World Enough and Time

Please sign Boxer petition re Iraq

She'd like a million signatures.

Go here, please.

If you're not from California, there's another link on that page, just above where the address info goes.

Bring our soldiers home!

Robert Devereaux

Rumsfeld's War Crimes

I commend to your attention Donald Rumsfeld: The War Crimes Case.

A few paragraphs:

Donald Rumsfeld was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war. On September 15, 2001, in a meeting at Camp David, Rumsfeld suggested an attack on Iraq because he was deeply worried about the availability of "good targets in Afghanistan." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Rumsfeld articulated his hope to "dissuade" other nations from "asymmetrical challenges" to U.S. power. Rumsfeld's support for a preemptive attack on Iraq "matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination," Ron Suskind wrote after interviewing O'Neill.

Rumsfeld defensively sought to decouple oil access from regime change in Iraq when he appeared on CBS News on November 15, 2002. In a Macbeth moment, Rumsfeld proclaimed the United States' beef with Iraq has "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." The Secretary doth protest too much.

Prosecuting a war of aggression isn't Rumsfeld's only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial execution of several people. Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, which constitutes a war crime. In his book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh described the "unacknowledged" special-access program (SAP) established by a top-secret order Bush signed in late 2001 or early 2002. It authorized the Defense Department to set up a clandestine team of Special Forces operatives to defy international law and snatch, or assassinate, anyone considered a "high-value" Al Qaeda operative, anywhere in the world. Rumsfeld expanded SAP into Iraq in August 2003.

But Rumsfeld's crimes don't end there. He sanctioned the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and thus constitute war crimes. Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, removal of clothing, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. According to Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld sanctioned the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners. Rumsfeld also authorized waterboarding, where the interrogator induces the sensation of imminent death by drowning. Waterboarding is widely considered a form of torture.

This monster must be brought to justice.

Robert Devereaux

The people reclaim ALL of Congress!

One more political entry before turning to other matters.

I said yesterday morning, and Randi Rhodes agreed on the radio, that the voters of this nation have risen up just in time and saved it from fascism.

Here's a great blog entry on that subject by Richard Power.

Yes, yesterday, the majority of voters in the USA thwarted the solidification of the corporatist (i.e., fascist) takeover we have been struggling against since 2000 -- at least temporarily.

...

The new Congress must be sworn in, and that won't happen until January 2007. The interim will be a dangerous time for all of us. But the Bush-Cheney regime has been severely weakened. Its psychological hold has been broken. Its enablers in the political establishment and the mainstream news media must ponder their futures....

I commend Power's words to your attention.

What a fantastic dream this is to wake to, the verdict that Webb has won the Virginia Senate seat and that therefore the war criminal Cheney cannot stymie us in critical votes.

You couldn't make this series of events up in a novel and expect agents, editors, or the reading public to buy it!

Once we have basked sufficiently in this new reality, in the momentary salvation of our nation and the beginning of its long road back to the respect of nations, we'll need to do these things:

• Ponder how it is that, while the folks at Democratic Underground saw clearly this threat from the very beginning, it took the American people as a whole so long, and so many impeachable offenses, to wake the fuck up.
• Figure out how to honor those people, and listen to them when the next assault comes.
• Devise our own Truth and Reconciliation commission, while holding Bush and his henchmen responsible in our courts and in the realm of international law.
• Figure out how to roll back every damned, damaging law that this maladministration, aided by its enablers everywhere, has foisted upon us.
• Put progressive teeth into the Democratic bite. No more spineless kowtowing to fascist bullies.
• Figure out how to reclaim the media from the corporate right.

All of these things can and must be done!

Robert Devereaux

Stepping back from the brink of fascism

The party of sanity and compassion handily won the House of Representatives, making Bush way lame, as lame as his brain.

Here's a nice post from Democratic Underground:

America stood up and demanded the accountability that has been lacking for so long. She has said that she won't become a de facto dictatorship, that she won't tolerate not having oversight for long, that the corruption builds up but eventually gets drained and that she's tired of being run by the lobbyists and not the people.

