Seeking Clemency from a War Criminal: The Case of Evan Vela Carnahan

George W. BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take– Martha RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded. BUSH: Yeah, that’s right. So what?


President Bush's interview on ABC News in Baghdad, December 15.





Sgt. Evan Vela Carnahan, 25, has served roughly one year of a ten-year sentence at the Ft. Leavenworth Military Prison. In November 2007, he was convicted of murdering an Iraqi civilian named Genei Nasir Khudair al-Janabi, whom he killed with a single shot to the head from a 9mm sidearm.


The killing took place just a few hundred feet from Janabi's home, which is located in a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in Baghdad near Iskandariyah in a region sometimes called the "Triangle of Death." Evan admits that he killed Janabi in compliance with a direct order issued by his squad leader. The squad leader -- who was acquitted of a murder charge -- admits that he gave the order, and stated under oath that he would have killed Janabi himself except for the fact that Evan was the one with the pistol in his hand.


During the past six years, the Bush Regime has followed an inverted Nuremberg formula -- call it the "Abu Ghraib Doctrine" -- under which the legal accountability for war crimes resides only with those at the bottom of the chain of command. To palliate public opinion in Iraq, a handful of low-ranking soldiers were sent to prison after the Abu Ghraib atrocities were made public.


Evan Carnahan was sent to prison for much the same reason: The killing of Janabi, which took place on May 11, 2007, came just as the much-heralded "surge" began, a program in which U.S. occupation commanders pacified the Sunni Triangle by bribing the leaders of the Sunni insurgency.


Curtis Carnahan, Evan's father (and a close personal friend of mine from High School), told Pro Libertate that "the Iraqi Human Rights Minister was present at every session of Evan's military trial, which the Army insisted on holding in Baghdad.... The trial didn't begin until November [of 2007], after Evan's unit had returned to Alaska. They could have brought Evan back to the United States, and we repeatedly filed motions to have the trial moved stateside. Instead, the Army, at great unnecessary expense, held the trial in Iraq, under the constant scrutiny of Iraqi officials. It's clear to me that Evan was being used as a scapegoat, as a political sacrifice, in order to appease Iraqi government officials."



Evan was part of a five-man sniper team that had implanted itself in a "hide" behind an earthen berm. Over the previous four days the team had been able to sleep no more than 3-4 hours during each 24-hour cycle, and what sleep they had was divided into fifteen-minute segments. This was typical of the 56 missions Evan's team had carried out under Staff Sergeant Michael A. Hensley, an Expert Marksman tasked to increase the "kill rate" of suspected "insurgents" in the area.


Hensley -- described in an Esquire story as a twitchy, tatooed collection of eccentric mannerisms and nihilistic opinions -- was one of the most proficient snipers in the U.S. Army, a "natural-born killer."


Evan was adopted by Curtis (who runs a printing business in eastern Idaho) as a child. The Army insists on calling him Sgt. Vela because of a clerical matter involving his Social Security Card. He was, by all accounts, an exemplary soldier who did not check his conscience at the door when he left for combat.


Before shipping out for Iraq, Evan expressed his ambivalence about killing Iraqis to his LDS (Mormon) Bishop. The spiritual counsel he received, as encapsulated in a videotape prepared by church authorities, was that he would not be held accountable by God for shedding the blood of Iraqis as long as he went to war "in a spirit of love."


This is anodyne advice of no practical or moral value in a war of aggression in which every U.S. soldier who kills in self-defense is actually committing murder. Since the U.S. government had no moral right or legal authority to invade Iraq, U.S. military personnel in that country are the equivalent of robbers suddenly confronted by an armed homeowner: A robber in that situation has no right to defend himself by force.


This isn't to say that every American serviceman in Iraq intended to behave like an armed robber, or that they deserve to be killed. It is to say that they shouldn't have been sent there in the first place, and that justice requires not only that we totally withdraw from Iraq but also prosecute and punish of those responsible for planning and ordering the invasion.


Evan's case offers a particularly poignant example of the multi-layered injustices that have blossomed from the Bushling's unnecessary war.


Early on the morning of May 11, Evan -- who had been assigned guard duty, but (given his human limitations) inevitably found himself dozing off -- awoke to find himself staring into the startled face of Genei al-Janabi, who had stumbled onto the sniper squad's "hide" on his way to fetch water. The squad soon awoke, and Janabi was taken prisoner. Shortly thereafter, Janabi's teenage son materialized and was likewise taken into custody.


Hensley now confronted a predicament. His squad had been sent to ferret out suspected insurgents in what was, at the time, a very active battle zone. Their position had been compromised, and the elder Janabi, understandably terrified, began to thrash and cry out for help. Helmsley decided to release the son. As soon as the teenager had departed, Hensley turned to Evan and ordered him to kill Janabi. Evan did as he was ordered.


Immediately thereafter, Hensley ordered the squad to plant an AK-47 on Janabi's dead body. He also began to concoct cover story; this involved multiple spurious radio calls to Lt. Matthew Didier at the squad's patrol base describing concerns about a suspected insurgent and requesting permission to kill him.


The killing of Janabi, Hensley later explained, "is legitimate to me; it's not legitimate to the law. So I [had] two choices. I can do something illegal, like put a gun on him, or I can go to jail for murder. I don't know where you stand ethically on all of that, but that is what it is. And if doing something that is a little dishonest keeps me and my men from going to jail one day, I am going to be a little dishonest. If the law causes my men to get killed, the law will be broken. If lying prevents me from going to jail, I'm going to lie."


Al-Janabi, Hensley insisted, had to die because he was "making too much f*****g noise" and thus imperiled the lives of his men. As a field commander, Hensley decided that the Iraqi, who was in his own neighborhood, looking for water on his own property, "had no right to be there, he was a bad guy, he deserved to die."


So he ordered Evan Carnahan to shoot the man in the head. And Carnahan, trained by the military to obey reflexively, and taught by his church leaders that obedience to authority expunges the taint of criminal actions, pulled the trigger, believing that his action was legally sound and morally right.


