Rex Regnant Sed Non Gubernat

Whatever happened to Bush's global democratic revolution?
by Justin Raimondo

How quickly we forget. It seems like only yesterday that the headlines were ablaze with news of the color-coded revolutions supposedly inspired by our president's commitment to fostering "democracy" throughout the globe. In an inaugural speech widely derided by those who hadn't quaffed too deeply of the neoconservative Kool-Aid, George W. Bush declared that U.S. foreign policy has "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Not content with "liberating" Iraq, while reducing it to a pile of rubble, the U.S. government went on the offensive on a global scale, hailing the color revolutions in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Belarus, and Lebanon as examples of what the president had earlier referred to as a U.S.-led "global democratic revolution."

It's only a few years later, however, and the "revolution" seems to have petered out. Worse, in all instances, the "revolution" turned out to be completely illusory, i.e., little more than a flimsy pretext for U.S.-engineered regime change on the cheap.

Revisiting the scene of these various "democratic" upsurges, one thing becomes all too clear: nothing has really changed. Ukraine provides the best example of this "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" syndrome.

The saga of Viktor Yushchenko's rise – and near fall – as the leader of the "democratic" resistance to Ukraine's neo-Soviet apparatchiks contained all the essential elements of the Bush administration's revolutionary narrative: a handsome, young, rising political star challenges the sclerotic, corrupt, election-stealing leadership of a decrepit post-communist former Soviet republic – and nearly becomes a martyr to the cause of capital-D democracy. In Yushie's case, it was an attempt to poison him, allegedly carried out by an official of the Ukrainian secret services – and, it just so happens, a key ally of Yushchenko's election opponent, Viktor Yanukovich.

This alleged assassination attempt badly disfigured the formerly handsome Yushie's face, and it is fair to say, this event was the turning point in the election. The finger was pointed directly at Yanukovich and his supporters, and the more radical Orange revolutionaries, led by the "gas princess," Yulia Timoshenko, openly accused the Russian KGB of being behind the plot. The Western media jumped on the story and unquestioningly accepted the narrative peddled by the Orange revolutionaries and their sponsors in the U.S. government, who were covertly (and overtly) funding Yushchenko to the tune of millions.

This supposed poisoning, however, was diagnosed under the most curious circumstances: Dr. Lothar Wicke, the former chief of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic where Yushchenko went for treatment, denied that Yushchenko had been poisoned at all, and testified that he had been threatened by supporters of the Orange movement if he failed to come up with the "right" diagnosis. The poisoning diagnosis was disputed by several Western experts, who questioned the timeline laid out by Yushchenko and his entourage – Yushie got sick immediately after dining with the head of the security services, whereas dioxin poisoning would take at least 3 days to manifest symptoms – and many doubted that dioxin would be the poison of choice, in any case.

Furthermore, after all that heavy breathing about a Russian-Yanukovich plot to take out the rising star of the Orange Revolution, the investigation into who poisoned Yushchenko, and why, never got much further than vague insinuations directed at the Yanukovich camp, and dark intimations of KGB involvement. Two years later, after a long silence, the "investigation" has yet to bear any fruit: not a single suspect has been charged. The comic-opera character of this criminal probe is underscored by the first few paragraphs of a recent Radio Free Europe story:

"Speaking to journalists in Baku on September 8, the Ukrainian president said
the investigation into the alleged poisoning in September 2004 was 'one step
away from the active phase of solving this case.'"Yushchenko's statement came as
Ukraine's prosecutor-general, Oleksandr Medvedko, announced that investigators
had determined the time, place, and circumstances in which the poisoning attempt
took place."All that remains, apparently, is to find the individual, or
individuals, responsible."

Ukraine's Keystone Kops know everything about this crime – except who did it. It has taken them two solid years to get to the brink of "the active phase of solving this case." Yet how do we account for the longevity of the passive phase?

One would think that the president would be eager to utilize the full resources of Ukrainian law enforcement – not to mention the expertise and assistance of his American allies – to get to the bottom of the plot that ruined his good looks and almost took his life. However, we have seen just the opposite: a strange reluctance to pursue the investigation, punctuated by laconic public pronouncements over the interceding years, culminating in this most recent Orwellian formulation of being "one step away" from "the active phase."

Just how seriously we ought to take accusations that Yanukovich – and, standing behind him, the Kremlin – engineered the poisoning of Yushchenko is indicated by the post-"revolutionary" politics of Ukraine, now dominated by a coalitionof Yushchenko and Yanukovich supporters.