To my friends who call themselves "conservative" - I'm not going to rub it in or gloat - in spite of some of the names I've been called and how my thoughts were questioned as traitorous over the past six years - I'll simply say this - THIS is what a mandate looks like! 15-30% spreads in the votes, not a measly ½ % - it's an absolute rejection of the direction that your hijacked party has led us in, now that you know for sure Americans are rejecting it - clean up your party, send the religious nuts who want to create a theocracy out of the US packing, send the crooked politicians and lobbyists home and come back to the table with real ideas on creating smaller government, less intrusion into my bedroom, not building other nations while we're neglecting our own at home here (I'm all for that too, as I've said many, many times before - we're not so far apart as those in DC want us to think so that we don't pay more attention to the crooked games they play).

Very nicely put.

Two regrets: 

Lamont lost to Lieberman, yes still that Bush-enabler is a Dem and may yet see the light.

And it appears that Angie Paccione, no thanks to a Libertarian spoiler, is headed for a 46% to 43% loss to the disgusting Marilyn Musgrave.  If that happens, I predict that Angie trounces the bigot in two years' time.  But meanwhile, what a dreadful loss of amazing talent.  Angie has it in her to be President some day.

Robert Devereaux

Vote Democratic!

Not a lot to say today except, my fellow Americans, vote as if your freedoms and the national honor depended on it (for they do), vote Democratic, vote the faux-Republican scoundrels out, and let's have a decent USA once more.

When we've routed the fearmongers, it's on to pressing issues of the day.

We'll let the Lame Duck quack his blithering head off, as we look forward to seeing all of these war criminals sweating bullets in The Hague.

Robert Devereaux

Check out The New Press...

This morning, I was struck with a book idea that has me considering the task of putting together a book proposal for whichever company publishes Howard Zinn's "A People's History" series of spinoffs from his magnificent and eye-opening A People's History of the United States.

That publishing company turns out to be The New Press, and here's The New Press's first paragraph describing themselves:

Established in 1990 as a major alternative to the large, commercial publishers, The New Press is a not-for-profit publishing house operated editorially in the public interest. It is committed to publishing in innovative ways works of educational, cultural, and community value that, despite their intellectual merits, may be deemed insufficiently profitable by commercial publishers. Like the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio as they were originally conceived, The New Press aims to provide ideas and viewpoints under-represented in the mass media.

Check out especially their books on U.S. history.

I've just ordered Fighting Words: An Illustrated History of Newspaper Accounts of the Civil War.

Will I in fact pursue a book proposal with them? 

Don't know. 

Ideas strike a writer, then fade. 

Some persist. 

The ones that not only persist but nag are those to pursue to their lair.

They're the ones that make the project of a book proposal (these can run 70-80 pages if done properly) worth the time and effort.

Robert Devereaux

Bush's odd eating habits...

Where have we heard it before?

Ah, yes.  Hitler's fanatical vegetarianism, not to mention his coprophagic sexual ways.

Now, please see Susie Bright's blog entry about Chimpy McFlightSuit's hatred of "green food" and "wet fish" (poor dear Laura), as per the new tell-all book White House Chef by Walter Scheib. 

Susie's opener:

This is rich.

Remember Walter Scheib, the brilliant chef who was fired by Laura Bush’s East Wing for using traitorous French cooking techniques? — You know, like sauteing. W. hates “green food” and “wet fish,” and Scheib must have suffered under such constraints. Now he's serving his revenge— blazing hot.

Walter has just written a tell-all recipe book, White House Chef, which he's dedicated to Hillary Clinton— Quelle Surprise d'Octobre!

Let's all lame-duck this war criminal big-time!

Robert Devereaux

Freedom of the press...

Check this out.

Money quote:

"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming,” Reporters Without Borders said.

The U.S. has fallen to 53rd place.

Sad and pathetic!

Robert Devereaux

Oust all GOP...

The current Republican party has disgraced its own moderate and honorable past with the right-wing radicalism it has embraced in the last many years, and the Bush-enabling that has plunged us into a Constitutional crisis.

We must vote against all of the following unworthies:

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Go forth and do it!

Robert Devereaux

Rude Pundit...

For more on the sorry state of American politics, be sure to drop in on Rude Pundit.

I don't visit Rude Pundit often, but when I do I love the eloquence of his outrage at the monsters in charge, their enablers, and the general lack of oppositional outrage from our so-called representatives in Congress.

Robert Devereaux