After the Sunni Buy-Out -- aka "Surge" -- began, the shooting of Janabi became a local political controversy, and the Army sicced the Criminal Investigative Division on Hensley and his squad. Hensley, whose conscience is as flexible as a Cirque du Soleil performer, brazened out the interrogation.


Evan broke down under questioning. He was offered immunity to testify against Specialist Jorge Sandoval and S. Sgt. Hensley. Both Sandoval and Hensley were acquitted of murder and convicted of lesser offenses. Both of them were given sentences equivalent to time already served in pre-trial detention.


Despite his immunity agreement, Evan was brought to trial. Hensley -- who, having been acquitted of murder, had nothing to lose -- testified on Evan's behalf. He eagerly, perhaps even giddily, admitted to being the instigator of Janabi's death, describing Evan's role as merely that of carrying out what the soldier believed to be a lawful order.


Curtis Carnahan, who made three long, expensive trips to Baghdad for Evan's pre-trial hearings and criminal trial, told me that the eight-member trial panel who heard the case "was hand-picked by General Rick Lynch," the appropriately surnamed commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, whom Carnahan describes as "a smug, narcissistic son-of-a-bitch." Lynch's priority at the time was to placate Iraqi officials. This was necessary, in turn, to ensure the "success" of the "Surge," which itself was intended to neutralize growing American antipathy toward the war.


Given all of these considerations, someone had to be fed to the wolves, and Evan happened to be the only suitable candidate.


A Father seeks justice: Curtis Carnahan (right) during one of his trips to Baghdad on behalf of his son, Evan.



According to Curtis, the Army had a file on Janabi suggesting that "he was a bad guy. And several people with detailed knowledge of the region have developed intelligence confirming that the al-Janabi tribe was either active in al-Qaeda, or collaborating with them."


Of course, just days after Janabi was killed, collaborating with suspected al-Qaeda operatives became official U.S. military policy in Iskandiriyah. It's also worth recalling the exchange quoted in the epigram above, in which George W. Bush, when confronted with the charge that it was his invasion and occupation of Iraq that resulted in Iraq becoming infested with al-Qaeda, replied: "So what?"


Bush infused those two syllables with his proprietary blend of bellicose ignorance and arrogant dismissiveness. Yes, he was admitting, the invasion created a morass of guerilla violence and a breeding ground for terrorism where none previously existed -- but that's not important. The implicit question is: If this isn't important -- if there were no WMDs, and the invasion actually enhanced the terrorist threat -- why did the U.S. invade Iraq?


An observation offered Curtis Carnahan is suggestive of an answer.


"Everything I saw while I was over there suggests that they're not going to pull out," Curtis told me. "There was construction going on everywhere -- more buildings, more concrete, more everything at Camps Victory and Liberty. They're definitely settling in for a long haul."


This underscores the fact that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was pure military colonialism. It wasn't intended to "liberate" a country long ruled by a U.S.-installed surrogate thug, much less to protect the United States and its inhabitants from any "threat" posed by that tiny, insignificant country. The objective was always to seize control over Iraq and use it as a staging base to assert military and political control over the region's energy resources -- an objective that will be followed irrespective of the new agreement with "independent" Iraq.


Curtis, as I mentioned earlier, is an old friend of mine (he was, in fact, my vice president when I was president of the Madison High School Class of 1981). He sees the war in starkly different terms than I do, insisting that the correct approach is to "cut off their heads and crush them -- we should be acting like a conquering army, forcing them to submit to our will." Like many other people I know, including many I love and respect, he doesn't appear troubled by the prospect of living under a government capable of exercising powers of the sort he describes. But due to what his son has experienced, Curtis does have a better understanding of the incurable corruption that infects every element of the Regime that rules us.


















She's not saying "Bush is Number One!" Evan Carnahan's sister, during a visit to Mordor, expresses her opinion of George W. Bush and the Regime he briefly ruled. (Photo courtesy of Curtis Carnahan.)


To justify an act of murder, Hensley fixed the "facts" around his decision to justify the killing. This was perfectly in harmony with the conduct of his Commander-in-Chief. When that decision created a local public relations problem, the soldier who pulled the trigger was offered as a sacrifice to political expediency; this, too, is perfectly in accord with Mr. Bush's priorities.


Among the clear lessons taught by this abhorrent case is this: Those who understand and cherish individual liberty should never allow themselves to become the agents of another person's will.


Evan Carnahan is merely one of countless thousands of fundamentally decent Americans whose earnest patriotism led them to participate in a world-historic crime. Unlike most of them, however, Evan is now in prison while those who used him to carry out that crime are free -- and his only hope for freedom, at present, is an act of clemency from the War Criminal in the White House.




On sale now.











Dum spiro, pugno!

Flying Shoes, Bursting Bubbles

The most remarkable thing about the gesture was the fact that it was an act of defiant contempt, rather than one of criminal violence.



Bush's reaction was remarkable only in the sense that he displayed, for perhaps the last time before he becomes deservedly inconsequential, the depth of his ignorance and the utter impregnability of his unearned self-regard.



Immediately after a Iraqi reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi disrupted a Baghdad press conference by hurling both shoes at Bush, calling him a "dog" and denouncing him in the name of "the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq," Bush sat down with ABC reporter Martha Raddatz to decant some of his unique wisdom about matters of diplomacy and cultural understanding.



Raddatz pointed out that Zaidi's gesture -- attempting to strike Bush in the face with the sole of a shoe -- is "considered a huge insult in this [part of the] world."



Bush's reply defies parody: "Look, they were humiliated. The press corps, the rest of the Iraqi press corps was humiliated.... But I'm not insulted."



So -- this carefully calibrated gesture, this surgical strike of an insult, which was directed specifically at the individual most responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans, managed somehow to humiliate everybody else in the room, while sparing the invincible ego of the one who was targeted.