Would the Yushchenko group agree to share power with Yanukovich and his party if they really believed their coalition allies had tried to kill their dear beloved Yushie? Somehow, I doubt it.

In any case, the so-called Orange Revolution has faded to a pale pinkish hue, with the color almost completely washed out of it. Ukraine is still corrupt, poor, and owned lock, stock, and barrel by a nomenklatura of unusual avariciousness. All that has changed is the likelihood of NATO membership, and that's all the U.S. government ever cared about anyway.

The containment, of the Russian bear – recently stoked by copious infusions of honey (in the form of sky-high oil prices) – and not the export of "democracy," was and is the real objective of U.S. support for Yushchenko and his fellow "revolutionaries."

The same motives can be easily discerned in the case of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where the Rose Revolution catapulted Mikheil Saakashvili to power in 2003.

The Ukrainian Orange phenomenon was modeled quite explicitly on the example of the Rose Revolution, which featured a disputed election, massive youth-oriented street protests, and plenty of subsidies from U.S. government agencies. The evil neo-communist leftovers from the old order, led by Eduard Shevardnadze, were swept away by the rising tide of pro-Western, modernizing young "democrats," exemplified by Saakashvili, said to be a Georgian combo of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Or so went the official narrative.

It wasn't long, however, before the wolf disdained his sheep's clothing and openly began to exhibit distinctly wolfish characteristics, imprisoning his political opponents and cracking down on the opposition in the name of "national security." His latest assault on his political enemies involves busting up an alleged Russian "spy ring" – which, just coincidentally, includes the leaders of most of the opposition. Dozens of Justice Party and Conservative Party (monarchist) leaders and activists have been arrested and imprisoned on what are obviously trumped-up charges. Russian military headquarters in Tbilisi – where the Russians still have a nominal presence – has been surrounded by Georgian military and police, and a major standoff is in the making, with Russia calling for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over the matter.

This crisis has a long history. U.S. support for Saakashvili and the Rose Revolution had, as usual, nothing to do with devotion to the principles of what is loosely referred to as "democracy," and everything to do with the geopolitics of oil and the regional objective of encircling – one might even say strangling – resurgent Russia. The construction of an oil pipeline that somehow avoids traversing Russian territory is the dearest dream of the Chevron wing of the Republican party, and would please to no end the Clintonian Democrats, who, you'll remember, set up a special office of the U.S. government devoted to making that pipeline a reality.

The Caucasus is a volatile region, every bit as volcanic and rife with ethnic and religious fissures as the Middle East. In Georgia alone, several ethno-religious groupings compete for title to the land and the right of self-rule in some very cramped quarters, and it takes a scorecard to know all the players. Without getting too much into the specifics – the particular historical and political factors giving rise to the Georgians' struggle with the Ossetians, the Ajarians, and the Abkhazians – it's important to know that all these rebellious regions share cultural and political ties to Russia.
Russian-speakers, primarily Orthodox Christians, these peoples see their history as inextricably bound up with the fountainhead of Slavic civilization represented by the Kremlin.

Russia, in turn, has given them limited diplomatic, political, and military support in their respective struggles for self-determination and kept the Georgian wolf at the door. However, Saakashvili, in his bid to create a Greater Georgia and prove his usefulness to the anti-Russian alliance of NATO nations, is taking the offensive. Even as he jails the opposition, cracks down on the media, and seeks to label anyone who fails to march in lockstep to his authoritarianism a "Russian spy," Georgia creeps closer to full NATO membership. First Ukraine, then Georgia – the creation of a cordon sanitaire around the former Soviet Union requires just a few more links, one of which was provided in the delightfully obscure country of Kyrgyzstan.

In Kyrgyzstan, you'll remember, the classic pattern of these color-coded revolutions ran true to form: a disputed election, massive street protests, and the flight of the former leader to Russia. This was hailed by Condoleezza Rice and numerous commentators as yet more evidence that the Bushian "global democratic revolution" was taking hold – inspired, or so we were told, by the American "liberation" of Iraq and the president's "forward strategy of freedom."

The former president, Askar Akayev, an ex-communist bureaucrat, was accused by all the pertinent "human rights" organizations to be an election-thief as well as a mini-Stalin. Compared to what followed, however, the era of Akayev's rule will go down in the history of the country as relatively benign: compared, that is, to the reign of his successor, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, which has been marked by what the International Herald Tribunedescribes as "political instability and deteriorating public security, including a string of high-profile murders." The latest outrage is the news that the president's brother tried to have heroin planted on a prominent opposition leader. Against the backdrop of mysterious hooligan attacks on the independent media, one thing seems clear: in Kyrgyzstan, the Tulip Revolution has wilted, and the familiar weed of autocracy has grown up in its place.

