....LMB: "War Crime and Punishment"....

March 30, 2003

Not satisified with being the "world's policeman," the Unite States has decided to also become its judge, jury and executioner.

"U.S. officials vowed Friday to vigorously prosecute members of the Iraqi military who they charge are committing a wide range of war crimes... the United States intends to conduct the prosecutions for crimes against U.S. combatants, rather than turn the defendants over to an international court or tribunal."

Yes, why bother with an International Criminal Court to prosecute war criminals when we can just bring them home to the good ol U.S. of A. and prosecute em here? Jesus, what a sham.

Posted by Jake at 12:58 AM | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Hey --- that's a great way to encourage the Iraqis to surrender!! Tell them that "Hangin'" George Bush will invoke the death penalty on them. Gotta hand it to the Bushistas ... just when you think they've topped themselves, they do it again!

Posted by: Z at March 30, 2003 09:42 AM

This shouldn't be too surprising, though.

On page 31 of our new National Security Strategy, the author states that "We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept."

If "we" won't be tried by the ICC, then "we" certainly won't stand for it doing justly what "we" can do in a manner that promotes our global expansion.

This has been going on for years. Reagan refused to let "us" be tried in the World Court for our terrorism in Nicaragua (Chomsky's 9-11, page 42). Assuming the authority of a greater, diversified system of justice is no great leap past refuting its power, though, it is obviously contradictory and deleterious.

One blinding hypocrisy in all of this is the U.S.'s desire to globalize its economy while ignoring the responsibility to the global community. It is a larger version of a corporation planting a factory in the middle of rural America without caring about how its toxic by-products destroy the surrounding community or how its closing of that one plant disastrously alters the lives in the community. As long as the corporation can afford better lawyers, the community it has hurt will likely lose a lawsuit. (As long as the U.S. acts as though it is the World Court, the world will lose to it.)

Everything evil that the U.S. visits upon places abroad is usually analogous to an evil that the U.S. has visited upon a portion of its citizenry (e.g., foreign occupation: eminent domain).

"We" will never take responsibility for our extra-border actions if "we" never take responsibility for actions in our own backyard--as Wendell Berry more succinctly states in his essay at the following site:

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03-2om/Berry.html

Posted by: Shawn at March 30, 2003 10:32 AM

WE are the World Court? Cool. Do we get to wear crowns and robes and stuff?
*shaking head, rubbing eyeballs*
This is unbelievable. When did it become acceptable for us (U.S.) to dodge under the social safety net of accountability?
At what point did we knock the chip off our own shoulders and start bitch-slapping the world into shape?
We are turning into the drunken, drooling, Dad that used to come home and beat up Mom for the slightest provocation. And then telling the police to fuck off.

Posted by: Kate S. at March 30, 2003 04:13 PM

To answer Kate's question of when we started doing these terriblr things. It was around 9am on 9-11-01. Up until that time the whining left wing had our hands tied. 9-11 woke up the giant.
God bless America, and God help our enemies.
Pre-emptive strikes against entities we deem a threat are the only way we will maintain our way of life.

Posted by: Tony at March 30, 2003 11:04 PM

Attaboy, tony! You tell 'em.

I just hope to Christ we get whoever has the nukes before they get us though, huh?

The only problem I see with the preemption door is that it like those wooden swinging doors you always see in saloons in old westerns. They swing both ways and when the guy in the white hat tells the bad guy "After I'm done slapping around this blind guy with no legs I'm coming after you."

That usually gives the other bad guy time to get his double barreled shotgun and sneak up on the good guy while he's stomping the blind legless bad guy.

On wait. With actions like that, maybe he isn't the good guy.

