Oh my God‼‼

War criminals beware

The Guardian warns that:

Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister during the Gaza war, would probably face arrest on war crimes charges if he visited Britain, according to a UK lawyer who is working to expand the application of "universal jurisdiction" for offences involving serious human rights abuses committed anywhere in the world.

Neither Olmert nor Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister during the Cast Lead offensive, and a member of Israel's war cabinet, would enjoy immunity from prosecution for alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions, predicted Daniel Machover, who is involved in intensifying legal work after the controversial Goldstone report on the three-week conflict. Neither are ministers any longer.

Prosecutions of Israeli political and military figures remain likely despite the failure to obtain an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the defence minister, when he visited the UK earlier this month, he said. In the Barak case a magistrate accepted advice from the Foreign Office that the minister enjoyed state immunity and rejected an application made on behalf of several residents of the Gaza Strip.

"This needs to be tested at the right time and in the right place," Machover said. "One day one of these people will make a mistake and go to the wrong country and face a criminal process — and then it'll be a matter for the courts of that country to give them a fair trial: that's what the Palestinian victims want."

One can only hope that Olmert, George Bush, Dick Cheney and others of their ilk will one day face the finite justice to be found in this world.

We are an empire now….

Writing for his Atlantic blog, Andrew Sullivan augments the Greenwald critique of the Washington Post's recently stated position (see this below along with the link it contains) on torture prosecution by exclaiming:

The longer I have lived in Washington, the more corrupt it appears. That includes large swathes of the press. The cooptation of the Washington Post by the torture-mongers should therefore come as no surprise — and Obama's refusal to investigate torturers is a reflection of his own so-pragmatic-it's-cynical belief that such matters do not really count for much — certainly not as much as a successful presidency. This is not a conspiracy. It's just the kind of elite corruption you usually see in banana republics with no rule of law and a coopted press.

It is surely fortunate — or would unfortunate be the better word to use? — that the United States yet to become a banana republic, for the middle class in the United States will not fare well when it attains this level of development. The signs indicating this fate are there, of course. Nevertheless, the country remains best characterized as a global empire and the only military superpower, and, as such, the arrogance of power has become its normal condition. Denial is an ordinary complement of such arrogance, so the fact that denial is a common feature of American politics follows as a matter of course.

Rule of law or rule by law?

Do we have a choice?

These are questions a reasonable and thus concerned citizen of the United States might ask at this juncture given the abuse of governmental power that is now all-too-common. Glenn Greenwald has often brought to our attention the institutional failures that produce these kinds of abuses. But he truly excels in holding the establishment press accountable for its willing complicity in the commission of these crimes. Most recently the Washington Post, as Greenwald makes plain, joined the Bush and Obama regimes as a defender of the kind and degree of torture 'authorized' by the infamous Bush regime torture memos (.pdf). Should we be surprised that the Post advocates sacrificing the over-aggressive foot soldier that exceeded the limits specified by the Bush regime's torture memos while permitting John Yoo (the principal author of the torture justification), his co-conspirators and the American governmental system as a whole to remain unmolested by the law? No, we should not find this surprising, and I would expect Greenwald also found the Post's position utterly predictable and contemptible. He continues:

That, in a nutshell, is the twisted Washington mentality when it comes to lawbreaking: when political crimes become so blatant and extreme that they can no longer be safely excused (Watergate, Iran-contra, Abu Ghraib), then it's necessary to sacrifice some underlings who carried out the crimes by prosecuting them, but — no matter what else happens — the high-level political officials responsible for the crimes must be shielded from all accountability. In ordinary criminal justice, what typically guides prosecutions is the opposite mindset: namely, a willingness to immunize low-level soldiers in order to ensure that the higher-level criminals suffer the consequences of their crimes. But when it comes to crimes committed by political officials in America's Versailles culture, only the pawns are subjected to the rule of law while the monarchs and their highest royal court aides are immunized.

