Human Rights

Sounds like we’ve heard it all before, because we have, back in August 2013, and that turned out to be less than convincing. Skepticism is likewise mounting over current White House claims that Damascus used a chemical weapon against civilians in the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province on April 4th. Shortly after the more recent incident, President Donald Trump, possibly deriving his information from television news reports, abruptly stated that the government of President Bashar al-Assad had ordered the attack. He also noted that the use of chemicals had “crossed many red lines” and hinted that Damascus would be held accountable. Twenty-four hours later retribution came in the form of the launch of 59 cruise missiles directed against the Syrian airbase at Sharyat. The number of casualties, if any, remains unclear and the base itself sustained only minor damage amidst allegations that many of the missiles had missed their target. The physical assault was followed by a verbal onslaught, with the Trump Administration blaming Russia for shielding al-Assad and demanding that Moscow end its alliance with Damascus if it wishes to reestablish good relations with Washington.

A recent report from Equality Now titled 'The World's Shame: The Global Rape Epidemic' http://www.equalitynow.org/campaigns/rape-laws-report offered a series of recommendations for strengthened laws to deter and punish sexual violence against women and girls.

Until I remember that I, too, am a human being, I have been with increasing frequency drawn to the conclusion that human beings have evolved with such an obsession with other individual humans that they simply cannot attribute proper importance to far-reaching policies.

If you want to excite a crowd, you don't tell them that virtually every official in Washington is in complete and harmonious agreement on massive military spending, more nuclear weapons, occupying Afghanistan, bombing Iraqis, bombing Syrians, bombing the hell out of Yemenis, and drone murdering at will. That's about as interesting as subsidizing fossil fuels and rendering the earth uninhabitable. Who cares!

If you want some sign of life out of an audience, you tell them that a particular politician is an idiot or a clown or a racist or a sadist or a misunderstood saint. Now, that has value. That has meaning.

Open Guantanamo to human rights inspectors. Open its files to the public. Subpoena the witnesses to its horrors. Open the courts to its prisoners and try them or set them free. Open the gates to the people of Cuba and give them their land back. And impeach U.S. presidents numbered 43 through 45.

“Lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?”

We have carnage and we have irony.

The speaker is the president, of course. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is, generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares to compare American collateral damage over the years with (as a chorus of shocked critics exclaimed) Vladimir Putin’s remorseless homicides. This happened during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly last Sunday, after O’Reilly had challenged Trump’s coziness with Russia and called Putin a killer.

The icon’s day has come and gone, and — oh, the irony — eight people were fatally shot in Chicago on his weekend. Another eight were shot during a Martin Luther King rally and celebration in Miami. 

God knows how many more died this past weekend: around the country, around the world.

An enormous wrong called human violence continues to roll across Planet Earth, but we bring less understanding to it than we had 50 years ago, when King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City and stood courageously against the war in Vietnam. 

At the Atlantic Council -- a "think" tank funded by such bastions of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, not to mention that center of peaceful nonviolence NATO -- Samantha Power announced on Tuesday that Russia is a menacing danger to the United States of America and to the rule of law in the world, which statement in fact constituted a menacing danger to the U.S. and to the rule of law in the world.

Power cited the "Russian government’s aggressive and destabilizing actions."

"For years, we have seen Russia take one aggressive and destabilizing action after another. We saw it in March 2014, not long after mass peaceful protests in Ukraine brought to power a government that favored closer ties with Europe, when Russia dispatched its soldiers to the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. The 'little green men,' as they came to be called, for Russia denied any ties to any of them, rammed through a referendum at the barrel of a gun, which Mr. Putin then used to justify his sham attempted annexation of Crimea."

A young man was tortured in Chicago this week. It wasn't an act of the Chicago police. It was live streamed on Facebook. And the President of the United States declared it an horrific hate crime.

The President did not advise "looking forward" rather than enforcing the law. Nor did he hold open the possibility that the crime might have served some higher purpose. In fact, he didn't excuse the crime in any way that might help recommend it for imitation by others.

Yet this same president has forbidden the prosecution of U.S. government torturers for the past 8 years and has now seen fit to keep a four-year-old Senate report on their torture secret for at least 12 years more.

Some people in the United States would maintain that environmental and climate policy should be based on facts. Some other people (there is very little overlap between the two groups) would tell you that U.S. policy toward Russia should be based on proven facts. Yet, here we are readily accepting that U.S. torture policy will be based on burying the facts.

Confirmation hearings for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, named by Donald Trump to be attorney general of the United States, will begin on Jan. 10, before Trump is even inaugurated. The rush and insistence on only two days of hearings reflect Republican efforts to cram the nomination through before Americans understand what is at stake.

Sessions will, no doubt, present himself as a humble, genial and reasonable public servant. In reality, Sessions is an outlier, an unimaginable nominee as attorney general, an implacable opponent of the very rights and liberties that the attorney general is supposed to defend. As more than 200 civil rights, human rights and women’s groups noted in a unified statement: “Sen. Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”

Are you old enough to remember when liberal groups openly admitted that the war on Iraq was illegal and fraudulent, based on oil and profit and sadism?

Well, can you recall when the proponents of the war claimed it was a defense against nonexistent ties to terrorists and nonexistent weapons?

Even if you've wiped those memories, let me assure you, NOBODY ever claimed that attacking and destroying Iraq was necessary to protect civil liberties in the United States (which have been seriously eroded during the course of the war).

Yet, in recent months the generic defense of murdering large numbers of people far away has taken over as the explanation for the war on Iraq.

The ACLU on Friday used the voice of my fellow Charlottesvillian Khizr Khan to claim that attacking Iraq was done "in defense of our country's ideals."