Uncle Sam's torture trade

[Lest we forget there is nothing new under the sun...]

 

First published in Workers Solidarity No.47 Winter 95/96

From September 1991-December 1993, the U.S. Commerce Department approved over 350 export licenses, worth more than $27 million, for torture and police equipment under commodity category 0A82C. According to the Export Administration Regulations, this broad-ranging category includes: saps, thumbcuffs, thumbscrews, leg irons, shackles, and handcuffs; specially designed implements of torture; strait jackets, plastic handcuffs, police helmets and shields; and parts and accessories.

Another export category, 0A84C, combines electric shock batons and cattle prods with shotguns and shells. Over 2,000 licenses were granted for these items. This information was obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request for data on gun exports.

By lumping controversial items (like thumbscrews) together with non-controversial ones (like helmets) into broad general categories, the U.S. authorities hope to hide their squalid little deals with torturers. This makes many suspect the worst, especially when these commodities are licensed for export to governments with well-documented records of human rights abuse. For example, Commerce approved $10.5 million to Saudi Arabia, where government officials continued to torture and otherwise abuse detainees, including citizens and foreigners, according to the State Department's latest human rights report.

Source: Federation of American Scientists Fund

~ Struggle ~

 

25 years since the Carnation Revolution

The Carnation Revolution (Portuguese: Revolução dos Cravos) was an almost bloodless, leftist, military-led coup d'état, started on April 25, 1974, in Lisbon, Portugal, that effectively changed the Portuguese regime from an authoritarian dictatorship to a democracy after two years of a transitional period known as PREC (Processo Revolucionário Em Curso, or On-Going Revolutionary Process), characterized by social turmoil and power dispute between left and right wing political forces.

Inspired by the revolutionaries they had been fighting in the Portuguese empire a group of officers, organised in the Armed Forces Movement rose to destroy the fascist/authoritarian regime that had ruled Portugal since the 1920s.

Although the regime's political police, PIDE, killed four people before surrendering, the revolution was unusual in that the revolutionaries did not use direct violence to achieve their goals. The population, holding red carnations (cravos in Portuguese), convinced the regime soldiers not to resist. The soldiers readily swapped their bullets for flowers. It was the end of the Estado Novo, the longest authoritarian regime in Western Europe.

 

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War Made Easy (trailer)

http://www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org


War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war line of one administration after another.

War Made Easy gives special attention to parallels between the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq. Driven by media critic Norman Solomon's meticulous research and tough-minded analysis, it sets stunning examples of propaganda and media complicity from the present within the context of rare footage from political leaders and leading journalists of the Vietnam era, including Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, dissident Senator Wayne Morse, and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer.

Norman Solomon's work has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as "brutally persuasive" and essential "for those who would like greater context with their bitter morning coffee." This film now offers a chance to see that context on the screen.

Israel and Iran: A bridge too far?

 "Iran cannot attack Israel because of the weight of history that puts Iran on the side of defenders of Jewish rights to a homeland and by the same token Israel cannot attack Iran because, first, it would be acting against its own conscience and, second, it would be making a strategic error by weakening the non-Arab bloc in the Middle East," said a prominent Tehran political scientist.

"The Iran-Contra affair, when Israel replenished Iran's inventory of arms during the Iran-Iraq War [in the 1980s], happened for a reason. It showed realpolitik instead of ideological noise ruling the policy-makers in Tehran and Tel Aviv, and the logic of limited cooperation - call it a temporary marriage of convenience back then - is not entirely absent today with the threats of terrorism, etc," added the Tehran political scientist.

Not everyone in Tehran shares such sentiments and the issue of Israel has been subjected to the exigencies of factional politics, like so many other (foreign policy) issues. Unfortunately, some Iran experts in the West have made a serious error of speaking of a "strategic alliance" between Israel and Iran during the Iran-Iraq War.

 

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Political harmony v. the rule of law: an easy choice for the political establishment

Former Congressman Harold Ford appeared at the Netroots Nation conference yesterday, argued that Bush officials shouldn't be held accountable for crimes they committed while in office, and then insisted that Democrats shouldn't be expected to defend civil liberties and Constitutional rights because -- as one observer summarized Ford's point -- "the Constitution doesn't poll very well."

 

[ ... ]

 

As I documented last week, the idea that the Rule of Law is only for common people, but not for our political leaders and Washington elite, is pervasive among the political and pundit class, in both parties. While common Americans should be imprisoned in record numbers when they break the law, the worst that should happen to the political elite when they commit crimes is that they should be voted out of office. That's the dominant mentality governing how our political system works.

For all the talk about how radical and lawless the Bush administration has been, this widely-shared view that our political leaders should be immune from consequences for lawbreaking is the administration's defining belief. After the 2004 election, President Bush held a news conference and was asked about the failures in Iraq, and this is what he said:

QUESTION: Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election.

On December 16, 2005 -- the day after the NYT revealed that Bush was breaking the law in spying on Americans without warrants -- Digby noted that exchange and wrote:

He, like Nixon, believes that the president has only one "accountability moment" while he is president. His re-election. Beyond that, he has been given a blank check. And that includes breaking the law since if the president does it, it's not illegal, the president being the executive branch which is not subject to any other branch of government.

But it isn't only the Bush administration that believes that. That was why Gerald Ford was widely praised for pardoning Nixon (Ford said "he acted to restore harmony and move on"). That's the same argument used by Bush 41 to pardon Iran-contra lawbreakers, and it's what the Washington Establishment said when -- liberal and conservative pundits alike -- they defended those pardons of Casper Weinberger and the other Iran-contra lawbreakers:

Another favored Republican was Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who like Shultz earned his insider spurs during the Nixon administration. Weinberger's false Iran-contra testimony was even more blatant than Shultz's, causing Walsh to indict Weinberger for perjury in 1992.

The Washington elites rallied to Weinberger's defense. In the salons of Georgetown, there was palpable relief in December 1992 when President Bush pardoned Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants, effectively ending the Iran-contra investigation.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many insiders. In a column, Cohen described how impressed he was that Weinberger would push his own shopping cart at the Georgetown Safeway, often called the "social Safeway" because so many members of Washington's Establishment shopped there.

"Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense -- which is the way much of official Washington saw him," Cohen wrote in praise of the pardon. "Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that's all right with me." [WP, Dec. 30, 1992.]

As Atrios pointed out and documented, "This was the basic view of much of the establishment 'liberal' commentariat."

And this is exactly what we are now hearing from the likes of Harold Ford, Chuck Schumer, Cass Sunstein, David Broder, Tim Rutten, and on and on and on -- criminal prosecutions for government lawbreakers are far too disruptive and politically untenable and unfair.

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