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Stokes
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 28 Nov 2004
Posts: 1426
Location: PA
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 Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 5:37 am Post subject: U.S. Drug Official "Flexing Muscles" on U.N. |
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Newsbrief: US Pressures UN Drug Office to Oppose Harm Reduction Language, UN Says Okay
1/28/05
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/372/usun.shtml
The European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies this week released a November letter from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime executive director Antonio Maria Costa to a high-level US anti-drug official in which Costa attacked the notion of harm reduction and promised to remove all references to the term from UNODC documents.
The November 11 letter came one day after Costa met with Robert Charles, Undersecretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. According to ENCOD, Charles' purpose for the meeting was to express official US concern that the term "harm reduction" had been used and to "encourage" the UNODC to not do it again.
Harm reduction, broadly defined, is the principle that while people may do things that can be dangerous for them, the way to approach such behavior is by attempting to minimize the risks involved. Thus, harm reduction encompasses such activities as providing condoms to populations at risk of sexually transmitted diseases. In the field of drug policy, harm reduction activities may range from providing clean needles to injection drug users to advocates for changes in the law to decrease harm to drug users and the community alike.
Costa apparently got Charles' message loud and clear. Within a day, he wrote to Charles abjectly upholding the official US line. "Under the guise of harm reduction, people are disingenuously working to alter the world's opposition to drugs," he wrote. "These people can misuse our well-intentioned statement for their own agenda, and this we cannot allow." Costa also promised to quit using the term, and assured Charles that "we are reviewing all our statements, both printed and electronic, and will even be more vigilant in the future."
Costa also emphasized UNODC's opposition to key harm reduction activities: "Let me be clear," he wrote. "First and foremost, UNODC maintains a strong opposition to heroin maintenance, as well as drug consumption and injection rooms." And while Costa sadly conceded that needle exchange programs had a role to play in reducing HIV/AIDS infections, he insisted such measures take place only within an overall scheme to reduce demand. The proven utility of needle exchanges puts UNODC "in a difficult position," he complained.
As ENCOD noted, it seems that UNODC supports not harm reduction but "harm production."
-- END --
It's too bad the UN is such a friendly organization ... they should've told Charles ............  ...  ...  ... 
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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 2:26 pm Post subject: |
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That already caused a lot of commotion in the European community.
Who the fuck do the Americans think they are?
This letter has done the opposite of what the American government intended with it. They have exposed themselves for what they are: A bunch of un-educated assholes.
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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
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Location: Amsterdam
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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Drug policy people:
I usually dont encumber you with political news, but the following - by the
famous investigative reporter Seymour Hersh - is well worth consideration
for its possible implications for the future of drug policy. Not only this
article, but many other recent ones indicate that the U.S. is headed for
serious times, when its influence may well decrease dramatically,
especially here in Europe. This should open a window of oppty to influence
Euro- and world drug policy in a way that has long been impossible. Of
course it is not easy to predict the course of events and how we may
capitalise on them, but we should attempt to stay aware of the current
situation on a much wider scope than we have been doing.
vbest regards,
peter |
| Quote: |
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012705C.shtml
Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"
Democracy Now!
Wednesday 26 January 2005
As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote today on the
nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, we hear a speech by
Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on torture from
Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib to Vietnam. [includes rush transcript]
Four British citizens have been released without charge from
Guantánamo Bay after nearly 3 years in custody. They are suing the US
government for tens of millions of dollars in damages.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee is
scheduled to vote on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney
General. As White House counsel, Gonzales helped lay the legal groundwork
that led to the torture of detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.
We turn now to Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh. Hersh first exposed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the New Yorker
magazine in April 2004 and is author of "Chain of Command: The Road From
9/11 to Abu Ghraib." He spoke last month at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue
in New York.
Transcript
Amy Goodman: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu
Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
Seymour Hersh: About what's going on in terms of the President is that
as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative
history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years,
George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely
committed - I don't know whether he thinks he's doing God's will or what
his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from - you know, I just
don't know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to
continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I
think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will
make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no
difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put
America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way
to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly
anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and
believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for
him weren't voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're
going to have.