This is not a sign of a character healthy and stable enough to slough off petty insults. It is a manifestation of a sociopath's indifference to the legitimate concerns of other people -- in this case, a young Iraqi journalist who has been subjected to violence by both American occupation forces (which had previously arrested him twice without cause) and the criminal mobs set free to prey upon the country by the U.S.-led invasion of his homeland.



"The guy wanted to get on TV and he did," opined Bush in his interview with Raddatz. "I don't know what his beef is. But whatever it is I'm sure somebody will hear it."




Mr. Zaidi's inexplicable "beef," of course, is his entirely understandable rage and resentment over the foreign occupation of his country, and the needless death of innocent people.



Unlike Bush, who has made four lightning-quick visits to Baghdad -- fleeting appearances under the cover of impenetrable security, during which he was spared any exposure to the gratitude of the pitiful people he "liberated" -- Zaidi lives in Iraq. He has to live with the consequences of Bush's whimsical little venture in mass murder and social destruction.



It was quite understandable that Zaidi found himself unable to abide the spectacle of Bush stewing in self-congratulation while Nouri al-Maliki and the assembled reporters dutifully played along with the charade, passively ratifying the lies that continue to sustain the world-historic crime that is the Iraq war.



Those who don't believe in a Creator find it difficult to explain how matter attained self-awareness. The existence of George W. Bush presents us with exactly the opposite conundrum: How can someone blessed with the capacity for thought be at once utterly self-preoccupied and entirely devoid of self-awareness?



Consider how Bush deflected the matter of Zaidi's insult -- which has understandably resonated throughout the Arab world -- by comparing it with what he considers to be a similar incident during the visit of another ruler to Washington:



"I've seen a lot of weird things during my presidency and this may rank up there as one of the weirdest. On the other hand, I do remember when the president of China came to the South Lawn, and a member of the press corps started yelling --I think it was Falun Gong slogans at the Chinese president. So this happens and it's a sign of a free society."



I'm not sure which part of this double-barrelled absurdity to deal with first.



Did Mr. Bush have a measurable understanding of the comparison he was drawing? The Falun Gong movement seems to share a phylum with Scientology and the Unification Church, but there are credible reports that its adherents are on the receiving end of severe official persecution, ranging from imprisonment to (allegedly) summary execution followed by harvesting of their organs for commercial use. Given that fact, is Mr. Bush really comfortable with his comparison?


Furthermore, after Dr. Wenyi Wang, a correspondent for the Falun Gong-founded newspaper Epoch Times, interrupted the press conference by shouting to Bush that he should "ask Hu Jintao to stop persecuting the Falun Gong," she was arrested and charged with "willfully intimidating, coercing, threatening and harassing a foreign official," a misdemeanor carrying penalties up to six months in jail and a $5,000 fine.



This wasn't done in China by Hu's government; it was done here by the regime over which Bush presides.



Yes, those charges were dropped in April 2007 -- as part of an agreement in which she was required not to commit any other crime, including the supposed offense of "confronting" any foreign leader about his government's human rights record.



All of this, one assumes, constitutes what Bush is pleased to call the workings of "a free society."
Perhaps he means a society in which the ruling elite is generally kept free of vexing exposure to the unfiltered opinions of those they rule.



It was the sudden, unaccustomed exposure to a contrary opinion that may have precipitated
Attorney General Michael Mukasey's sudden fainting spell during a recent address to the Federalist Society in Washington.



Generally described as "conservative," the Federalist Society has been an incubator for many of the Bush Regime's signature policies in the war on terror -- institutionalizing the practice of torture, undermining habeas corpus, indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, the use of drumhead military tribunals with Soviet standards of evidence, exalting the president to the status of Grand and Glorious Decider, and so forth.



Mukasey used his address at the Federalist Society function for the same reason Bush made a final stop in Baghdad: Both of them were seeking to secure the Bush Junta's "legacy" by making grand summary statements of its supposed accomplishments before docile audiences.


In both cases, there was at least one ram among the sheep. For Bush, it was Muntazer al-Zaidi. For Mukasey it was Richard Sanders -- no, not the actor who played Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati, but rather a State Supreme Court Justice from Washington.



Sanders is often described as a libertarian-leaning judge; he says that "protection of our constitutionally guaranteed liberties as the first duty of our highest court." He managed to sit in silence for 17 minutes as Mukasey, basking in the fawning glow of his sycophantic audience, extolled the virtues of the Bush Regime's assault on the rule of law. But Sanders, as sickened by the audience as he was by the speaker, could abide no more.



"Tyrant! You are a tyrant!" Sanders stood and exclaimed, causing Mukasey to pause momentarily. He left just moments later. A few minutes later, Mukasey suddenly started stumbling over his words as he read his prepared text; to the horror of his audience, the Attorney General suddenly slumped foward over the lectern, bringing FBI agents scrambling to the podium to catch him before he fell.



Sanders had left by the time Mukasey's collapse took place, and was understandably concerned for the official's health. But as someone who cherishes liberty and respects the Constitution, Sanders simply couldn't suppress his reaction.



"Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, 'I've got to stand up and say something.' And I did," Sanders told his hometown press. "I stood up and said, 'Tyrant,' then I sat down again, then I left."



In a statement issued to the press, Sanders described how his outburst was the product of insuperable revulsion over both the Regime's behavior and that of its willing accomplices in the audience at that Federalist Society event:


"In his speech, Attorney General Mukasey justified the Bush administration's policies in the War on Terror, which included deying meaningful hearings for prisoners in Guantanamo, and other questionable tactics.... [T]he government must never set aside the Constitution; domestic and international law forbids torture; and access to the writ of habeas corpus shoud not be denied.



The program provided no opportunity for questions or response, and I felt compelled to speak out. I stood up, and said, `tyrant,' and then left the meeting. No one else said anything. I believe we must speak our conscience in moments that demand it, even if we are but one voice."



Or, for that matter, if we have only one set of shoes to hurl at the Emperor.



