The Tease of Things I Don't Need

On the Homefront:
Bread and Circuses

Okay, it's well past time for a political piece. I've been feeling so drained in recent weeks (months?) that I've kept putting this aside and focusing on trivialities.

The central focus today is on the illegality of the Iraq war, and why George W. Bush and his administration meet the standards for war criminals.

I want to start by re-recommending a piece I mentioned on April 30th which drew no comments - which I blame myself for, as I never did come back with comments or expansions of my own - A San Diego Citybeat interview with Scott Ritter. (As with all my links, that will open as a separate window.)

A former U.S. Marine who proudly took part in the first Gulf War as an adviser to General Norman Schwarzkopf, and testified in 2002 as to the mistake he saw the nation moving towards - the invasion of Iraq - Ritter is author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiract to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein.

In the interview he hits on topics from the militarily unwinnable nature of the Iraq War, how Saddam presented no threat to us & how this was known by the intelligence community, the ignorance displayed by U.S. citizens, the Constitutional trail to show how the current Iraq war is an illegal war of aggression, and that the Bush administration is guilty of an international crime much as the Third Reich was. Further, the divergence between the intelligence available concerning Iraqi weapons programs and the line towed and pushed by the Bush administration is so broad that cannot be written off as "bad analysis."

It was a lie. Or, rather, a series of them.

The Clinton administration doesn't get off the hook with Ritter, either, as they pushed many of the same buttons, the difference being they continued economic sanctions and bombings so that Iraqis died without committing U.S. troops to the region.

(I wonder how harshly history will judge us for passing through so many years of killing by bomb-burst and deprivation, only stopping to question once it was our own blood being spilled? )

I considered trying to bulletize excerpts, but the interview is well-conducted and information-dense, so picking Q & A sections out of context isn't effective. If you're interested primarily in a specific sub-topic just scroll to the appropriate question, neatly presented in boldface.

The second (and final for today) piece to recommend is a Buzzflash interview with Ray McGovern. You may have heard a peep from McGovern in the news last week when he spoke up with questions and accusations during an appearance by Donald Rumsfeld in Atlanta, at what was supposed to be another of those highly filtered, friendly speaking stops for the Secretary of Defense.

Most of the mainstream media presented him as a heckler, almost making it an "on the lighter side of the news" piece. Few noted that Ray McGovern is both a journalist and a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was an intelligence analyst. This is not some crackpot, heckling peacenik with trumped up conspiracy theories. This is someone who's looked at the record of intelligence, looked at all of the official statements made by members of the Bush administration, and upon putting them all together is taking it upon himself to confront them with their lies.

Normally I've eschewed direct links to Buzzflash material not because of their ultimate content but because the presentation is hyperbolic, with an excessive glee akin to someone hopping up and down in his seat while someone else dishes dirt on a loathesome ex. They're often a good spot to start, but seldom what I'd consider to be the last word on a subject. The significance of who the interviewee was and what he had to say made this an exception.

So, again -- both pieces are worth the few minutes they'll take to read, and reading them back-to-back will intensify key content in each, from what we've been sold so far to warnings about where the situation with Iran may very well be headed.

In the end, the message we have to take away from both pieces and take to heart is that we citizens of the United States have been a sloppy bunch.

We've washed our hands like a nation of Pontius Pilates (and, no, that's not a new exercise program) and left the decisions to politicians & the people those politicians have in turn empowered. The mainstream media continues to largely be a joke when it's not being a tool. And to many are just shurgging off all the negative information as "alarmist", "politically motivated" and beaming on into the day with some sense of assurance that if anything illegal was going on that it would already be in court.

The world doesn't automatically work that way. Word that it does is just the calming product of the propaganda machine that keeps power in the same hands. Being able to deflect accusations in the court of public opinion by simply gainsaying them, by having legions of paid and unpaid lackeys repeating the latest counter-argument zinger, by casting aspersions on the motivation behind the accusations and/or by invoking The War -- has cumulatively left some people with an amazing amount of power and a frighteningly low level of accountability.

I'll close with the observation Ritter made about the citizens of the United States:

As I said, they’re no citizens anymore; they’re consumers. As long as you keep them wrapped in a cocoon of comfort, they don’t care.

And, for that matter, ultimately much the same message from McGovern:

If you follow these facts, you cannot avoid the conclusion that the President of the United States is arguably a war criminal – a person who started a war of aggression as defined by Nuremberg as the supreme war crime, because it differs from other war crimes only insofar as it contains the accumulated evil of the whole. And what we mean by that – we’ll think about torture, think about kidnappings, think about taking people and putting them in black holes, incommunicado. These are things that we didn’t used to do, and I know that for a fact.

So if you get this information, it’s very disquieting. It’s far easier just to tune into Fox and let yourself be entertained, and not have to grapple with the fact that your government is a rogue government that does not obey, not only international law but domestic law – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for example – wire-tapping us at will. That’s a lot to deal with, and most people prefer to say, it can’t be that bad. If they acknowledge that it is that bad, they might have to do something about it. Most people are just too comfortable to try to do something about it.

It's time to wake up and smell the septic tank.