Saddam’s Hanging

What a debacle! Having seen the footage on YouTube of Saddam’s hanging, I have mixed feelings.

One feeling is anger, anger for a number of reasons. I am angry at the guard(s) who taunted Saddam. Those who defend the taunts, or are unwilling to condemn them outright, the present American administration included, could argue something like this: “The man was a monster, it doesn’t matter if we taunt him when he’s hanged.” Or, “Let’s make his last moments as uncomfortable as possible,” or “It’s no equivalent to what he did to those people he gassed,” etc. ad nauseum.

“Have you no dignity, sir?” We might as well admit that we are sinking to Saddam’s level: granted, our execution is focused and, supposedly, the product of due process of law. (Make no mistake: any real trial of Saddam would have incriminated half of the Western world.) Is it okay to be mean to somebody because they have been mean to others? Should we fight fire with fire, take an eye for an eye, or should we turn the other cheek, and do unto others as we would have them do unto us? Which cliché should we embrace in this case?

Why would childish taunts and hecklers be tolerated at a dictator’s hanging any more than they would at an American murderer’s execution? George Bush, as governor of Texas, executed a retarded individual with the mental capacity of a seven-year old. Would it have been okay to taunt him?

The taunting called to my mind, for which I am ashamed, the archetypical image of Palestinians hurling rocks at tanks, or Arabs in the streets hoisting their AK’s high and wailing in a bloodthirsty foreign tongue. Americans need see no more of such images, they would only justify their malformed beliefs about the Middle East. I feel dirty whenever one of those images reaches my television screen.

The point is that taunting is altogether uncivilized and indecent, sullying an otherwise solemn occasion. It is entirely uncalled for, vicious by nature, disruptive, unbecoming, grotesque and infantile. I would like to think that I would not have taunted Hitler, had he been hanged in front of me (or hanged at all), for that is certainly a greater show of dignity and remorse for all deaths. If I had been alive then, and had believed in the death penalty, my hypothetical relief would have been silent and dignified, thank you. I would imagine that seeing a man die is vindication enough. Why, why is taunting necessary? Silent indignation, relief or vindication would have shown a degree of superiority astronomically greater than any childlike taunt hurled at a defenseless and doomed soul whose only hope is likely to have a dignified last moment on earth. Why are we justified in frustrating his desires? Because he did it to someone else? A naked fallacy that needs no elaboration.

I am also angry at the Iraqi judiciary for sentencing Saddam to hang in the first place. Granted, it may have provided a shred of vindication for the small number of Westerners who still embrace the death penalty — the United States stands out starkly as a developed nation that endorses capital punishment, executing more prisoners than everyone except China and Iran. I am not the first, nor, certainly, will I be the last to add that Saddam’s execution will do little but make a martyr out of him for the minority Sunnis of Iraq. If there’s one thing Iraq needs less of, it is sectarian anger. Whether one admits to the existence of a Civil War, no one should deny that passions are enflamed, and this execution, no matter how noble, just, or destined it may seem as we gaze from our distant and insulated shores, will plunge the country further into chaos and clashes.

Another feeling is embarrassment. I am embarrassed such a mess could be made of an otherwise solemn occasion. The United States was quick to absolve themselves from any responsibility for the execution itself, as if it would have been pulled off without us. Perhaps, then, we should have been involved, to ensure that something, some semblance of decency, order and ceremony was present at the hanging. The event reflects poorly on the Iraqi government, which cannot easily be disentangled from the United States. The execution is yet another cruel, inhuman, degrading and embarrassing scar on the United States’ already poorly-informed and much-maligned conduct overseas.

One feeling I don’t have, come to think of it, is relief. This will not be the end, certainly. It gives me personally no feeling of closure. I remain awestruck by the absurd and counterproductive actions taken by all sides of the conflict, excepting no one.

Alberto Gonzales on Habeus

I just caught a minute of Attorney General Gonzales answering questions on Habeus on CSPAN. The sentence I came in on ended with, “we’re not taking habeus corpus away from these people, because they never had it to begin with.”

Well, first of all, let’s ditch semantics. Just because militants in Iraq don’t ‘have’ habeus in their own country doesn’t mean we are denying them it when they come here. There’s the rub: by “taking it away” I understand “denying.” It is now easier to say that we are denying these people habeus.