Policymakers, from the Dear Leader on down, are hermetically sealed off from dissent of any kind. On those rare occasions when frustration and moral outrage find a fissure in that bubble and the serenity of a political celebrity is disturbed, the result is usually a prominent display of some kind of corrective violence directed at the dissident.



Because he's a sitting judge, Sanders won't be punished in any way for his eruption. A private citizen almost certainly would face some kind of reprisal: That, after all, is what Tasers are for.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

When Desertion is a Duty

A young man named Stephen with large hopes and a small bank account answered an employment ad for a security agency. Offered a generous salary, extravagant benefits, and a sizable signing bonus, he inked a renewable employment contract promising to work for the agency for six years.


Only after Stephen passed through the agency's training program did he discover that the security firm was actually a front for a criminal syndicate. Rather than protecting lives and property, he would be required to take part in armed robberies and expected to kill, when necessary, to ensure the success of the "mission."


Stephen had no problem with the idea of risking his life for money, but he wanted nothing to do with crimes against innocent people. So he simply walked away from his job. Question: Should Stephen be subject to civil or criminal liability for deserting his employers and violating the terms of his contract? That contract was certainly valid at the time of its execution. But it became defective when Stephen's employer required him to commit crimes against innocent people. A contract requiring a party to commit a crime is not enforceable.



When the Mafia puts out a "contract" to have someone murdered, it hardly expects that agreement to be enforced by the courts.


Obviously, Stephen shouldn't be punished for walking away from his contract. In fact, a better moral case could be made for prosecuting those who choose not to do as Stephen did, once they became aware of the true nature of their employer and the "mission" they had been given.


"Stephen" is a hypothetical character. Robin Long is the reality. The 25-year-old Idahoan, who enlisted in the Army in 2003, was recently convicted of desertion and sentenced to 15 months behind bars for the supposed crime of refusing to participate in an illegal war.


Robin was raised in Boise as part of a military family, and always took it for granted that he would make the military his career as well. When Robin enlisted in June 2003, the Army recruiter -- who, like many others in that line of work, was a shameless liar -- assured him that he wouldn't be sent to Iraq.

Not content to be a contract killer, Robin Long decided to quit his job. Now the criminal syndicate that hired him is throwing him in jail.


Those assurances seemed quite plausible at the time, since they were offered just weeks after Bush's notorious "Mission Accomplished" photo-op. But at the time Robin wasn't opposed to being sent to fight what he then considered to be a just war.


"When the United States first attacked Iraq, I was told by my president that it was because of direct ties to al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction," he later recalled. "At the time, I believed what was being said."


Robin's view of the morality of the Iraq war changed not because he learned that the case for it was fraudulent (something no honest person can now dispute), but rather because of the way his training dehumanized the Iraqis he was supposedly being sent to liberate.


"I was hearing on mainstream media that the U.S. was going to Iraq to get the weapons of mass destruction and to liberate the Iraqi people, yet [I was] being taught that I'm going to the desert to, excuse the racial slur, `kill ragheads,'" Robin explained. Robin's horror was compounded by encounters with Iraq combat veterans who bragged of their "first kills" or showed him pictures of Iraqis who had died beneath tank treads.


When Robin received orders to ship out to Iraq in 2005, he was the only one in his unit called up for combat. Given a month's leave before he was to report to Fort Carson in Colorado, Robin took the opportunity to learn more about the merits of the war. After long and anguished contemplation he decided that he couldn't be a party to a world-historic crime. So, acting on exactly the same moral premises that "Stephen" did in the parable above, Robin deserted his employer.


Seeking refuge from the crime syndicate he had unwittingly served, Robin took up residence in a friend's basement in Boise, then relocated to Canada, where he lived for three years. He met a young woman he wanted to marry; they got a head start on a family by having a son before a ceremony.


Robin applied for refugee status, contending that he was unwilling to participate in a patently illegal war and confronted "irreparable harm" if we were forced to return to the putative Land of the Free. Broadly speaking, the Canadian government shares Robin's view of the Iraq war and has never taken part in the Coalition of the Bullied and Bribed Washington assembled to occupy Iraq. Both Parliament and the Canadian public support a return to that country's Vietnam-era policy of welcoming American soldiers who refuse to serve in an unjust foreign war.


But Stephan Harper's government, under pressure from the Bush Regime, refuses to treat war resisters as refugees. Robin was denied refugee status and required to check in with Canadian immigration authorities every month.


On July 4, Robin was arrested by the Canadian Border Services Agency, which accused him of not "adequately" reporting his whereabouts. Robin became the first American "deserter" to be deported from Canada back to the U.S. since the Vietnam war.


Although he's a hero to many opponents of the Iraq war, Robin, like others who have refused orders to kill Iraqis, has been accused of cowardice. Tim Richard, a former National Guard soldier from Iowa, knows what it is like to be assailed as a coward for following his conscience rather than the herd. Like Robin, Tim fled to Canada shortly before he was to be sent to Iraq. However, Tim is uniquely fortunate in that he had dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship, a fact that stymied efforts to return him to the lower 48.

Tim Richard (back row, second from left), seen here with other Canadian anti-war activists.


Seeking money to pay for college, Tim enlisted in the National Guard in 1999. His contract specified a six-year term of service. In 2005, Tim was a semester away from completing his college degree, and four months from the end of his service contract, when he was called up for deployment to Iraq.


After making the necessary inquiries, Tim was shown official paperwork that changed his release date from November 2005 to December 2031. A contract that can be unilaterally changed by one party is not enforceable. But, as noted here before, the official view of the military, as explained to a soldier deployed in Iraq, is that "we can keep you here just as long as we want, and we ain't never got to send you home."


After reporting to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, Tim was horrified by the pre-deployment training he was given. Much of that training dealt with kicking in doors and holding civilians at gunpoint -- "attacking people who are defending their homes," as he describes it. In one training exercise he ended up "shooting" two role-players posing as Iraqi civilians. The experience, along with the studied indifference of his instructors and fellow trainees, left Tim profoundly shaken.


