Think back six years. How often
did we hear then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tout his intense four-day
vigil at CIA headquarters preparing the speech he would give to the
United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003? Retired Army
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was asked by
Powell to herd cats in putting that speech together, recently threw
light on why it turned out to be such an acute embarrassment.
It is apparent that regardless of who is in power, conservative ideals
are firmly entrenched not simply in the American psyche, but are an
integral part of U.S. policies. One could blame liberals for not
having a backbone when combating conservatives, but chances are that
the real reason may be even more onerous; one likely explanation is
governmental psychological warfare.
News of the death,
in a Libyan jail, of Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi, a US terror suspect who was
the subject of an extraordinary rendition, then tortured in Egypt and
Jordan as well as CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Poland has,
understandably, raised questions about whether he committed suicide -
as the Libyan authorities claimed - or whether he was murdered.
Barack Obama is fast becoming an accessory after the fact to the war crimes that the Bush Administration has committed.
By not prosecuting the torturers and those who ordered the torture, and now by not even going public with the photo tortures he'd already agreed to release, Obama is doing Dick Cheney's business for him.
Cheney's been telling every news outlet that will have him on that a) we didn't torture or do anything wrong and that b) everything we did was necessary to keep us safe.
No matter how you dress it up, the question on the table is whether the Obama administration should continue to cover-up
evidence of the criminal offence of torture, committed by US personnel.
It is a truly remarkable notion that evidence of crimes should be
suppressed because it might provoke anger around the world.
The Brad Blog, which picked up on the story of the strange death of
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi shortly after I published the first account in
the Western media on Sunday evening, asked a question yesterday evening
that I had been asking myself throughout the day:
The attack, inside an official "no-fire zone", was among the bloodiest incidents since the army began its offensive against Tamil Tiger rebels.
About 50,000 civilians are now trapped inside a tiny strip of coastline, covering an area less than twice the size of London's Hyde Park. President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government has repeatedly promised not to use heavy artillery in this zone.
The Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines established after World War II to try Nazi party members, were developed to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles could also be applied today, when judging the conditions that led to the Iraq war and in the process to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and to the devastation of a country's infrastructure.
"Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils
that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of
law and the rights of man -- a charter expanded by the blood of
generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give
them up for expedience sake."
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may have caused some
Democratic members of Congress to think that the constitutional
questions raised by the executive excesses of the Bush-Cheney era had
been resolved, just it may have cause some Republicans members of
Congress to start thinking about executive accountability.
But this personality-defined approach our battered system of checks
and balances is a throwback to the days of powerful monarches, when the
people of a country waited for the day when a bad king was replaced by
a good king.