It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the
question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do
to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as
absolutely appropriate? All of us - you have to - I can't begin to
exaggerate how frightening the position is - we're in right now, because
most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good
job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed,
provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance,
I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it
consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon - by statute now. It
gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting
to do, and that is basically man hunting and killing them before they kill
us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it to them." That is
the attitude that - at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll
just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can - you know,
there's not much more to go on with.
I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing.
Let's all forget this word "insurgency". It's one of the most misleading
words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war
and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then
had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are
fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the
Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started
- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to,
in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We
took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to
fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting.
The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -
it's - it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing.
A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We
estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we
could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next.
There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody
told me, it's - somebody in the system, an officer - and by the way, the
good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.
There's a lot of anxiety inside the - you know, our professional
military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So,
they do - there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people.
One of the ways - one of the things that you could say is, the amazing
thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine
neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and
how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians
and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the
bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It
does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to
wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon
and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is
neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside - the real
goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the
intelligence people. There were people - serious senior analysts who
disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean
by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal
in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true
believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been "diminish the
agency." I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it,
but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration
of power.
On the other hand, the facts - there are some facts. We can't win this
war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages.
Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really
appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who
was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he
became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him,
since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October,
November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing
raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown
exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There
are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're
operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry
Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the
operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot.
They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not
told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to
carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to
be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq
- some of you remember Vietnam - Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone"
right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in
the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing
planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as
possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday
after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people - I don't call
people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s,
and he picked up the phone and he said, "Welcome to Stalingrad." We know
what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling
us. They're not talking about it.
We have a President that - and a Secretary of State that, when a
trooper - when a reporter or journalist asked - actually a trooper, a
soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the
President then gets up and says, "Yes, they should all have good equipment
and we're going to do it," as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process.
Words mean nothing - nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They
have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, "well, we don't do torture."
We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see
anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has
come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers,
this is not an isolated incident what's happened with the seven kids and
the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue
is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we
send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children
to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the
military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being
blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid
with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of
these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half
months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you
all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a
timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported
in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful
lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May,
our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he
was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those
three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic
effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven "bad seeds", enlisted
kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way,
Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who
were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison.
They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there
is another framework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten away with it.
So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I
can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a
Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from
somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in
Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted - his
name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the
local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a
letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, "Today
everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate
breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My
son lies in a casket half a world away." There's going to be - you know,
when I did My Lai - I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story,
more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did
My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had - for some of
you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers - the
analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies
in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers,
because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you
dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq.
They're "rag-heads". They're less than human. The casualty count - as in
Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case,
you know, it's - in this case, these - a group of soldiers in 1968 went
into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about
10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings,
and they ended up - they thought they would meet the enemy and there were
550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day.
They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done
a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there
were about 90 men in the unit - the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air.
They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches
and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air,
but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army
Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of
kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an
awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment - one of the things
that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at
the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him
under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were
sitting having the K rations - that's what they called them - MRE's now -
the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he
began - and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of
that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, "Plug him," he said. And Medlow
somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so
Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a
smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next
morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was
being medevac'd out. As he was being medevac'd out, he cursed and everybody
remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, "God has punished me, and
he's going to punish you, too."
So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about
Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said,
"I'm coming to see you. I don't remember where I was, I think it was
Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to I
think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into
the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman
Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a
chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old
hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she
said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of
these great - she said to me, "I gave them a good boy. And they sent me
back a murderer." So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the
Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know
about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of
this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working
class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I
have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and
her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military
police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in
March, of - The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their
reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is
sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit
is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She
was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to
get money, not for college or for - you know, these - some of these people
worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not - this is
not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just
had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house,
moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in
another city and began working a different job. And moved away from
everybody. Then over - as the spring went on, she would go every weekend,
this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get
large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly - over her body, the
back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on?
Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says
to her daughter, "Were you there?" She goes to the apartment. The daughter
slams the door. The mother then goes - the daughter had come home - before
she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of
the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was
there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a
- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it.
