Less Is Moore In subdued, Effective '9/11'
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
by Roger Ebert
http://www.suntimes.com/output/eb-feature/cst-ftr-cannes18.html

Impeach the SOB - Damn the Republicans & Full Speed Ahead!
Written by “kucinich4president” Yahoo Group Member Daniel Welch
Tuesday, May 18th

It's time to stop beating around this Bush and start beating up on him—but good. There is no set of humanitarian or democratic principles by which this administration would not have been removed in any sane society. The last election was questionable at best, and his reckless, dangerous and criminal actions in the ensuing years have shown the whole world he is unfit to govern. The only democratic remedy, impeachment, was set aside early and forcibly by an opposition still afraid of its own shadow. It did make some sense, early on, to argue that, since the Greasy Oil Plutocrats (GOP) controlled both houses, it was a waste of time and energy.

Cynical political calculation is the currency of a failed "democracy," and Washington is crawling with sellouts and political weathervanes. In the Sausage Factory that is the legislative process, anyone who wants to get anything done had best be ready to hold her nose and roll up her sleeves. The principle still counts for something. To hear either of the Mega-Parties talk, you'd think they were all about principle. Grandiose rhetoric covers the tiniest focus-grouped nuances; minor tweaks to failed policies are disguised as major ideological shifts, their proponents bravely marching, Quixote-style, into the windmill of their ever-so-slightly differing opponents.

So maybe it's time for a simple, radical proposition: Truth is True. Of course Republicans will fight impeachment like crazy--so what? Anyway, it's past time to put to rest the right-wing myth that Nixon was "hounded out of office" by the opposition. By the time Barry Goldwater met with Nixon to tell him the jig was up, he reported that the president could expect no more than ten votes in the Senate. "And," he is reported to have added, "I'm not one of them." Politicians don't always toe the party line, especially when it is one drawn in the sand by a crook. The damage done to decades-long international agreements, to the reputation of the US, and simply the revulsion at all the atrocities committed in our name, is almost beyond calculation, and quite likely beyond repair. Cornered at every turn, the thieves and liars of this junta respond to every new self-inflicted crisis with greater abandon.

There are dangerous and powerful forces trying to keep this man in power, and there is no doubt that confronting them head on will prove difficult. But there is no choice left. The iceberg whose tip is now poking its way into the eye of a weary world is gargantuan, and will not melt of its own accord. These men intended all along to shred the Geneva Convention, the US constitution and every safeguard in between. The "Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal," a misnomer if ever there was one, is not about a few hicks on a rampage. Anyone with a brain could see that immediately, and once again we were proven right. The attempt to end-run the CIA and establish a fully secret system of torture and "intelligence gathering" lays bare the core of these men's "principles:" utter contempt for democracy and due process.

It should be something of a clue to learn that the CIA was too accountable for these guys. The CIA, as we well know, is loath to bend any rules or skirt accountability in pursuit of its own shadowy goals. Doug Feith, apparently, knows better than the CIA, and he wouldn't trust them for...well, let's say for all the assassination manuals in Central America. It has become the unspeakable, torturous mess we knew it would, and they still won't come clean. That's why they mustn't be let to leave of their own accord. Next January is far too long, too many wars, atrocities and frayed alliances too late. These guys, and yes, I mean all of them, from Dubya and Lon Chaney on down--these guys have to go now. And I don't mean back to cutting brush in Crawford. (What's the deal there, by the way? Does this guy live on a billion acres that he cuts himself, or what? Isn't he done yet?).

No, not back to Crawford or off to some slimy lobbying firm--they need to go sit in a dock in The Hague and await the judgment of the world. The world's responsibility is to convene an ad hoc tribunal to prosecute the war crimes of the Iraq war--just as they do with other rogue nations who refuse to subject themselves to the conventions of international law. Our responsibility in the US is to facilitate the process by first removing the war criminals from power, and then not stopping the international peacekeeping force when they come to arrest them. Shocked? Why? Of course, it is often shocking to turn the looking glass around, but if we try to see what the rest of the world sees, these are the logical next steps. Instead, the internal "debate" grows more and more deaf to the outside world. The Democrats have already picked their pro-war candidate, and he is staying the course, while rumors about a "unity ticket" with McCain swirl above the wreckage of the international scene. What planet are we on? I actually saw an article recently chiding the left with the specter of 1968, claiming that it was our fault (the antiwar crowd) that Humphrey lost. Huh? I guess it couldn't have been Humphrey's fault that he saddled himself with Johnson's War. At least he was the sitting vice president--what's Kerry's excuse?