Along with other soldiers bound for Iraq, Tim was given leave on Thanksgiving Day 2005. He used that opportunity to take an outbound bus headed for the western U.S., eventually joining his mother in British Columbia.


This act was called "desertion" by the U.S. military. But, as Tim points out, he actually carried out the terms of his service contract before it was unilaterally (which is to say, fraudulently) revised by the military: Tim served the full six years he had agreed to. Because of the criminal policies of the government that ruled him, Tim was compelled not only to flee to Canada but to repudiate his U.S. citizenship. Now a full Canadian citizen, Tim has continued both his college education and his activism against the Iraq war.


Both wings of the Establishment Party are in agreement that the U.S. will remain mired in Iraq until at least 2011. Meanwhile, Washington is eagerly courting other catastrophes in the region: Preparations are still being made for a strike on Iran, the resurgent Taliban, in time-honored fashion, is slowly but effectively cutting off supply routes for U.S.-led occupation forces in Afghanistan, and the Bush Regime seems perversely determined to goad Russia into a completely avoidable conflict the the Caucasus.

Two more "liberated" Iraqi children join the uncounted thousands who have been killed as a result of Washington's murderous "humanitarianism." May God grant them eternal peace in His presence.



All of this will inevitably mean that tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel -- Guardsmen and Reservists, in particular -- will deal with multiple and extended tours of duty, conscription by "stop-loss" order, and other insufferable hardships inflicted in the course of missions having nothing to do with defending the United States. If we harvest even one-tenth the hell Bush and his handlers have sown, the trickle of "deserters" may quickly become a deluge.


There is nothing criminal about refusing to honor a supposed commitment to serve as contract killers for the world's largest source of preventable criminal violence.


On the subject of officially sanctioned criminal violence --



Media notice

Tomorrow (Thursday, Aug. 28) I'll be on the nationally syndicated radio program Point of View from 2:00-3:00 Eastern Time to discuss "Communitarianism," both the ideology and the movement.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Fiat Justicia Ruat Caelum

"Ha! I kill me!" Unfortunately, the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq is not metaphorical.











"...the rulers of the states are the most criminal group in a respective population. With a limitation of their power their criminality tends to decrease; but it still remains exceptionally high in all nations."

Pitirim Sorokin



What was the offense for which Saddam Hussein was executed?


Most people in a position to answer that question -- those with an attention span superior to that of the typical goldfish -- would probably say that Saddam suffered the long drop to the end of the rope as punishment for his multifarious crimes against humanity.


That list would include waging aggressive war against Iran, the use of chemical weapons in that conflict and against his own subject population, or for other mass murders and acts of domestic terror.


The correct answer, as former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi recalls, is that the formal charge for which Saddam was hanged was not the murder of millions or even thousands, but rather the execution -- following a proper trial, conducted under established law and settled standards of due process -- of 102 Shi'ite men from the village of Dujail.


Those men were convicted of plotting and carrying out an attempt on Saddam's life when he visited the Shi'ite village 35 miles north of Baghdad in July 1982. At the time of that assassination attempt, Saddam was a subcontractor for the world's most malevolent regimes -- the one infesting Washington, and the one afflicting Russia -- and so he was obviously capable of bestial behavior. Yet in dealing with the attempt on his life, Saddam behaved as if he were a legitimate head of state*.


Saddam let his security forces round up about 800 people and winnow from them the relative handful of people who had some direct connection to the attack. After a two-year inquiry, a 361-page indictment was compiled naming some 148 suspects. By that time, 46 of the suspects had died under torture at Abu Ghraib prison, a fate not unfamiliar to those imprisoned there under American rule following Iraq's "liberation." The remaining 102 were tried, convicted, and executed for the attempt on Saddam's life.


Interestingly, the attempt by Shi'ite radicals to murder Saddam came just months after the Syrian regime of fellow Ba'athist Hafez al-Assad dealt with an uprising organized by the Muslim Brotherhood (a beneficiary of U.S. aid since the early 1950s, as Robert Dreyfuss documents in his book Devil's Game) in a small town called Hama. Assad dealt with that rebellion by unleashing his military and pounding Hama into blood pudding massacring an estimated 10,000-25,000 people.



Saddam dealt with a much more personal threat in Dujail. Had he behaved as the prevailing caricature would suggest, that village would have been destroyed root and branch: The town itself would have been subject to Carthaginian destruction, and the extended families of its residents would have been liquidated. Instead, Saddam's government undertook to distinguish the guilty from the innocent and punished only those determined to have been complicit in the attempt on his life.

As Bugliosi notes, Saddam "was killed [by execution] for killing those who first tried to kill him." More than five years ago, George W. Bush ordered American military personnel to invade and occupy Iraq, thereby authorizing the killing of Iraqis who had never harmed or threatened Americans in any way. Thousands of Americans and -- most likely -- hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of Bush's orders. Sundry justifications have been offered for this unnecessary bloodshed. Among them was the charge that Bush flung at a September 2002 fund-raiser in Houston: "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my Dad." Even if that were true -- something we have ample reason to doubt -- it must be pointed out that Bush's Daddy tried to kill Saddam first during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.



The revenge motive, whether or not it reflects genuine filial passion on Bush's part, makes as much sense as any of the other rationales for the ongoing conflict in Iraq, aka The War In Search Of A Reason. And this fact underscores the fact that the legal case for convicting Bush is much stronger than the one used to convict Saddam.


Consider: Saddam was the direct target of a documentable assassination attempt, and his response was to find those specifically responsible and punish them. Bush the Younger, claiming an irrepressible desire to punish those responsible for a dubious alleged attack on his father, instigated a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, devoured hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth, helped bring about an accelerating economic crisis, and threatens to metastasize into a regional or even global conflict. Saddam was made to stretch a rope for much less than this. In fact, the "crime" for which Saddam was executed was nothing of the sort.