She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had
returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked
at the computer. She knows - she doesn't know about depression. She doesn't
know about Freud. She just said, I was just - I was just going to clean it
up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more
why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure
enough there was a file marked "Iraq". She hit the button. Out came 100
photographs. They were photographs that became - one of them was published.
We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is
something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab
man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds,
remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large
photograph. What we didn't publish was the sequence showed the dogs did
bite the man - pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called
me, and away we go. There's another story.
For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of - you
know, we all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless.
We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military
is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell
them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to
tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on
fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because
there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken
over - by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the
casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost
and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones
come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -
you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about
the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain
injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new
study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are
greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical
treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries
to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see,
it's going to - it's - I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a
bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What
happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of
that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to
suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe
that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go
very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought
property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -
Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous.
I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there,
collective action against us. Certainly, nobody - it's going to be an awful
lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops
buying our bonds, our credit - our - we're spending $2 billion a day to
float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians,
everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're
going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will
be another year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is
enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead.
Speedy Gonzales & the Rule of Law
By Huck Gutman
The Statesman, India
Wednesday 26 January 2005
Ethics, in today's America, primarily refers to sex: no Presidential
fooling around, no sanctioning of homosexual love. But what about the
appointment as Attorney General of a person for whom the Geneva Convention
is 'obsolete' and 'quaint', asks Huck Gutman.
What does it mean that Alberto Gonzales is about to be approved as
Attorney General of the USA? That this particular appointee of President
George W Bush will become the chief law enforcement officer of the American
nation?
The President's advisors and spin doctors proclaim his elevation from
the President's counsel to his current position, as a moment of historic
magnitude. For the first time in American history, a Hispanic will occupy
one of the four highest administrative offices in the nation. They cite his
story, the rise from rags to riches, as proof that democracy and
egalitarian opportunity are alive and well in the world's sole superpower.
Even the often-pugnacious Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking
member of the opposition party on the Judiciary Committee which vetted and
will vote on the nomination, recently said: "The road you've travelled,
from being a 12-year-old boy, just about the age of your oldest son,
selling soft drinks at football games, all the way to the state house in
Texas and our White House is a tribute to you and your family."
Bush is no doubt mindful of the Latino success story that Gonzales
embodies. Hispanics, according to exit polls, gave 44 per cent of their
votes to Bush in the just-concluded presidential election. Gonzales'
appointment is a matter of pride for many Hispanics, even among those who
didn't support or vote for Bush.
But something other than identity politics and cultural pride are at
stake in the Gonzales appointment.
More than any other event, this appointment, and the ease with which
it will pass the Senate without significant opposition, reveals the extent
to which the USA is moving ex-peditiously, and without significant
complaint, along a road that leads to what one can only, uncomfortably,
call fascism.
Gonzales stands as the apostle of torture in the administrative
councils of the American polity. When it appeared that questioning of
"suspects" held as possible informants about the murderous attack on the
Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001 might violate the Geneva
Convention, international law and American law, Gonzales asked Department
of Justice attorneys for a definition of what constitutes torture, and to
whom the prevailing legal restrictions on torture might apply.
On 25 January 2002, a memorandum from Gonzales to Bush stated that
"the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" which "renders obsolete
Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders
quaint some of its provisions." The prohibition against torture was thus
found to be "obsolete" and "quaint", as if it were a hand-cranked
phonograph in our day of stereos and portable CD players.
Much was made of the USA's previous President, Bill Clinton, and his
dalliance with a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. Again and again,
conservative critics called him "immoral". Let there be no doubt: there is
something morally wrong about breaking marriage vows and about using the
perquisites of power and age to take advantage of a young woman. But the
fate of a nation scarcely swung on some sexual escapade in the White House,
however distasteful and upsetting the incident may have been. Such is not
the case with Gonzales and his unethical work in the White House.
It is more difficult to talk about ethics than we often imagine.
Philosophers do it, religious sages do it, but in daily life we are more
likely to talk about other things: sports, cinema, political intrigues,
celebrities. When we talk about ethics, we often fall back on morality, on
the codes that have been handed down to us by our parents, our religion,
our schooling or (more and more in today's world) what pundits tell us in
the mass media.