And as long as we're playing the bogus counterfactual history "whose fault was Nixon" game, there are plenty of turns to go around. Assume that RFK had not been killed in June of 1968. Having won the California primary, he was poised to wrest the nomination from Humphrey, relieving the Democrats of their war burden, and would presumably have swept to victory over Tricky Dick. Imagine...no Houston Plan, no destabilizing Chile--maybe a few million still alive in Southeast Asia.... Well, maybe it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the point is history is not an a la carte menu. You can't pick and choose once the opportunities are gone.

The only way the Democrats can lose this election, as I see it, is to fail to embrace and stay ahead of the exploding buyer's remorse now coming into focus over the quagmire in Iraqnam. The RFK analogy is with us still, in the person of Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich is RFK for 2004--the late-surging candidate whose war stance-deemed opportunistic by some, too establishment by others--represents the hope of the party but whose candidacy, alas, is not to re: RFK's because he was shot in the head, and DJK's because he was shot in the image, budget, soul...take your pick. But it doesn't graft well a generation later. No bullets were necessary to doom Kucinich's candidacy, and no matter what changes between now and July, it is exceedingly unlikely that Democrats in the "disciplined," slick "modern" era would abandon the walking disaster that is the Kerry candidacy--although they should be thinking hard about it. But of course, it's beside my point. Who cares who's running in November? Impeach the bastards now. By the time the dust settles and the indictments are all handed out, we may well have come far enough down the chain of succession to where a new government might mean something: Bernie Sanders, or Kucinch, and Barbara Lee. Full speed ahead!

© 2004 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to http://www.danielpwelch.com. Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School. His website is at http://www.danielpwelch.com

KUCINICH WINS DELEGATES IN OREGON

With about 90% of the votes counted in yesterday’s Oregon primary, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich appeared headed toward a final total of about 16%, enough to win several delegates to the Democratic National Convention in July. “I’m grateful to the voters of Oregon for their support, their encouragement, and their hospitality,” said Kucinich, who spent a good part of the past month campaigning throughout the state. “Oregonians responded to my message about the importance of the Democratic Party taking a stand on the crucial issues facing our country, and now we’ll have additional delegates to help take that message to the convention in Boston.”

Kucinich said the response of Oregonians was especially strong on the issue of the war in Iraq, and he intends to continue making that a centerpiece of his ongoing campaign in Montana, South Dakota, Alabama, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. “When you reach out to voters, and you listen to what they have to say, you hear loudly and clearly that they want the Democratic Party to end this war and bring our troops home,” Kucinich said. “Even though the party’s nomination was locked up two months ago, tens of thousands of Oregonians voted their consciences and their beliefs.” Oregon is considered a key swing state in the November general election.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM PETER SCHURMAN AT MOVEON.ORG

As America learns more about the prisoner abuse scandal, it's becoming clear that the path to the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison began at Donald Rumsfeld's office in the Pentagon. According to an article in the New Yorker magazine, a policy put in place by Secretary Rumsfeld "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq." Despite this horrible scandal and the cascading failures of U.S. military policy in Iraq, President Bush says that Rumsfeld is doing "a superb job." In the absence of presidential leadership, Congress must step in and hold the administration accountable. Please call your Senators and Representative today and tell them to call on President Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld.

Senator Charles E. Schumer
Washington, DC: 202-224-6542

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
Washington, DC: 202-224-4451

Congresswoman Nydia M. Velazquez
Washington, DC: 202-225-2361

President Bush approved a policy that the Geneva Convention wouldn't apply to suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. When the war in Iraq started to go badly, Rumsfeld extended these aggressive interrogation policies to Iraqi prisons. According to the current issue of Newsweek ... "It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers - and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation - methods that the Red Cross concluded were ëtantamount to torture."

High-level officials in the Pentagon were sent from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq to implement the more aggressive policies, and it appears that command of the prison was placed in the hands of military intelligence officers. Techniques that had been approved only for suspected al-Qaeda terrorists were suddenly applied to Iraqi prisoners (up to 90% of whom
>were mistakenly detained, according to the Red Cross). Despite the eagerness of the Bush administration to blame the torture at Abu Ghraib on a few rogue soldiers, it is now clear that real responsibility lies at the top of the chain of command. As the Commander-in-Chief, it's President Bushís job to decide who runs the Pentagon. If he won't take the steps that are needed to restore American credibility around the world, Congress needs to use its power to convince the president to do the right thing - whether it issues a clear public call for the Secretary's resignation or whether it uses other leverage to force the Administrationís hand.