Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Nations Cannot Be Trusted to Investigate Their Own War Crimes

We are no different. That is currently being shown, as CIA Director Leon Panetta is energetically engaged in trying to vigorously sweep the CIA's war crimes under the rug.

One of the saddest outcomes of the Bush/Cheney War on Terror the Constitution has been the blatant rise of the supra-legal police state mentality, the attitude of "we have the badges, we have the guns, whatever we do is legal and who do you think you are to question us". There has been elements of this going on for a very long time; you see it in the cops who take the view that "nobody but another cop can understand what we do" and who are perennially resistant to the ideas of civilian oversight and accountability for their actions.

Dick Cheney and his ghoulish assistant, David Addington (the two premier chickenhawks of the last administration) brought that mindset to the entire Federal government. If a huge majority of the American people disagreed with what they did, their reaction was "So?". Torture is illegal? So what, they just got some mouthpieces to sign opinion letters saying that torture was not torture.

Very few countries hold their war criminals accountable. Normally it takes massive regime change or a peaceful change of power tantamount to a revolution, as in South Africa. Usually the accountability has to come from the outside, with other nations indicting and convicting the war criminals. We have done the same, witness the conviction of Chuckie Taylor on charges of torture. But we will not do the same for our own torturers, not unless the fix is in and our government can be assured that nobody higher than an E-5 or GS-4 will be tried for it.

No, we are no different from the other nations that have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. We are no different from Burma, Chile, Argentina, Peru, China, Cambodia, Russia, or any of the other slew of nations in the last few decades which tortured people and then tried to sweep it under the rug forever.

So much for "the rule of law".

And so much for "change you can believe in".

(H/T)
on or about

2 comments:

  1. Fixer8/05/2009 5:23 AM

    Indeed. For the last 8 years, the U.S. has been a tin-horn dictatorship.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark8/07/2009 9:21 AM

    Mmmph. I got a very thorough verbal slapping the other day for daring to mention The Hague w.r.t. the last occupants of the White House. The salient comment was along the line of "It's our dog, and if needs be we'll shoot it ourselves".

    At that point I was too tired, angry and by that point in the "discussion" frankly too drunk to ask why the last two Presidents to be successfully shot needed to be, aside from winning the cold war and going to the moon respectively.

    ReplyDelete

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