Posted by: Lurch at March 31, 2003 06:36 AM

"Pre-emptive strikes against entities we deem a threat are the only way we will maintain our way of life." <-- This is the most selfish and backward thinking that has plagued America today. In the middle ages, (before mid-15th century) when feudal social structure rewarded the nobles with power and autonomy, peasants and small middle-class population suffered severely from social and economic depression. Reformists were suppressed and killed. People who spoke the truth and tried to change the devastating way of life was ex-communicated. History has finally found its way to repeat itself in this century. And, we have Bush to thank for this, including his republican supporters and sympathizers for perpetuating a false sense of reality that we can wage war with anybody we please in the name of oil, power and money.

Posted by: Canoe Driver at March 31, 2003 03:23 PM

First of all, I love your site. Thank you for sharing your hard work with us. Secondly, I think the hidden motive for wanting to try US enemies under US law instead of International law is two-fold. 1. It will be easier to win on home turf; and, most importantly, corporations,like Dyncorp, a wholly owned subsidiary of VP Cheney's company Halliburton, gets to build more POW camps like the Camp x-ray (where do they get these names?!) in Cuba and make more profit for our VP who is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton. Dyncorp also builds new bases so war is very profitable for Halliburton.

Posted by: Lisa at March 31, 2003 04:35 PM
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Media News

November 16, 2004

Tales of Media Woe

Senate May Ram Copyright Bill- one of the most depressing stories of the day that didn't involve death or bombs. It's the music and movie industries' wet dream. It criminalizes peer-to-peer software makers, allows the government to file civil lawsuits on behalf of these media industries, and eliminates fair use. Fair use is the idea that I can use a snippet of a copyrighted work for educational, political, or satirical purposes, without getting permission from the copyright-holder first.

And most tellingly, the bill legalizes technology that would automatically skip over "obejctionable content" (i.e. sex and violence) in a DVD, but bans devices that would automatically skip over commericals. This is a blatant, blatant, blatant gift to the movie industry. Fuck the movie industry, fuck the music industry, fuck the Senate.

Music industry aims to send in radio cops- the recording industry says that you're not allowed to record songs off the radio, be it real radio or internet radio. And now they're working on preventing you from recording songs off internet radio through a mixture of law and technological repression (although I imagine their techno-fixes will get hacked pretty quickly).

The shocking truth about the FCC: Censorship by the tyranny of the few- blogger Jeff Jarvis discovers that the recent $1.2 million FCC fine against a sex scene in Fox's "Married By America" TV show was not levied because hundreds of people wrote the FCC and complained. It was not because 159 people wrote in and complained (which is the FCC's current rationale). No, thanks to Jarvis' FOIA request, we find that only 23 people (of the show's several million viewers) wrote in and complained. On top of that, he finds that 21 of those letters were just copy-and-paste email jobs that some people attached their names to. Jarvis then spins this a bit by saying that "only 3" people actually wrote letters to the FCC, which is misleading but technically true. So somewhere between 3 and 23 angry people can determine what you can't see on television. Good to know.

Reuters Union Considers Striking Over Layoffs- will a strike by such a major newswire service impact the rest of the world's media?

Pentagon Starts Work On War Internet- the US military is talking about the creation of a global, wireless, satellite-aided computer network for use in battle. I think I saw a movie about this once...

Conservative host returns to the air after week suspension for using racial slur- Houston radio talk show host (and somtime Rush Limbaugh substitute) Mark Belling referred to Mexican-Americans as "wetbacks" on his show. He was suspended for a couple of weeks, and then submitted a written apology for the racial slur to a local newspaper. But he seems to be using the slur and its surrounding controversy to boost his conservative cred with his listeners.

Stay Tuned for Nudes- Cleveland TV news anchor Sharon Reed aired a story about artist Spencer Tunick, who uses large numbers of naked volunteers in his installations and photographs. The news report will be unique in that it will not blur or black-out the usual naughty bits. The story will air late at night, when it's allegedly okay with the FCC if you broadcast "indecent" material. The author of this article doesn't seem to notice that Reed first claims that this report is a publicity stunt, but then claims it's a protest against FCC repression. I'd like to think it's the latter, but I'm not that much of a sucker.

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