But you don’t need to be content with that stretch of reason. Understand that American citizens, like Jose Pedilla, have been branded enemy combatants and had their right to habeus stripped from them. Indeed, any American citizen could fall into such a situation. Would Gonzales really argue that American citizens don’t have habeus to begin with? Certainly not. Additionally, Gonzales and the Administration’s platitudinal repetition of “picking people up off the battle field” is at least misleading and at worst a blatant lie. What battle field was Pedilla on? American soil? What battle field is that? Please, don’t act like every single person in Guantanamo was found holding an AK-47 and staring down US troops in the middle of a fire fight. I will grant no such absurdity.

With a somewhat loose interpretation, we can argue that the Constitution applies to all people under US jurisdiction: if we claim the ability to abduct these people, a decent respect the dignity of mankind commands we give them the chance to challenge their detention. Any other position is untenable.

Iraq

Iraq is a mess and it’s no secret. Without having to calling it a “civil war,” the fact is that 100 people are dying every day, because of insurgent attacks that average only fifteen minutes apart. What would you think of your occupiers if your home city suffered attacks every fifteen minutes?

Iraq is clearly worse off than when we invaded – more than half a million civilians have been killed, according to a new study published in The Lancet. Twice as many civilians have perished at the hands of the United States as reported by the worst accusations made against Saddam. Much of the infrastructure is still crippled, and our moral ground on the world stage has been irreparably damaged. Eighty percent of Iraqis want us out.

What have we done?

I don’t propose to have the solution, but as the election approaches, it’s time to dedicate serious energy and thought to the options. Bush has said that when to pull out will be the next President’s problem. The Army plans to keep troops in Iraq through 2010, according to a new report. Are these viable options? At the current rate, that means we’re only halfway done, and that another half million civilians will die. When will the public wake up?

We do not need more partisan bickering – the time has come to agitate for a solution. This problem crosses the aisle and crosses the Earth’s oceans. We have decimated a country and a population; it is time to turn our heads to a solution. And fast.

A solution will require international cooperation, and our allies with interests in the region should understand that, although they may have had no hand in the destruction, it would behoove them to assist us in repairing the country. It is a concern of the entire world, now to fix Iraq. Things are only getting worse.

Injustice anywhere

The New York Times quickly breezes through a handful of atrocious policies OK’d by the Senate recently:

…suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

What do we have there, three breaches of the Bill of Rights? As well, the bill formalizes the absolutely astonishing ability of the President to rob a citizen of their Constitutional guarantees. I’m simply sickened. I don’t understand how denying an American citizen their right to trial protects my freedom. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” –Martin Luther King

I want my Constitution back.

Hindsight is 20/20

The U.S. invasion “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it again, we would do exactly the same thing,” [Cheney] said.

I would like to think that that’s a metaphorical defense — that we would remove Saddam from power, and remove his oppressive regime and all that, but that the intricacies would be better planned.

If, however, Cheney does me that we would do the exact same thing, he means that, knowing what we know now, we would have no qualms about plunging a country into chaos, or igniting a bloodbath that, while short of civil war, is widespread and anarchic. And we’d also kill an estimated hundred thousand civilians. Knowing what we know now, those were all good choices. And we’d gladly do it all over again.

World Development Aid

I have previously commented on the United States’ failure to contribute the requested 0.7 per cent of its GDP to the United Nations for international development. It seems the idea has run headlong into fierce opposition here in the States, and has been painted as an unnecessary and draconian ‘tax’ implemented by an authority outside the jurisdiction of a national government.

That’s true to some extent, just as it is true that judges are unelected. But there are few in government who do not, at some point, answer to an elected official. Judges in many local municipalities, for example, are elected directly. At higher levels, like at the Supreme Court, judges are nominated by the elected President, questioned by the elected legislature, and then voted on democratically by our elected representatives. Your government in action, people. Though it is true the judges may be a step or two removed from the democratic process, they ultimately are chosen by the people. Republicans thusly have no one to blame for the ‘tyranny of the judges’ except for the people.

Our representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, underwent similar rigors, for which the Democrats were criticized, when he was nominated to represent this country to the world. He was nominated by the elected President and withstood the interrogation of the elected legislature, and sent as an emissary to the world stage. The United States, with its powerful standing in the United Nations, should have the power, one would think, to prevent something like this “tax” from coming into existence. As well, this is nary a tax in the traditional sense — there have been no penalties for our repeated failure to pay, there are no jack-booted thugs coming to repossess our cars. The chest beating and shouting is nothing but a symbolic gesture against a demi-authority that has time and again proven itself impotent. The people have nothing to fear but right-wing demagoguery.

In spite of my point thus far, I find it somewhat atrocious that the government has not seen fit to donate such a scant portion of its Gross Domestic Product to international aid.

