Crimes Against Humanity - Where "Americans Can Kill For Free"-By Michael Hirsh

[kpete]

The Age of Irresponsibility
How Bush has created a moral vacuum in Iraq in which Americans can kill for free
MICHAEL HIRSH The World From Washington
Blackwater and the Bush Legacy
Sept. 20, 2007

Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like “1984,” or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky—or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the unspoken rule of Bush’s counterinsurgency efforts over the past four years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.


Morality begins when people take responsibility for their actions. But no one in the Bush administration has taken responsibility for one disaster after another in Iraq. Nor does anyone seem to care....

The Bush administration’s lack of concern about holding its employees responsible for their actions extends to obstructing civil suits against rogue contractors under the False Claims Act. “None of the lawsuits has been successful,” says lawyer Alan Grayson. “In a couple of the cases the government has said the case has to be shut down because it involves state secrets.” (The Justice Department has said it is carefully looking at the suits.) Who has been in charge of this? None other than Peter Keisler, the former head of Justice’s civil division who is now acting attorney general, says Grayson, who is involved in several cases against Blackwater and other contractors. “They run people off the road. They treat the local population like it’s some big shooting gallery. It’s not just Blackwater; it’s everybody.” No, that’s letting the responsible party off too easily: it’s the Bush administration.

more at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/

[OwnedByFerrets]

1. Kicked

[rusty quoin]

2. Randi Rhodes just read it on air.