In his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vincent Bugliosi takes note of this contrast, but he curiously doesn't elaborate on it. That's probably the only notable shortcoming in the case made by Mr. Bugliosi in his timely and necessary book.


Bugliosi made his reputation by prosecuting the Charles Manson, so he's well-equipped to deal with the blank-eyed sociopath defiling the White House. He insists that Bush can and must be put on trial -- within the United States, not at The Hague -- for the deliberate, premeditated murder of Americans sent to die in Iraq. Those deaths were entirely unnecessary and occurred because of the depraved indifference to human life displayed by the Grand and Glorious Decider in bringing about the Iraq War.


According to Bugliosi's analysis, Bush can find no legal refuge in the fact that Congress "authorized" and funded the war, since "consent is not a defense to the crime of murder. Further, even if it were, it is [well-established] law that fraud vitiates consent. So the consent that Congress gave Bush is nullified by the deliberate misrepresentations he made to Congress in inducing it to give him its consent."


Additionally, after he leaves office Bush is fully liable for any criminal actions he committed while he was president, unless his successor issues a plenary pardon. Under existing law, it is not necessary to prove a specific intent to kill in order to demonstrate "premeditation"; the act of "lying in wait" to attack a victim who subsequently dies is sufficient.















No lack of jurisdiction: Bush's murder victims come from every state and most U.S. territories. Any state Attorney General, or county prosecutor, could pursue an indictment against Bush.


As applied to Bush's crimes, this principle would mean that it's not necessary to prove that Bush intended for any specific American or Iraqi to die in order for him to face the charge of first degree murder. At an absolute minimum, however, "Bush's taking the nation to war would constitute implied malice, that is, an intent to do a highly dangerous act with reckless disregard and indifference to human life, and hence, at least second degree murder in every state, as well as under federal law," writes Bugliosi.


Thus "any state attorney general in the fifty states (or any district attorney -- called the state's attorney in cities like Chicago and Miami -- in any county of any state) could bring a murder charge against Bush for any soldiers from that state or county who lost their lives fighting Bush's war," the author continues.


In fact, such an attempt has already been made by Ed Felien, a former City Councilman from Minneapolis. Last May, Felien petitioned the Minneapolis District Court for a writ of mandamus "alleging that President Bush committed third degree murder by sending Minneapolis National Guard troops to Iraq on false pretenses," reported Jason Leopold of The Public Record. Felien has appeared before a District Court judge to argue "that a county attorney should be ordered to arrest the president on murder charges when he arrives in the city for the 2008 Republican National Convention."



Unfortunately, Felien's complaint is attenuated -- and thus made ineffective -- by various less important allegations of oil price-fixing and drug distribution.


But this doesn't foreclose the possibility of other, more tightly written complaints being filed by other officials in Minnesota or elsewhere.


George W. Bush habitually displays the sociopath's frigid indifference to the suffering of others, but he is exquisitely sensitive to impositions on his own leisure time.


Yeah, war's a real laugh riot -- isn't it, Idiot Boy?


Witness, as just one example, Bush's recent lie (widely reported while Bugliosi's book was on the presses) that he had given up golfing as an act of sacrificial solidarity with U.S. troops and their families. Bugliosi points out that of the approximately 2,535 days of Bush's presidency through last January 1, "Bush spent all or part of 908 days, an incredible 36 percent of his time, on vacation or at retreat places.... Two and a half years of the less than seven years of his presidency in which his main goal was to kick back and have fun."


And boy, has the Bushling had fun.


While Iraqis are dying by the tens of thousands, American troops are on their fourth and fifth rotations into hell, and more than four thousand American families have lost children, husbands, fathers, and mothers, Bush's life has been one protracted lark punctuated by the unpleasant occasional necessity of pretending to work. Neither the rigors of education nor the burden of painfully acquired wisdom has ever left is impress on Bush's face -- something genuinely remarkable for someone in the seventh decade of life.


During the past five years of war, the expression most often seen radiating from the face of that in-bred, pampered Man-Child has been the kind of delight one would expect of an idiot child who can indulge every transient whim. No matter the suffering inflicted on others by his war, no matter how many Americans die or suffer life-altering injuries, Bush "is always seen with a big smile on his face ... and is in good spirits," notes Bugliosi. "How would that be possible if he was suffering?" Just weeks after 9/11, while Americans were still shattered by the event, the New York Times noted that "Mr. Bush's nonchalant, jocular demeanor remains the same."



In an August 2002 interview with Runner's World, while Americans were killing and dying in Afghanistan and his administration was getting ready to roll out the case to expand the killing to Iraq, Bush complained that his daily jogging regimen was suffering: "It's sad that I can't run longer. It's one of the saddest things about my presidency."


"All in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me," effused Bush in December 2001, a year incurably disfigured in the memory of the rest of us by 9/11 and its aftermath. "We're having the time of our life," he gushed during his second inaugural in January 2005, nearly two years into the war of choice he inflicted on the world.


Given that his reign has taken place in a permanent state of quasi-vacation, Bush probably won't notice a dramatic change of lifestyle when he retires. Perhaps the only significant difference will be that he'll no longer be able to kill people at whim. He really should spend the remaining decades of his life being either pursued or punished for the murders he has committed. One wonders how the Secret Service would react to process-servers or bounty hunters charged to carry out court orders resulting from the legal process Bugliosi outlines; I think such incidents would be both entertaining and edifying.


While Bugliosi's criminal case against Bush is compelling, there are weaknesses in the rest of the book.


He insists, for instance, that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were somehow less inclined toward the promiscuous murder of foreigners than Bush has been, which is demonstrably untrue. Clinton shed blood needlessly in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, as well as in the politically convenient anti-impeachment military campaigns of 1998: The "Monica Missiles" missile attacks on Afghanistan and Somalia in August, and the "Desert Fox" bombing of Iraq in December. And Clinton's 1999 78-day terror bombing of Serbia, supposedly to prevent "genocide" in Kosovo, was an act of mass murder easily as prosecutable as Bush's assault on Iraq.