Greenwald continues by using the rest of his column to debunk the tired rationalization the Post offered to defend those who authorized the whole wretched torture business. He concludes his piece by observing:

If, as appears to be the case, this is the principle by which we're now governed — presidential acts in blatant violation of clear statutes are no longer crimes if a DOJ lawyer justifies it in advance, even using legal reasoning found to be in bad faith — then, by definition, Presidents are literally no longer bound by the rule of law. If the crimes are embarrassing enough, we'll find a Lynndie England — or some obscure, easily demonizable, extra-sadistic CIA interrogator — to scapegoat and punish in order to pacify the citizenry and create the illusion that the rule of law still prevails. But the one thing that remains off-limits in Washington culture above all else is subjecting high-level political officials to the rule of law when they commit crimes. The low-level scapegoating which the Post today endorses is the approach which, by all accounts, Eric Holder is likely to pursue.

The United States — a proud nation, a nation of laws, of a Constitution, of the Constitution. Yet America is not today — if it has ever been — a nation in which every person is equally subject to the law. Rather, the law and the Constitution have mostly been instruments the powerful, the favored and the well-placed used to pursue their peculiar ends. This corruption of the republic is quite evident today. The corruption has lately become so obvious that if the actions of the elite betray their intentions, their sensibilities and their political culture, then it follows that they believe justice is something meant only for the weak.

One might consider this kind of justice an instance of "street justice" — a harsh form of rule originating on Wall Street and K Street.

Another secret program

Cheney's fingerprints are also on this one

The New York Times reports that the CIA created a post-9.11 counterterrorism program and that it had withheld information about the program from Congress. The Vice President allegedly ordered the CIA to keep Congress uninformed about the matter.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

This latest revelation directly follows an Inspector General's report which:

…underscored the central role of the former vice president's office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency's program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

It is unsurprising, then, that "Efforts [The Times made] to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful." Why would he wish to take ownership of these legally dubious and ineffective programs!

Accountability

It is not too early to identify Obama administration as a criminal regime

Izzy Award winner Glen Greenwald again takes the Obama administration to task for affirming Bush era notions of justice, presidential powers, due process, etc.

I am a middle class American…

…I own once owned a house and a car

Mark Ames characterizes the gullible American thusly:

If I was an oligarch and I wanted to buy my spoiled little shit of a son a toy that would make him laugh and laugh for hours, I'd buy him a middle-class American. Because Americans are funny the way all dupes and chumps are funny. You can trick today's Americans time and again, and they always fall for it. And when you trick them, they stomp around dramatically and make a lot of blustery noise about "the people" who allegedly "aren't going to stand much more of this" because "our founding forefathers bla bla bla" and of course the ol' "you can fool some of the people some of the time, buttcha can't fool bla bla bla..." Basically, if you've seen your Elmer Fudd, then you've seen your American sucker in all of his cartoon comic-foil glory: a sentimental buffoon, a harmless chump whose guns don't fool anyone but himself.

Every day, Americans play the role of Elmer Fudd to the oligarchy's Bugs Bunny — if you look at it from the oligarchy's point of view, at least.

Exhibit A: Multigazllionaire scumbag Angelo Mozilo v. American Suckers.

Tuesday it was reported that Mozilo, the guy who destroyed millions of Americans' lives and now faces fraud charges, is making American taxpayers — his victims — pay for his legal defense. Yup, Bank of America, which only exists thanks to tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, is using YOUR MONEY to defend Angelo Mozilo against YOU, the victim.

Stewart on Cheney

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Randall Terry on the Tiller assassination

Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue and the spokesman for "…the Schindler family in the Terri Schiavo case," feels neither guilt, remorse nor humility with regards to the Tiller assassination, as the video demonstrates:

More background on the Tiller assassination

John Nichols wrote:

Fifteen years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered a "hit list" circulating among militant anti-abortion activists.

The top target for assassination on the list was Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas physician whose Women's Health Care Services clinic in Witchita has been one of only three clinics in the United States that performs late-term abortions in order to end the pregnancies of women who doctors determine would suffer irreparable harm by giving birth.