Economist Lord P. T. Bauer, said, “The argument that aid is indispensable for development runs into an inescapable dilemma. If the conditions for development other than capital are present, the capital required will either be generated locally or be available commercially from abroad to governments or to businesses. If the required conditions are not present, then aid will be ineffective and wasted.”

But I contest this statement — oftentimes what is lacking is knowledge of the vicious Zero Sum game of capitalism that the West requires for survival. Africans may very well have the land to farm, but to assert that wealth will spring forth spontaneously from natural resources — when the truth is that these people are, if productive and knowledgeable, certainly the target of robber barons and economic tyrants — is absurd. You cannot expect a person to be born into this world with Wealth of Nations ingrained in their mind and an intimate knowledge of the world’s market economy. It is very much possible — and observable today — that a wealth of resources and a dearth of only capital will not necessarily generate capital in the magical inerrant Free Market way that the Right so dearly wishes it would. The fact that sweatshops in, say, Mexico have been set up at incredible rates in recent decades has led to an influx of capital into the region, but not the development of the local populace. Arguably, it has increased the amount of poverty.

One need only look around to see that the third world, left to the West’s Free Market devices, does not benefit. The need for aid and, perhaps more so, education, remains. And the United States’ reluctance to provide aid for the basic needs and development of foreign countries belies its claim to compassion.

Sending them a bill

Why would the United States send a bill to the people they are evacuating from Lebanon? Since when has the current administration thought it important to spend real money, instead of borrowing? It’s ironic our government would borrow money to buy bombs to kill citizens of other countries, but that when it comes to saving the lives of our own twenty-five thousand citizens, we send them a bill.

Independence Day

It’s important to remember why the original thirteen colonies broke from the British Empire. Jefferson laid out the preamble of the Declaration as a syllogism, and, indeed, the entire document is one big argument explaining the nature of government and decrying George III’s as tyranny. A few examples of George III’s infringements upon the rights of man:

- He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
- He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
- He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and Amount and Payment of their Salaries. [...]
- He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation [...]
- For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury.

But what people forget is that Jefferson wrote of the right of the people to alter or abolish a government when it destroys, rather than ensures, their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thirteen years later, such activity, acting out in favor of altering or abolishing even a harsh and oppressive government, was enshrined as treason under the Constitution and declared quite inimical.

Without choosing sides between the Constitution and the Declaration when it comes to the right of man to violently oppose their government (at least when the government is the aggressor), it is plain to see, to me, that our current leadership has encroached in the same ways as George III’s. As far as right to trial and due process are concerned, as I’ve already mentioned, American citizens are kept without a trial, without counsel, and without being formerly charged. Hundreds of signing statements undermine the power of the Legislature that the Fathers never intended, and Legislative action designed to overrule the Judiciary undermines the power of the latter. I won’t rehash these abominations unto the liberty of man, but I will propose that today’s symbolism provides a new point of view from which to analyze them.

“Man is born free, and everywhere is he is chains.” –Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Enlightenment thinker and major influence to the Constitution and Declaration

Ludlow

An excerpt from my report, “Why did Socialism fail in early 20th century America?”:

In 1914, one of the worst labor conflicts in American history took place at a mining colony in Colorado called Ludlow. After workers struck with grievances ranging from requests for an eight-hour day to allegations of subjugation, the National Guard was called in by Colorado governor Elias Ammons. That winter, Guardsmen made 172 arrests.

The strikers began to fight back, killing four mine guards and firing into a separate camp where strikebreakers lived. When body of a strikebreaker was found nearby, the National Guard’s General Chase ordered the tent colony destroyed in retaliation.

“On Monday morning, April 20, two dynamite bombs were exploded, in the hills above Ludlow… a signal for operations to begin. At 9 AM a machine gun began firing into the tents [where strikers were living], and then others joined” (Kick et al, 2002, p. 263). One eyewitness reported, “The soldiers and mine guards tried to kill everybody; anything they saw move” (Kick et al, 2002, p. 263). That night, the National Guard rode down from the hills surrounding Ludlow and set fire to the tents. Twenty-six people, including two women and eleven children, were killed (Kick et al, 2002, p. 264).

The rest is here.

Ishaqi report rejected

In March, Coalition forces attacked a house they believed contained an Al-Qaeda operative. Eleven civilians were killed, and then the house was leveled by an air strike. The United States investigated the incident, saying that the air strike was called in to kill an insurgent, but caused “up to nine collateral deaths.”

Yet the Iraqi Prime Minister has rejected the official US report. The BBC has been furnished a tape that shows eleven bodies with gunshot wounds in the rubble. That is, the civilians were shot execution-style before an air strike was called in to cover up the killings. A six-month-old infant was among the dead.