Dear Dirty America

It seems the world is acknowledging, though slowly and in response to side issues, that the Bush administration is guilty of torture and international war crimes. After the United States placed several Russian officials on the Magnitsky List for human rights abuses, Russia said the attack would not go without response.In turn, eighteen current and former American officials were placed on a list of human rights abusers, and were barred entry into Russia. The big four that headed the list are American all-stars of enhanced interrogation, unlawful detention, and are the authors and architects of cartoonish justifications for legalizing torture: David Addington, John Yoo, and a major general and rear admiral.

The New York Times wrote about this list:

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, which released the tit-for-tat list on Saturday, said that Washington must realize that it cannot conduct its relationship with Moscow “in the spirit of mentoring and undisguised diktat.”

I particularly enjoyed the “tit-for-tat” description of the list, as if Russia’s compilation of human rights abusers is a petty thing, when instead it helps us on an international scale to highlight who these people are, what they’ve done, and to keep them in the public’s mind.

President Obama buried any chance for the full weight of justice to be served against Bush administration officials who committed war crimes and knowingly allowed torture in Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons around the world.

The hypocrisy of our government, of our White House, and our military is absurd, yet it doesn’t get mentioned by the gatekeepers of official news, like the L.A. Times, NY Times, and the Washington Post.

Our United States international war criminals are as brutal and guilty as the rest of the world’s human rights abusers, and they all need to be arrested. When Barack Obama said we as a nation will be looking forward instead of focusing on the past eight years, what he really meant was that he won’t be pursuing any judicial proceedings against the former administration’s obviously guilty offenders, because then he too would be subject for the same war crimes and torture.

Torture didn’t end with the Bush nightmare. Obama’s a nightmare, too, except he speaks better, and he says comforting words in a more sophisticated manner. But torture is still going on. As Glenn Greenwald writes it:

It’s hardly news that the US instituted and for years maintained a systematic torture regime, but the success of the Obama administration in blocking all judicial proceedings has meant there has been no official decree that this is so. A comprehensive report just issued by a truly bipartisan group of former high-level Washington officials (including military officials) is as close as we are likely to get to such an official proclamation.

It’s the tit-for-tat method needed to ensure that every time our president or government condemns human rights abuses or violent acts, we remind them of their own criminal records and refuse to let it be scrubbed from our memories.

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