And:

But the National Abortion Federation identified Dr. Tiller as the eighth US abortion provider to have been murdered since 1977. According to the group, seventeen others have been targeted with attempted murder.

The National Abortion Federation can be found here.

AlterNet reports:

Dr. George Tiller, 67, one of the few OB-GYNs in the country who performed late-term abortions despite ongoing threats to his safety, was fatally shot yesterday while attending a church service in Wichita, Kan. Scott Roeder, 51, has been detained for questioning.

Roeder — a registered Republican previously arrested for having bomb materials in his car — posted this chilling message on an Operation Rescue Web site called Charge Tiller in 2007 (via the Daily Kos):

"It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the 'lawlessness' which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation."

According to an AP report:

Roeder, 51, was returned to Wichita and was being held without bail on one count of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault. Formal charges were expected to be filed Monday.

And, more ominously:

A man with the same name as the suspect has a criminal record and a background of anti-abortion postings on sympathetic Web sites. In one post written in 2007 on the Web site for Operation Rescue, a group that closely followed Tiller's work and legal troubles in recent years, a man identifying himself as Scott Roeder asked if anyone had thought of attending Tiller's church to ask the doctor and other worshippers about his work.

But police said Sunday that all early indications showed the shooter acted alone. Operation Rescue condemned the killing as vigilantism and "a cowardly act." The president of the group told The New York Times that Roeder was "not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer."

In 1996, a 38-year-old man named Scott Roeder was charged in Topeka with criminal use of explosives for having bomb components in his car trunk and sentenced to 24 months of probation. However, his conviction was overturned on appeal the next year after a higher court said evidence against Roeder was seized by law enforcement officers during an illegal search of his car.

At the time, police said the FBI had identified Roeder as a member of the anti-government Freemen group, an organization that kept the FBI at bay in Jordan, Mont., for almost three months in 1995-96. Authorities on Sunday night would not immediately confirm if their suspect was the same man.

Morris Wilson, a commander of the Kansas Unorganized Citizens Militia in the mid-1990s, told The Kansas City Star he knew Roeder fairly well.

"I'd say he's a good ol' boy, except he was just so fanatic about abortion," Wilson said. "He was always talking about how awful abortion was. But there's a lot of people who think abortion is awful."

Home-grown terrorists look to be on the attack

According to the AP:

Media outlets are reporting that late-term abortion doctor George Tiller has been shot and killed at his church in Wichita, Kan.

Anonymous police sources told The Wichita Eagle and other media that the 67-year-old doctor was killed Sunday morning at Reformation Lutheran Church.

An arrest has been made, according to The Wichita Eagle.

Tiller, long an object of anti-abortion protests, had been shot once before and his clinic bombed. Tiller's clinic had been vandalized earlier this month, as reported by another AP article.

Torture advocate opposes Sotomayor nomination

John Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley, a one-time legal counselor to the Bush regime, once a clerk to Clarence Thomas and currently an object of a Spanish war crimes trial, discusses Obama's first Supreme Court nomination:

President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor shows that empathy has won out over excellence in the White House. Sotomayor has sterling credentials: Princeton, Yale Law School, former prosecutor, and federal trial and appellate judge. But credentials do not an excellent justice make. Justice Souter, whom Sotomayor would replace, had an equally fine c.v., but turned out to be a weak force on the high court.

Empathy versus excellence… It seems Yoo believes Judge Sotomayor, like Souter before her, will produce results he dislikes, that will offend his political sensibilities, that he believes will be less-than-excellent and that she will be a probable "weak force" on the Court. Like Souter, she also has the bona fides of a successful lawyer…. Yet these are not enough to satisfy Yoo, who continues:

She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

Now, it seems, Sotomayor will produce results Yoo could live with because her rulings will not likely disturb the constitutional fundamentalism associated with the Reagan Revolution and its aftermath! Since this belief — that Sotomayor is a lightweight that will hew to the fundamentalist program —leaves Yoo without a point to drive home in his critique of the Sotomayor nomination, his course changes to:

But conservatives should not be pleased simply because Sotomayor is not a threat to the conservative revolution in constitutional law begun under the Reagan administration. Conservatives should defend the Supreme Court as a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings.

