Blinding Hypocrisy
Insouciant Americans
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
In
a recent column, “The Stench of American Hypocrisy,” I noted that US
public officials and media are on their high horse about the rule of law
in Burma while the rule of law collapses unremarked in the US.
Americans enjoy beating up other peoples for American sins. Indeed,
hypocrisy has become the defining characteristic of the United States.
Hypocrisy in America is now so commonplace it is no
longer noticed. Consider the pro-football star Michael Vick. In a
recent game Vick scored 6 touchdowns, totally dominating the playing
field. His performance brought new heights of adulation, causing
National Public Radio to wonder if the sports public shouldn’t retain a
tougher attitude toward a dog torturer who spent 1.5 years in prison for
holding dog fights.
I certainly do not approve of mistreating animals.
But where is the outrage over the US government’s torture of people? How
can the government put a person in jail for torturing dogs but turn a
blind eye to members of the government who tortured people?
Under both US and international law, torture of
humans is a crime, but the federal judiciary turns a blind eye and even
allows false confessions extracted by torture to be used in courts or
military tribunals to send tortured people to more years in prison based
on nothing but their coerced self-incrimination.
Compare Vick’s treatment of dogs with, for example,
the US government’s treatment of Canadian “child soldier” Omar Khadr.
Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, the only
survivor of a firefight and an air strike on a Taliban position. He was
near death, with wounds to his eyes and shoulder and shot twice in the
back. The Americans accused the boy of having thrown a hand grenade
during the military encounter that resulted in the death of a US
soldier.
As there was no witness to support the accusation,
Khadr was tortured into submission. He was beaten, deprived of sleep,
left hanging with his arms chained above his head, hooded and
threatened by dogs. The National Post of Canada (Nov. 6, 2010) reports:
“His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy
that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a
group of black men would gang rape him to death.”
Despite this and other evidence that Khadr was
coerced by torture into agreeing that he killed a U.S. soldier during a
military firefight that left Khadr all but dead, U.S. military judge
Col. Patrick Parrish ruled that Khadr’s “confession” had been freely
given and could be used to convict him in court.
The charge against Khadr is an invention. We don’t
know whether Khadr was a combatant or just happened to be in the place
where the American attack took place. Khadr is accused of “murder in
violation of the laws of war.” Such a crime does not exist. Soldiers
who are enemy combatants are not tried for killing one another. As the
Americans had pulled Khadr’s “crime” out of a hat, they definitely
needed a guilty plea. Shortly before the “trial,” the Americans told
Khadr that if he did not plead guilty and escaped conviction, they would
hold him indefinitely in a torture prison as an enemy combatant.
This is the behavior of Nazi Germany. When German
courts freed Nazi victims from false charges, the Gestapo simply picked
up the cleared defendants when they left the court house and sent them
to camps or prisons.
At the last minute new charges appeared out of thin
air in order to beef up the nonexistent case against Khadr. He was
forced to admit to killing two Afghan soldiers and to sign away his
right to sue his jailers for torturing him. In court, Col. Parrish
repeatedly emphasized that Khadr admitted his guilt freely of his own
accord. In other words, Parrish lied in court by presenting a coerced
confession as “willingly given.” This is typical of US prosecutors.
In a powerful editorial, “Stalin Would Have Been Proud,”
the National Post of Canada said: “what it really was, was a show
trial. . . . They could have told him to confess that he had
simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would
have done it.”
The National Post goes on to say that Stalin’s
torture techniques, which “inspired the standard operating procedures at
Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not
designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false
confessions.”
The Americans need false confessions in order to
maintain fear of terrorists among the deceived population and in order
to cover up the US government’s crimes of torture.
If a case can be worse, it is the case of the young
American educated neuroscientist, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. Read Yvonne
Ridley’s account in CagePrisoners, February 12, 2010.
Siddiqui and her three young children were
kidnaped. Siddiqui was tortured and abused by the Americans and their
Pakistani puppets simply because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, according to
Wikipedia her second husband’s uncle, mentioned her name during one of
the 180 times that he was waterboarded. Reminds me of reports by Soviet
dissidents that when they were being tortured by the KGB, they tried to
remember names on gravestones to give to the authorities, and when they
couldn’t they gave whatever names popped into their memories.
Siddiqui’s young children apparently are still
missing. While she was in detention, Siddiqui herself was shot in the
stomach by an American soldier, allegedly after she managed to seize his
rifle and point it at him. This absurd story was enough for federal
judge Richard Berman to sentence her to prison for 86 years for assault
with a deadly weapon and attempting to kill U.S.personnel. Obviously,
Berman knows where his bread is buttered, and it is not by justice.