Don't forget Clinton's war crimes: Belgrade, the capital of a pro-U.S. European country, burns under assault by NATO bombers during the 78-day terror bombing ordered by Clinton in 1999 (left); a young girl who lost her legs in a bombing attack is just one of hundreds of civilian victims of the assault (below, right).


Where Bush -- as Bugliosi capably documents -- did everything he could to precipitate war with Iraq (to the point of discussing with Tony Blair various ways of provoking a first strike from Saddam), Clinton used a January 1999 diplomatic meeting in Rambouillet, France to present the Serbs with an ultimatum he knew they would have to refuse: The price of avoiding a bombing was Serb acquiescence to the military occupation of their country. "They [the Serbs] need some bombing," one State Department Clintinoid commented at the time, "and that's what they are going to get."


If it was just for Saddam to be forced to dance between heaven and earth because he executed would-be assassins, Bush deserves no less for his acts of mass murder, and Clinton really should join his successor in the dock as well. That's one reason why both wings of the Ruling Party will work in tandem to shelter Bush and his minions: Both sides are mired in the same morass of murderous criminality.


This is why Barack "The Holy One" Obama has disavowed any intention to pursue criminal investigations of the previous administration should he be elected, or even to support impeachment this year. "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breaches, and intentional breaches of the president's authority," he commented more than a year ago.


Apparently, waging aggressive war, institutionalizing torture, and eviscerating due process protections are merely "policy options" from Obama's perspective. That's certainly the view of the criminal class that produced him, and in whose service Obama would deploy his remarkably well-developed gift for mass deception.

_
* By using the term "legitimate" in this context, of course, I don't intend to imply that the state enjoys any innate legitimacy.


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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Depraved Majesty of Totalitarian Democracy

Is it Krushchev? Is it Lancelot Link's nemesis, Baron von Butcher? No, it's a little of both: It's the Grand and Glorious Decider in full General Urko mode.


After four Blackwater mercenaries were killed and their lifeless, butchered bodies publicly displayed by gleeful insurgents in March 2004, George W. Bush was handed one of those "leadership moments" so earnestly lusted after by incorrigible narcissists of his variety.


Summoning every resource of eloquence and inspiration at his disposal, Bush -- according to the newly published memoir by Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq -- disgorged what he probably thought was a masterpiece of Churchillian oratory in a videoconference with his national security team and commanding generals in Iraq:

"Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

This harangue was roughly equal parts towel-snapping frat-boy faux bravado, corporate seminar positive thinking dogma, partially digested talk radio sound-bites, and reheated Brezhnev-era Soviet revolutionary cant served up in one borderline-aphasic seizure.


Picking carefully through this slurry with a pair of tweezers we can extract one expression that nearly qualifies as a complete thought: The Marxoid imprecation against those who would "stop the march of Democracy" in Iraq and, presumably, elsewhere.


In fact, it was the audacity displayed by the residents of Fallujah in setting up their own self-governing institutions after the U.S. invasion that attracted the murderous attentions of Bush and his adult handlers.


Jeremy Scahill, in his exceptionally valuable study of Blackwater, Inc., points out that after the invasion "Fallujans had organized themselves and, before U.S. forces entered the city, created a local system of governance -- appointing a Civil Management Council with a manager and mayor -- in direct affront to the authority of the occupation."


Human Rights Watch reports that in Fallujah, the management of the city's public and private assets was apportioned among the various tribes, and arrangement one could call a form of checks and balances. The local hospital contracted with local militiamen to provide security. And local Imams "urged the public to respect law and order."


"Are you finished democratizing my city? Can I come out?"


What is described here is a rudimentary and very fragile form of republican self-government, albeit of a form based on cultural assumptions substantially different from those that informed our own Founders. So of course it had to be destroyed in the interests of the Bushevik Global Democratic Revolution.


Fallujah suffered greatly in the first Gulf War: A February 13 aerial bombing attack on a bridge spanning the Euphrates. The first airstrike failed to bring down the bridge. During the second, a half-dozen of the laser-guided "precision" missiles malfunctioned, missing the target and hitting a nearby residential neighborhood, an apartment building, and a crowded market. Scores were killed, hundreds more were wounded.


By the time the Bush family stretched forth its hand a second time to confer the blessings of armed benevolence upon the ungrateful Iraqis, Fallujah had become known as a stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein and anti-American hostility. This shouldn't surprise anyone with a particle of understanding of human nature. Which means it was utterly mystifying to those whose minds are incurably hostage to the tenets of totalitarian democracy.


You see, "Democracy" is the sanctified name used to describe whatever Washington sees fit to inflict on any community -- foreign or domestic -- it targets. And the objective of planting and nurturing democracy consecrates any means to bring about that end.


Shortly after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, a contingent of Marines occupied Fallujah, seizing the Al Qaed ("The Leader") School on Hay Nazzal Street as its headquarters. Since the reaction to this action was entirely predictable, the seizure has to be considered a deliberate provocation.


Opposition quickly coalesced, and a mob gathered around the school -- as well as Ba'ath Party HQ, also occupied by US troops -- to chant defiant slogans. The protest promoted Lt. Col, Eric Nantz, the U.S. commander in Fallujah, to warn the crowd via loudspeaker that the demonstration "could be considered a hostile act and would be engaged with deadly force.


At some point, a U.S. soldier was hit by a rock thrown by a demonstrator, and what had been a protest turned into a massacre. A hail of gunfire erupted, and hundreds of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered. Some eyewitnesses testify that U.S. troops ordered ambulance drivers away from the scene as civilians died in agony.


This all happened roughly a year before the death of four Blackwater operators who were sent, ill-prepared and with inadequate support, on a very badly planned mission in Fallujah.