In Yoo's judgment, then, although Sotomayor lacks the intellectual power required by a Supreme Court justice and poses no threat to the Reagan Revolution as it pertains to constitutional law, she will still somehow impose her prejudices on her Court rulings, an imposition that will undermine the "faithful application of the Constitution." Her inclination to rely upon her biography and her empathy thus makes her unworthy of a seat on the Court.

Yoo, unsurprisingly, does not address the issues raised by his strange argument, issues that follow from the misalignment between his prediction that Sotomayor will pose no threat to the Reagan Revolution in constitutional law and his prediction that Sotomayor will bring unworthy prejudgments to this lofty post and then impose them on her jurisprudential work. Of course, the tension between the beliefs which support the two predictions dissipates a bit if one were to accept that constitutional fundamentalism of the conservative stripe is logically consistent with some instances of constitutional prejudice, namely, those prejudices typical of a constitutional fundamentalist. A prudent person might even expect these acceptable prejudices to mirror Yoo's own! But tensions in Yoo's position would persist and remain effective even if one were to accept that constitutional fundamentalism is consistent with some instances of constitutional prejudice. If prejudices are unacceptable, why then should anyone accept those attributable to a constitutional fundamentalist? They should not accept them if they wish to remain logically consistent.

Inconsistency does not appear to bother Yoo. He does attempt to avoid problems of this sort by relying upon what can be called the shotgun technique of criticism: One can expect to down one's prey if one hits it with an adequate amount of buckshot. Thus Yoo's recourse to an ad hoc collection of criticisms of Sotomayor's nomination.

Of course, killing Sotomayor's candidacy by using this method does not conform at all to the ideal of a reasoned deliberation over the merits of a particular candidate for the Supreme court, her legal positions and past work or, for that matter, of the norms that ought to be used when considering a candidate for the Supreme Court. Yoo's criticism is not really criticism at all. It is, rather, just another political hatchet job.

Obama takes after “Slick Willie”

While addressing Barack Obama's recent National Security speech, Marjorie Cohn rightly asserts:

The pressure [produced mostly by the Reactionary Noise Machine] has caused Obama to buckle [on his decision to close Guantanamo Bay prison]. Timed to coincide with a Cheney speech to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Obama announced an appeasement plan to deal with the 240 remaining Guantánamo detainees. Parts of his plan would threaten the very foundation of our legal system — that no one should be held in custody if he has committed no crime.

"Unsurprisingly, Republicans are jubilant" with the new Obama, according to Joanne Mariner. They are elated, in Mariner's reckoning, because they can now plausibly represent "…Obama's reversal as a belated embrace of the Bush administration's war on terror, their tone is unabashedly triumphant." Obama's stance has been called "Cheneyism-without-Cheney," an apt depiction of a president who has done little more than to provide a bit of whitewash to America's empire and its criminal actions.

By applying the term appeasement in this instance Cohn thereby invokes the Munich Pact of 1938 which sealed the Sudetenland's fate and has come to represent a cynical and foolish real politics in action, a display of cowardice in the face of a mortal threat and the willingness of the powerful to betray the weak in order to gain meager advantages. Her use of the term also indirectly calls to mind Bill Clinton's infamous triangulation strategy, the net effect of which was to move the Democratic Party rightward without, however, slaking the crude desires of the reactionaries. Briefly put, it can be argued that Bill Clinton prepared the country for the militarism and authoritarianism of the George W. Bush regime with his triangulation strategy. He managed this feat by making a Republican program appear normal and inevitable. Appeasement is thus a powerfully critical symbol in this case. By relying upon this power Cohn suggests that Obama's new prisoner detention policy amounts to his capitulation to America's neoconservatives, militarists and imperialists, which is to say, to an evil within our midst.