We imprisoned Michael Vick, because he tortured
dogs. But Department of Justice (DOJ) officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee,
in close collaboration with the George W. Bush White House and VP Dick
Cheney’s office, fabricated the argument that US and international laws
against torture do not apply to the US president. Yoo and Bybee were
found by the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility to have
violated professional standards. However, DOJ official David Margolis
reduced the charges to “exercised poor judgment.” This despite the fact
that Yoo actually asserted to an Office of Professional Responsibility
investigator than Bush’s powers as commander-in-chief provided Bush with
the authority to unilaterally order, without recourse to law, the mass
murder of civilians.
Vick didn’t get off with “exercised poor judgment.” In US “justice,”
torturing dogs is a worse crime than torturing people.
In the US, if you torture a dog you go to prison,
but if you are a member of the government you can give a green light to
torture, and your reward will be to be appointed professor of law at the
“liberal” University of California, Berkeley (Yoo) and to the federal
bench (Bybee).
With so many executive branch known criminals
running around at large, what did the lobbyists’ representatives, aka
the US Congress, do? They excoriated Charles Rangel, the black US
Representative from Harlem.
What had Rangel done? Had he indulged in even more
heinous acts of torture, rape, and murder than the executive branch
officials? No. Rangel helped a school raise money, and as the school
was going to name itself after him, Rangel “benefitted personally” from
using the power of his office to help the school to raise money. Rangel
also committed another grave crime. He used a New York apartment, which
was designated for residential use only, as a campaign office. Rangel
also failed to pay income tax on rent from a condo in the Dominican
Republic, most likely an insignificant sum of which an 80-year old man
run off his feet by his demanding job might not have been aware.
Because of these “serious crimes,” the House Rules
Committee concluded that Rangel brought discredit upon the House of
Representatives.
I mean, really, how many things can you think of
that are of less consequence than Rangel’s transgressions? We have a
Congress that is bought and paid for by lobbyists, whose every vote is
lobbyist determined by campaign contributions that financially benefit
the Representatives and Senators. But Rangel is guilty because he helped
a school raise money?
We have a Congress that has forfeited its power to
declare war and sits complicit while the president not only usurps its
power but uses illegitimate power to commit war crimes by launching
naked aggressions on the basis of lies and deception.
We have a Congress that turns a blind eye to
criminal actions by the president, vice president, and executive branch,
including violations of US statutory law against torture, violations of
US statutory law against spying on Americans without warrants, and
violations of every legal protection in the Bill of Rights, from the
right of privacy to habeas corpus.
The hallmarks of the remade US legal system, thanks
to the “war on terror,” are coerced self-incrimination and indefinite
detention or murder without charges or evidence.
“Freedom and democracy” America has resurrected the legal system of the Dark
Ages.
But Rangel who helped a school is stripped of his
Ways and Means chairmanship and censored by the
bought-and-paid-for-Congress. One has the impression that Rangel must
have done something far more serious, such as criticize the illegal wars
or the banksters’ rip-off of American taxpayers. Or do we simply have a
case of white people ganging up on a black?
With the criminal mega-rich banksters, thanks to
their agents ensconced in the US Treasury, regulatory agencies, and the
Federal Reserve, free of regulatory oversight, on whose head does
regulation fall? It falls on 13-year olds who sell cupcakes in public
parks.
In Westchester County, New York, New Castle
Councilman Michael Wolfensohn called the police on 13-year olds Andrew
DeMarchis and Kevin Graff for selling cupcakes, cookies, brownies and
Rice Krispie treats in a Chappaqua park. The kids were guilty of being
vendors on town property without a license.
The kids were making about $100 a day and had
capitalist dreams of starting a business. But regulation stopped them
cold. A license cost between $150 and $350 for a scant two hours, and a
$1 million insurance certificate is also required.
So banksters, who were able to purchase with campaign contributions, and who
knows
how much in under-the-table-payoffs, the repeal of the depression
era banking regulations and then some, are scot free after having robbed
taxpayers of bailout funds and their pension retirements. But the
cupcake business of two 13-year olds is closed down.
What does it say about a population of 300 million that fails to see the
hypocrisy in this?
Has a more insouciant population ever existed?
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has
just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at:
[email protected]
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11222010.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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