.
That is what we stand for."
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- Addressing his fellow Americans, Silber asks the paramount
question, "Why do you support" these horrors?
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- His question goes to the heart of the matter. Do we Americans
have any honor, any humanity, any integrity, any awareness of the crimes
our government is committing in our name? Do we have a moral conscience?
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- How can a moral conscience be reconciled with our continuing
to tolerate our government, which has invaded two countries on the basis
of lies and deception, destroyed their civilian infrastructures, and murdered
hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?
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- The killing and occupation continue even though we now
know that the invasions were based on lies and fabricated "evidence."
The entire world knows this. Yet, Americans continue to act as if the
gratuitous invasions, the gratuitous killing and the gratuitous destruction
are justified. There is no end of it in sight.
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- If Americans have any honor, how can they betray their
Founding Fathers, who gave them liberty, by tolerating a government that
claims immunity to law and the Constitution and is erecting a police
state in their midst?
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- Answers to these questions vary. Some reply that a fearful
and deceived American public seeks safety from terrorists in government
power.
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- Others answer that a majority of Americans finally understand
the evil that Bush has set loose and tried to stop him by voting out
the Republicans in November 2006 and putting the Democrats in control
of Congress all to no effect and are now demoralized as neither
party gives a hoot for public opinion or has a moral conscience.
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- The people ask over and over, "What can we do?"
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- Very little when the institutions put in place to protect
the people from tyranny fail. In the United States, the institutions
have failed across the board.
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- The freedom and independence of the watchdog press was
destroyed by the media concentration that was permitted by the Clinton
administration and Congress. Americans who rely on traditional print
and TV media simply have no idea what is afoot.
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- Political competition failed when the opposition party
became a "me- too" party. The Democrats even confirmed as attorney
general Michael Mukasey, an authoritarian who refuses to condemn torture
and whose rulings as a federal judge undermined habeas corpus. Such a
person is now the highest law enforcement officer in the United States.
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- The judicial system failed when federal judges ruled
that "state secrets" and "national security" are more
important than government accountability and the rule of law.
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- The separation of powers failed when Congress acquiesced
to the executive branch's claims of primary power and independence from
statutory law and the Constitution.
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- It failed again when the Democrats refused to impeach
George Bush and Dick Cheney, the two greatest criminals in American political
history.
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- Without the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, America can
never recover. The precedents for unaccountable government established
by the Bush administration are too great, their damage too lasting. Without
impeachment, America will continue to sink into dictatorship in which
criticism of the government and appeals to the Constitution are criminalized.
We are closer to executive rule than many people know.
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- Silber reminds us that America once had leaders, such
as Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed and Sen. Robert M. LaFollette Sr.,
who valued the principles upon which America was based more than they
valued their political careers. Perhaps Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich
are of this ilk, but America has fallen so low that people who stand on
principle today are marginalized. They cannot become speaker of the House
or a leader in the Senate.
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- Today, Congress is almost as superfluous as the Roman
Senate under the Caesars. On Feb. 13 the U.S. Senate barely passed a bill
banning torture, and the White House promptly announced that President
Bush would veto it. Torture is now the American way. The U.S. Senate was
only able to muster 51 votes against torture, an indication that almost
a majority of U.S. senators support torture.
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- Bush says that his administration does not torture. So
why veto a bill prohibiting torture? Bush seems proud to present America
to the world as a torturer.
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- After years of lying to Americans and the rest of the
world that Guantanamo prison contained 774 of "the world's most dangerous
terrorists," the Bush regime is bringing six of its victims to trial.
The vast majority of the 774 detainees have been quietly released. The
U.S. government stole years of life from hundreds of ordinary people who
had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were
captured by warlords and sold to the stupid Americans as "terrorists."
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- Needing terrorists to keep the farce going, the U.S.
government dropped leaflets in Afghanistan offering $25,000 a head for
"terrorists." Kidnappings ensued until the U.S. government had
purchased enough "terrorists" to validate the "terrorist
threat."
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- The six that the United States are bringing to "trial"
include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car pool driver who allegedly
drove Osama bin Laden.
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- The Taliban did not attack the United States. The child
soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The United States attacked
the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soldiers terrorists who should
be locked up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military
tribunal? If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the
driver a terrorist? What about the pilots of the airliners who brought
the alleged 9-11 terrorists to the United States? Are they guilty, too?
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- The Gitmo trials are show trials. Their only purpose
is to create the precedent that the executive branch can ignore the U.S.
court system and try people in the same manner that innocent people were
tried in Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany. If the Bush regime had
any real evidence against the Gitmo detainees, it would have no need for
its kangaroo military tribunal.
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- If any more proof is needed that Bush has no case against
any of the Gitmo detainees, the following AP News report of Feb. 14, 2008,
should suffice: "The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court
on Thursday to limit judges' authority to scrutinize evidence against
detainees at Guantanamo Bay."
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- The reason Bush doesn't want judges to see the evidence
is that there is no evidence except a few confessions obtained by torture.
In the American system of justice, confession obtained by torture is
self-incrimination and is impermissible evidence under the U.S. Constitution.
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- Andy Worthington's book, "The Guantanamo Files,"
and his online articles make it perfectly clear that the "dangerous
terrorists" claim of the Bush administration is just another hoax
perpetrated on the inattentive American public.
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- Recently, the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity
issued a report that documents the fact that Bush administration officials
made 935 false statements about Iraq to the American people in order
to deceive them into going along with Bush's invasion. In recent testimony
before Congress, Bush's Secretary of State and former National Security
Advisor, Condi Rice was asked by Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., about the
56 false statements she made.
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- Rice replied: "I take my integrity very seriously,
and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false."
Rice blamed "the intelligence assessments," which "were
wrong."
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- Another Rice lie, like those mushroom clouds that were
going to go up over American cities if we didn't invade Iraq. The weapon
inspectors told the Bush administration that there were no weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, as Scott Ritter has reminded us over and over.
Every knowledgeable person in the country knew there were no weapons.
As the leaked Downing Street memo confirms, the head of British intelligence
told the British cabinet that the Bush administration had already decided
to invade Iraq and was making up the intelligence to justify the invasion.
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- But let's assume that Rice was fooled by faulty intelligence.
If she had any integrity she would have resigned. In the days when American
government officials had integrity, they would have resigned in shame
from such a disastrous war and terrible destruction based on their mistake.
But Rice, like all the Bush (and Clinton) operatives, is too full of American
self- righteousness and ambition to have any remorse about her mistake.
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- Condi can still look herself in the mirror despite 1
million Iraqis dying from her mistake and several million more being homeless
refugees, just as Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, can
still look herself in the mirror despite sharing responsibility for 500,000
dead Iraqi children.
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- ?There is no one in the Bush administration with enough
integrity to resign. It is a government devoid of truth, morality, decency
and honor. The Bush administration is a blight upon America and upon the
world.
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- April 4, 2008
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- Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant
Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street
Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for
two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions,
co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans
lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March,
2008.
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- Copyright © 2008 Creators Syndicate
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