Finally, it can be said that Obama's latest position not only advocates illegal and unconstitutional actions and institutions, as must be the case given America's treaty commitments and its constitutional safeguards against this kind of behavior, it also effects his greatest betrayal of the Americans who voted for him in the last election, a political outcome that clearly reflected a deep popular dissatisfaction with the kind of policies Obama now promotes. It is clear today that America's electoral mechanism and party system lack the power needed to restrain America's criminal state. More is needed if the country wishes to effectively refuse to become a massive gulag.

An emerging campaign to disbar Bush’s torture lawyers

The organizer of the campaign: Velvet Revolution. A page dedicated to the campaign may be found here, and includes the rationale behind the campaign, the names of the lawyers targeted, the supporting documentation and lists of individual and organizational campaign endorsers.

So far, as every politically sentient being knows, the Bush apparatchiks who organized and justified America's recent torture regime have escaped justice. This campaign would be a start.

Banned in Britain

The Independent tells us that "Advertising censors have branded an anti-domestic violence advert starring Keira Knightley too shocking for TV, and are refusing to allow it to be broadcast unless key scenes are cut." The censored video:

The Bush administration brought torture to Poland

America corrupts Europe

Der Spiegel has published a report documenting the presence of a CIA prison and 'special interrogations' — read: torture — center near northeastern Poland's Szymany airport. Fortunately the former communist county still believes in the rule of law:

Warsaw public prosecutor Robert Majewski has been investigating former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller's government on allegations of abuse of office. At issue is whether sovereignty over Polish territory was relinquished, and whether former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his left-leaning Social Democratic government gave the CIA free reign over sections of the Stare Kiejkuty military base for the agency's extraterritorial torture interrogations.

Would the world's oldest democracy be so committed to the law as to investigate its villains…

‘Good people’ don’t torture

Only monsters torture others. Americans are 'good people.' They are not monsters. Therefore Americans "don't torture," as President Bush made clear. Yet the historical record is now plain and unassailable: America did use torture as an interrogation-disciplinary technique. Moreover, as Frank Rich points out,

…we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government's highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to "24"; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

And:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

Briefly put, the United States committed crimes against humanity (torture) in order to justify one fundamental war crime (the Iraq invasion) it committed in pursuit of its imperial ends. It did not commit these crimes against humanity in defense of the Republic or American democratic institutions, such as they are. They were not acts of self-defense. Rather they were just one specific tactic used to achieve imperial ends.

But are common Americans guilty of this crime? Yes they are, in some indistinct measure. They acquire their guilt because this criminal enterprise was put into effect by a democratic government; by definition the citizens of a democratic country are implicated in the crimes committed by their government since they have the institution powers needed to install the government that committed the crimes and the powers required to remove it before or after it commits the crimes.

Phillip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, Martin Niemöller and Hannah Arendt would not find this possibility — that normal folk commit or are complicit with these kinds of crimes — surprising. Neither malice nor indifference to suffering are uncommon properties among human beings. They are universally distributed.

Obama banned torture?

It appears he did not, according to Randolph Brickey writing for CampusProgress:

In fact, the President has not "banned" torture. Torture was illegal before President Bush came to office, through our incorporation of the Geneva Convention into domestic law. (This is to say nothing of centuries of American custom and tradition holding that torture is unconscionable and morally abhorrent.) Members of the Bush administration did not somehow "unban" torture; they simply chose to ignore the law. Torture has not become any more or less legal since Obama took office. Rather, he has chosen not to pretend it is legal, and his indication that he is open to prosecutions or investigations against the architects of the Bush administration's torture policies is a sign that all is not lost for those who want the law to be followed. But however he proceeds, the idea that he has "banned" it, and we can thus moves on, ignores both the severity of the crimes committed by those who tortured, and the grotesque abuses perpetrated upon terrorism detainees — both those who are innocent and those who are not.