But ethics goes to the very deepest concerns of human life. It
inquires into how we will live together with others sometimes those
immediately around us, sometimes those of that larger world of community or
town or nation or even world in a way that is compassionate, fair, just
and responsible.
What does it mean to be a "good" man or woman? That is the central
question addressed by ethics, the very core of ethical inquiry.
Whatever answer one moves toward in defining what comprises a "good"
human being, we can be certain that the answer does not include condoning
the torture of other human beings.
Yet, at this moment the USA is poised to anoint as its chief law
enforcement official a man who counsels and condones the use of torture.
Nor was his January 2002 memo aberrant, an accident. Six months later,
in August 2002, Gonzales cleared a Justice Department memo that stated
bluntly that both international treaties such as the Geneva Convention and
US law do "not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of
enemy combatants." Simple reasoning, but terrifyingly strange: If you're
not an American, then it is OK for the American authorities to torture you.
That memo, which is addressed to Gonzales, opens with the words "You
have asked for our Office's views regarding the standards of conduct under
the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading
Treatment or Punishment." It states that Americans acting under the
President's authority can inflict "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment
to prisoners without violating laws and treaties against torture. Torture
can properly be claimed, according to the memo prepared by Assistant
Attorney General Jay Bybee, only when there is severe pain of "an intensity
akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or
organ failure." If you aren't dead or close to it, it isn't torture.
Mark Danner, the author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Gharib and
the War on Terror, recently wrote with admirable clarity of Gonzales: "He
is unfit because, while the Attorney General is charged with upholding the
law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Gonzales, in the
matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it."
In his opening testimony before the US Senate, which continues to
consider his nomination, Gonzales claimed he was only soliciting opinions,
that this was his job as counsel.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
In the first place, he passed along opinions over his signature, so
that those opinions carried his implicit, and likely his explicit, consent.
In the second place, choosing to ask if torture is legal, and asking
if it can be narrowly defined as only the most harrowing of conduct, are
not innocent acts: they presume that extant prohibitions against torture
might and probably should be weakened. His request was to cast about for
legal loopholes rather than to seek to clarify fundamental principles of
the rule of law. And, in fact, Gonzales' staff played a role in preparing
the memo which found those loopholes: Timothy E Flanigan, his deputy
counsel, talked about a draft of the memorandum with lawyers at the Office
of Legal Counsel before it was finalised. (It should be noted that when the
memo became public, and only then, the administration repudiated it.)
But the worst offence is one which the Senators who, not wanting to
offend Hispanic voters, will end up overwhelmingly approving Gonzales as
Attorney General refuse to address.
The purpose of legal counsel is not merely to tell one's employer what
is legal. The purpose of a counsel is to "counsel": to offer sound advice,
not just about narrow constructions of legality, but about the rightness of
proposed courses of action.. "This might be legal," a counsel should advise
his client, "but it is the wrong thing to do." It may be wrong because it
is impractical, or because it has negative operational consequences, or
because is costly, or because it opens one to litigation by those who
challenge its legality. But it may also be wrong because it is unethical.
The fact that Gonzales solicited and then passed along advice which
defined prohibitions against torture as quaint and obsolete is not as
egregious as the fact that he passed that advice along without saying,
"This is a legal opinion, but anyone can offer an opinion. This opinion is
wrong, both because it is too narrow legally, and more importantly, because
it is unethical." He should have informed Bush that the Geneva Convention
protects people everywhere from unjust and inhumane treatment, and that its
abrogation would have severe consequences for the conduct of nations and
specifically, in the diminishing of protection for US troops abroad.
(Secretary of state Powell submitted a memo to the President saying exactly
that. But then, Powell is now on the way out, and Gonzales is now on the
way in.)
He should have said torture is heinous, and when carried out
systematically, it is a crime against humanity. Instead, he looked for ways
to justify torture.
