Peace Rant

We can only hope. We can hope only if . . .

There's a pretty powerful piece of news out tonight.  Well, I think so, anyway.  But it will no doubt be ignored or buried by the US media.  So pass it on yourself.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, said today that waterboarding is an international crime.  She was quite clear on this:  "I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture."

The timing of her statement is quite impressive.

Arbour's comments follow on the heels of the admission by CIA Director Michael Hayden, in Congressional testimony, that the US has engaged in waterboarding.  Better than that, the comments arrived in nearly the same news cycle as reports of Attorney General Michael Mukasey's flat refusal -- again in testimony before Congress -- to prosecute anybody for torture.

The initial accounts are reporting that Arbour said violators of the International Convention Against Torture should be prosecuted.  However, the reports don't quote Arbour saying it quite that way, and I haven't been able to find a transcript yet.

Still, she is quoted reminding people that crimes such as torture have "universal jurisdiction" -- meaning any country can charge, prosecute, and punish violators of such international laws.  And that's where she came close to saying that Bush, Cheney, et al, should be prosecuted:

"There are several precedents worldwide of states exercising their universal jurisdiction ... to enforce the torture convention and we can only hope that we will see more and more of these avenues of redress," Arbour said.  [Emphasis added.]  [Complete Reuters article.]

Meanwhile, our own Congress, after hearing not just this week's testimony from Hayden and Mukasey, but years of the same arrogant obfuscation and undisguised lying, cannot bring itself to even consider impeachment.  Instead, it is considering banning waterboarding.  That's pretty much the epitome of too little, too late.

Arbour's comments, coming as they do from a high-ranking UN official, will likely be given little weight in our mainstream media.  But Arbour is no lightweight on the international scene.  She was the chief prosecutor of human rights abuses in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

As I noted, I have my doubts this story will go anywhere, despite its importance.  So we all need to help it sprout wings.  The Reuters article has a link that allows you to email it to friends.  Forward it to your Representative and Senators.  Forward it to newspaper editors.  And friends and family.

We can hope only if we take some action.

Vote early, vote often

Let me be clear about a couple of things before I dive into this voting thing.

First:  No President -- past, present or future -- is going to advance anything remotely resembling a progressive agenda.  Quite the contrary.  And that includes virtually all of the currently approved candidates.

Second:  If your favorite candidate is eventually elected president, you will end up feeling dismayed, disappointed, betrayed, outraged.  Usually in that order.  And often quite rapidly in succession.

And so, of course, you must be sure to vote.

Our election systems are totally screwed up.  From the blatant corruption of the campaign finance system to corrupt computers counting votes, our elections are in a shambles.  No doubt about it.

But voting is a right.  And if we don't exercise our rights, we run a significant chance of losing them -- all of them.  Our rights under the Constitution, our civil liberties, our human rights, are always under attack, because they are an inconvenience to those who prefer to control things.

This whole concept of rights is still a bit fuzzy in modern realpolitik -- there's plenty of lip service, but little initiative to defend human rights.

If we stop speaking out, we'll lose our free speech rights.  If we stop assembling in redress of our grievances, we'll lose the right to vigil and picket and protest and march. 

And if we turn away from the ballot box, we'll find ourselves completely disenfranchised -- we're already headed down that road.

I have no hope that the next President will initiate a wave of progressive legislation nor substantively change the elite-consensus foreign policy of this country.  But I do think a certain new President could at least bring a little fresh air to the stale backrooms of this country's power centers -- shake things up a little bit, change the focus, change the channel.  That would be a step forward.

Barack Obama.

And then it's back into the streets.  There's a war on.

It's the oil, habibi

Juan Cole posted a small aside on his great blog Informed Comment a couple of days ago:

People keep asking in puzzlement what Bush expected to get out of his Iraq misadventure. It is the oil, habibi, the oil.

It's amazing that people keep asking this question.  Maybe they'll finally realize the truth of Juan's statement -- and what many of us have been saying for the past five plus years -- when they read the news about Exxon-Mobil's record profits for the past year.  This wasn't a record year just for Exxon.  It was the most profit ever made by any company in the history of the planet.

The company reported Friday that it beat its own record for the highest profits ever recorded by any company, with net income rising 3 percent, to $40.6 billion, thanks to surging oil prices. The company’s sales, more than $404 billion, exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries.

Exxon Mobil earned more than $1,287 of profit for every second of 2007.  [NY Times story:  Exxon Sets Profit Record: $40.6 Billion Last Year, 2/2/08]

This wouldn't have happened without the Bush gang in the White House.  And Bush wouldn't be in the White House if not for the oil barons of Texas.  The Bush clan and the Texas oil barons are old family friends.  Here's a snippet from a 2002 Guardian investigation into Texas politics and the oil giants:

'You are looking at the biggest oil refinery in the world,' indicates LaNell Anderson. She refers to the edifice that is the 3,000-acre Exxon Mobil plant at Baytown, near Houston, producer of 507,800 barrels a day. Here begins a story of both dynasty and destiny, for it was on this spot in 1917 that the Bush family's oil connection was forged - where the Humble Oil company, which struck black gold in the Houston suburb of that name, took root, later to become the Exxon behemoth. Humble's founder, William Stamps Farish, went on to become president of Standard Oil. His daughter became a friend of George Bush Sr and his grandson William Jr was taken in 'almost like family' (said Barbara Bush) while campaigning for George Sr's entrée into Washington Senatorial politics in 1964. Farish Jr claims to have been the first man to whom Bush Sr confided his ambition to be president one day, and was last year named US Ambassador to London. [Read the complete areticle, Dark heart of the American dream, The Guardian, 6/16/02]

It's just a matter of old friends tending to the needs of old friends.  $1,287 per second is a pretty nice payoff for having friends in high places.

(By the way, habibi means "my friend" or "beloved".)