Torture, it seems, is a matter of law, and not a policy choice a President may take when it suits him. In fact, as Marjorie Cohn makes clear, "Obama's intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the President's constitutional duty to 'take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.'" Thus investigating and prosecuting torturers would not violate the sacrosanct principle of avoiding the criminalizing policy differences. It would instead affirm the allegedly unassailable principle which requires the investigation, prosecution and punishment of criminal acts when it is right to do so. Brickey continues:

Obama and members of the press pretend that a step in the right direction is sufficient to fully address years of systematic human rights violations, or at least preferable to an actual public inquiry or criminal prosecution. The illusory ban is set up to take the place of actual enforcement and accountability, as though agreeing to follow the laws means the president has actually worked to changed them. This decision is couched in vague aphorisms of moving forward and stresses the importance avoiding division. But there is very little actual progress here, and it is difficult to imagine how this decision unifies the country when the majority of American support some form of investigation. Furthermore, enforcing our laws is not discretionary but a duty of the office. The President has the opportunity to protect these CIA agents and contractors through presidential pardon if he feels it just or necessary for the national well-being. Obstruction of justice is not a legitimate means towards that end.

A step forward is no accomplishment when it falls so far from reaching the mark required by the law of the land. The upshot: So far, President Obama has merely agreed to follow existing law, as Brickey rightly asserts, something the President was required to do as a matter of course. But that is not all of it. Till this point Obama's actions with respect to the Bush torture regime have only protected past lawbreakers while providing a bit of legal-political coverage for their crimes. With these dubious methods the President has actually conserved the Bush torture regime by securing the liberty of the torturers, by pushing against a legal investigation of their crimes and even by keeping torture available as a practical tool any administration may use when it deems it necessary. Conserving torture as a policy option is one malignant effect of Obama's unwillingness to investigate and prosecute Bush-era crimes. Only the vigorous investigation and prosecution of America's torturers will reverse this situation.

Some crimes of the greedy, reckless and self-absorbed

Drawing upon Hannah Arendt's famous analysis of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi regime, the destructive potential a modern administrative system harbors within and, of course, upon the Holocaust as a manifestation of that destructive potential, Shoshana Zuboff contends that: "The economic crisis has demonstrated that the banality of evil concealed within a widely accepted business model can put the entire world and its peoples at risk." Indeed, it can, for how might one assess a deep global economic crisis but as an systemic event that puts millions — if not billions — at risk? What also might one say about those individuals, groups and organizations responsible for the crisis? Zuboff continues by asking:

Shouldn't those businesses be held accountable to agreed international standards of rights, obligations, and conduct? Shouldn't the individuals whose actions unleashed such devastating consequences be held accountable to these moral standards?

Her answer:

I believe the answer is yes. That in the crisis of 2009 the mounting evidence of fraud, conflicts of interest, indifference to suffering, repudiation of responsibility, and systemic absence of individual moral judgment produced an administrative economic massacre of such proportion that it constitutes an economic crime against humanity.

Zuboff fails to provide a remedy for these crimes which were so neatly woven into the fabric of the modern world that they became perceptible to common folk long after the disaster began to snowball. This absence is unsurprising since the blame for the crisis properly extends to individuals, organizations and groups worldwide. We live in a globalized and globalizing world. The key problem: How might so many with so much power be brought to justice? The task is daunting. Yet parsimony in practice is possible. This potential derives from the fact that the major portion of the blame for the latest crisis falls upon the putative "masters of the universe." They earned this blame because with power comes responsibility. It is for similar reasons that countries like Great Britain and the United States deserve a special share of the blame since "[t]he use of force to configure a 'liberal' world economy (as Marx and Later Rosa Luxemburg argued) is what Pax Britannica [and later Pax Americana] was really about," according to Mike Davis (295). It is undisputable that the Western imperial powers gave shape to the modern world. Consequently they should at least be assigned responsibility for the world they have created and from which they have taken so much.

Representative Kucinich calls for a Congressional investigation

The target of Kuchinich's proposed investigation according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (see also this): The Bush administration's "executive assassination group," the existence of which came to light during a recent talk by investigative Seymour Hersh.

Hersh made his allegations public during a question and answer session that followed a panel discussion which had America's Constitutional crisis as its topic.

Kucinich made his request for an investigation into Hersh's allegations in a letter he just sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.