Later he, like everyone in the Bush administration, professed
amazement that American soldiers tortured prisoners at Abu Gharib prison in
Iraq. (Well, they weren't dead and didn't have organ failure, so maybe it
wasn't really torture?) (But I should not jest, not even parenthetically:
We are speaking of torture, here.)
Such a man as Gonzales should not be walking the streets. He should be
brought up for trial on the basis of enabling war crimes. Instead, he is
the soon-to-be confirmed next Attorney General of the USA. Its chief
law-enforcement officer.
Ethics seem irrelevant in the USA today, despite much talk by
pollsters that ethical issues have an effect on elections. (That sort of
ethics refers primarily to sex: no Presidential fooling around, no
sanctioning of homosexual behaviour through "gay marriage".) Meanwhile,
Bush is determined to use his power to get what he wants, even if what he
wants is wrong. Even if what he wants is to torture suspects and to appoint
a possible war criminal to head up the legal functions of the US government.
And the American people? A lassitude has set in. There is work, there
is shopping, there are television and video games and popular music. Ethics
seem, for many, too difficult a burden to shoulder. Maybe in the 22nd
century. But not now, in this time, in this place.
Huck Gutman is former Fulbright Visiting Professor of English at
Calcutta University. He a Professor at the University of Vermont, USA.
------- |
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Stokes
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 28 Nov 2004
Posts: 1426
Location: PA
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 6:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Ferre wrote: |
| This letter has done the opposite of what the American government intended with it. |
Nobody in the world wants to be represented by arrogant, uneducated assholes.
But if, for now, we must be ... then I can clearly see your above quote as the blessing in this situation.
Some things have a way of working themselves out without anyone's help.
Peace over war.
Stokes 
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Where love is, there God is also.
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Mystic Power
admin THC-Ministry YahooGroup
Joined: 23 Aug 2004
Posts: 3605
Location: Key West
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 6:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| The proven utility of needle exchanges puts UNODC "in a difficult position," he complained. |
Translation: "'The TRUTH puts us in a difficult position,' he complained"
Bliss on
Ben
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"We are the Ones we have been waiting for."
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"In Lak'ech"
~ Ancient Mayan: "I am another YOU." ~ |
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entropical
Full member
Joined: 10 Jan 2005
Posts: 95
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 9:17 pm Post subject: |
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_________________
"Rastafari is not a faith which can be converted to. No one person can say, 'This is exactly what the Rastafari doctrine is,' because the beauty of the faith is that it is seen through the eyes of the beholder...it is a way of life, which, like life itself, continues to grow in mind, body and spirit." |
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Fyrefly1
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 2209
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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Fyrefly1
"All truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th Century Philosopher |
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entropical
Full member
Joined: 10 Jan 2005
Posts: 95
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 10:14 pm Post subject: |
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_________________
"Rastafari is not a faith which can be converted to. No one person can say, 'This is exactly what the Rastafari doctrine is,' because the beauty of the faith is that it is seen through the eyes of the beholder...it is a way of life, which, like life itself, continues to grow in mind, body and spirit." |
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Lilli
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 12 Dec 2003
Posts: 4218
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
Who the fuck do the Americans think they are?
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Dutch, Irish, English and Welsh is what runs thru my veins. 
Its the dictator and his satanic follwers. It isnt the people we obviously dont count. Or he wouldnt have the office again.
"The Powers That Be" is in this world at the present is Skull and Bones club.
We hate it to bro.
_________________
I pass to you the torch that Christ once passed to me.
Others are still in the dark and need
the light to see.
"I AM"
"Gathering the fragments so that
none are lost"
His Shepherdess
http://missouri.thcministry.org/
Last edited by Lilli on Sun Jan 30, 2005 11:07 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
Posts: 7295
Location: Amsterdam
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 11:07 pm Post subject: |
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yeah, sorry Lilli, I meant the American government.
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Lilli
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 12 Dec 2003
Posts: 4218
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 11:12 pm Post subject: |
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_________________
I pass to you the torch that Christ once passed to me.
Others are still in the dark and need
the light to see.
"I AM"
"Gathering the fragments so that
none are lost"
His Shepherdess
http://missouri.thcministry.org/ |
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