It is tragically typical of the American mass mind -- at least, that small portion of it that still pays attention to the ongoing national crime in Iraq -- that the death of four mercenaries in the service of Washington's empire has become known as the "Fallujah Massacre," and -- of course -- there is no corresponding name for the murder of hundreds of Iraqis by American forces in 1991 and April 2003. Likewise, no name has been given to the breathtakingly savage campaign of detention, regimentation, state terrorism, and mass murder that the Bush Regime conducted in an attempt to impose democracy on Fallujah.


The death of four Blackwater operatives -- whose survivors were stiff-armed by both that politically connected corporation and the government it serves so dutifully -- gave the Regime "the ideal pretext to launch a massive assault on a population that was fast becoming a potent symbol suggesting that the United States and its Iraqi proxies were not really in control of the country," recounts Scahill. And remember: The triumph of "democracy" meant nothing more or less than uncontested U.S. control over Iraq.


In April 2004, Fallujah was encircled by U.S. troops and fenced in with concertina wire, and then Operation Vigilant Resolve began. According to on-site reports from both "embedded" and independent sources, occupation forces within the city seized control of the main hospital to prevent its use in treating the wounded. Air assaults destroyed the power plant and the main mosque.


Platoons were dispersed throughout the city armed with loudspeakers and a vocabulary of exquisitely profane insults compiled by psy-ops specialists as a way of luring resistance fighters out from hiding. This "insult-and-shoot" tactic was eagerly taken up by platoons throughout the city: U.S. troops, to the accompaniment of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Hell's Bells," pumped out a steady stream of profanity and then mercilessly gunned down those Fallujans who rose in defense of their community's honor.


Warplanes dropped their lethal payloads of 2,000-pound bombs on the city; AC-130 Spectre gunships capable of demolishing city blocks in minutes were a common sight in the skies above Fallujah. A doctor from Baghdad who witnessed the death toll later commented: "There is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans did to innocent people."


Yet Fallujah refused to be "pacified," let alone "democratized."


"As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge," then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers testified before Congress on Hitler's birthday (April 20). Imitating the propaganda style of Hitler's regime, Myers described the inhabitants of the city as non-human vermin fit only for extermination: "We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat's nest, that is still festering today...."


The second assault on Fallujah began shortly after Bush's triumph in the November 2004 election. This time, the same Empire that supplied Saddam with chemical weapons, and then execrated him as a singular monster for using them "against his own people," cut out the Middle-Man entirely, using white phosphorous munitions against the "rat's nest" in Fallujah.


This was what the bloody-handed Bushling had in what passes for his mind when he urged the annihilation of those who stood athwart the "march of democracy" in Iraq.


Faoud Ajami, an apologist for the neo-con wing of the Imperial ruling elite, is every bit as Arab as Vidkun Quisling was Norwegian. A few days ago Ajami -- who is called on occasionally by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to put a mock-academic gloss on the Regime's depraved ambitions -- decanted another dram of a familiar Establishment whine that is not improving with age: The plaint that it's simply unfair to judge the Iraq war, and the Warmakers, by the results of their policies and the facts as we now know them.


Ajami was provoked by Scott McClellan's memoirs, in which the erstwhile White House spokesliar tries to come clean about at least some of the deceptions that led to the invasion.


According to neo-con apologist Faoud Ajami, this little boy from Fallujah had to be mutilated because Saddam "taunted" the US Government. If that makes sense to you, you're qualified to teach at Johns Hopkins University.


Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami pouts that McClellan's apostasy from the Warmakers' cult comes "in the sixth year of the war, at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power."


So ... an aggressive war simply had to be waged because Saddam had "taunted" the Empire, by refusing to duck or scurry for cover?


That is a war aim worthy of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including more than 4,000 Americans?


This is the same quasi-thought, albeit expressed in slightly more elevated diction, that was given voice a year ago by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: In a televised interview, Friedman said that a good and sufficient reason to invade Iraq was because "we" could, as a way of telling the Arab world, "Well, suck on this."


While Ajami avoids Friedman's use of urban patois -- which is singularly unconvincing, coming from a chinless, chest-less nebbish who probably can't do a single pushup, much less throw a decent punch -- he likewise insists that "democracy" cannot be victorious until all people everywhere, great and small, bow before the Empire's scepter.


Ann Coulter, who could probably take either Friedman or Ajami in a fist-fight, once reduced the discussion to a metaphor derived from prison rape: By ordering the invasion of Iraq, Coulter told an audience in mid-2003, Bush had "made the Middle East his bitch."


Well... not exactly. The problem, of course, is that neither Iraq nor the Middle East has been domesticated by the Empire, and never will. But the ongoing imperial wars will prove a splendid way to destroy whatever remains of American prosperity and national independence, as well as to flush out and eradicate anybody who remembers and seeks to restore the old republic.


"I don't care if it created more enemies," the Bushling spat at NBC News correspondent Richard Engel in a 2007 interview. "I had to act." To the same reporter, Bush blithely admitted that the war in Iraq "is going to take forty years." And his administration is taking steps right now to ensure that we will remain mired in Iraq and the region for at least two more generations.


Bush and his claque are seeking a special agreement with the Iraqi government to retain fifty permanent military bases in that country, and to provide permanent immunity for U.S. personnel stationed there. In familiar fashion, George the Dumber insists that congressional approval of this proposal -- which is a treaty by any honest use of language -- does not require Senate approval or congressional action of any kind.


Heroic armed missionaries of Democracy confront violent Iraqi ingrates -- at least, that's how the Regime and its apologists expect us to view this photograph.



Iraqi government officials protest that such an arrangement would entirely nullify Iraqi sovereignty. Ah, but Iraqi sovereignty, like all other principles, people, institutions, laws, or considerations, must yield to the imperatives of Washington's rule, aka Democracy. To that end, the Regime that rules us "is holding hostage some $50 billion of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government" into signing that agreement by July 31, reports the estimable Patrick Cockburn of Britain's Independent newspaper.


To many observers this appears to be simple, vulgar extortion.


This conclusion is entirely unfair, of course. It's democratic extortion -- surely, the noblest kind.


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Are you on their little List? Probably -- if you've done anything worthwhile for freedom.