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26 November 2010 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? Dr. Roberts was appointed
Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury by President
Ronald Reagan. He served in the Congressional Staff of
the House and Senate. He was Associate Editor and
Columnist for the Wall Street Journal, columnist for
Business Week, the Scripps Howard News Service,
Creators Syndicate, and for major newspapers in France
and Italy. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, for 24 years and
occupied the William E. Simon chair of Political
Economy in the Center for Strategic and International
Affairs, Georgetown University for 12 years. Dr.
Roberts has also had academic appointments at Virginia
Tech, Tulane University, University of New Mexico, and
George Mason University. He was a member of Merton
College, Oxford University, during 1963-65. In 1969 he
presented a Special University Lecture to the faculty
and student body of Oxford University. He was awarded
the US Treasury's Silver Medal in 1982 and the French
Legion of Honor in 1987. Read more articles by
Paul Craig Roberts. |
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