Both Russia and the U.S. maintain military bases in the country – there was, you may recall, that mysterious incident with the disappearing U.S. officer, who turned up several miles away from where she was last seen, for reasons that aren't quite clear. And now we have this collision in the air over Manas Air Base, involving a Kyrgyz airliner and a U.S. military refueling aircraft – both reminders of the shadowy American presence in this far corner of Central Asia.

It was under Akayev that the Russians were granted access to their base near the village of Kant, not far from the capital city of Bishkek, in 2003. Shortly afterward, he was overthrown. While Bakiyev got into a tiff with the U.S. over the price of basing rights – he wanted $50 million more, to start – his increasingly repressive regime has not occasioned any reprimands from the Americans. What may provoke the ire of the U.S. are increasing military and economic ties with Russia, such as the recent joint "anti-terrorism"military exercises conducted by Kyrgyz and Russian forces.

Who wants to bet that the guardians of liberty over at Freedom House and the constellation of "human rights" organizations will suddenly begin to take note of Bakiyev's shortcomings?

We always said these color-coded "revolutions" were made in Washington, and now that they have all been betrayed in Washington and on their home turf, our view – not exactly a popular one at the time these "revolutions" were occurring – is confirmed. The people of these countries still suffer and are in virtually all cases worse off than before: the only achievement they can rack up to date is the prospect of NATO membership, or, in the case of Kyrgyzstan, increased aid.

The "revolutions" in the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe were meant not to spread "democracy," but to extend the reach of American military power, via NATO and more directly. The American goal is to encircle the Russians and the Chinese, keeping both in check and extending the far frontiers of the rising American empire deep into Central Asia.

It isn't about democracy, or free markets – it's all about imperialism, pure and simple. 

The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority--perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all "anti-terrorism" package.

Why are they doing it, and how can they be stopped?

American prohibitions on abuse of prisoners go back to the Lieber Code promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The first international Geneva Convention dates from the following year.

After World War II, international law protecting prisoners of war and all noncombatants was codified in the Geneva Conventions. They were ratified by the US Senate and, under Article II of the Constitution, they thereby became the law of the land.

Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a "war crime" as any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law.

The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales's infamous 2002 "torture memo." Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, "substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."

Noting that the statute "prohibits the commission of a 'war crime' by or against a US person, including US officials," he warned that "it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges." The President's determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

Unfortunately for top Bush officials, that "solid defense" was demolished this summer when the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruled that the Geneva Conventions were indeed the law of the land.

The Court singled out Geneva's Common Article 3, which provides a minimum standard for the treatment of all noncombatants under all circumstances. They must be "treated humanely" and must not be subjected to "cruel treatment," "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," or "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld "suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them" because "the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3--and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime." A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.

Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the Associated Press on August 10, "I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes.
That's why it's so dangerous." Human rights attorney Scott Horton told Democracy Now! on August 16 that one of the purposes of the proposed legislation is "to grant immunity or impunity to certain individuals. And these are mostly decision-makers within the government."

The Coming Debate

Bush officials have not acknowledged that one of their real motives for gutting the War Crimes Act is to protect themselves from being prosecuted for their own crimes. But so far they have apparently offered only one other reason for tampering with the law: The existing law, especially the Geneva language prohibiting "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," is too vague to enforce. (Perhaps the Bush Administration should declare the US Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" as too vague to enforce as well.)

Fidell noted in an August 9 Washington Post article that military law includes many terms like "dereliction of duty," "maltreatment" and "conduct unbecoming an officer" that may appear vague but that are nonetheless enforceable. The Army Field Manual bars cruel and degrading treatment. When Attorney General Gonzales recently testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that "outrages upon personal dignity" was too ambiguous, Senator John McCain stated that top military lawyers see no problem in complying with Common Article 3.

The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act and rejecting the Bush amendments, in contrast, are multiple and overwhelming:

1. Commitment to the Geneva Conventions protects US service people from future retaliation.

As former Secretary of State Colin Powell has argued, abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put US soldiers at greater risk, would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions" and would "undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general."

2. The War Crimes Act will prohibit "torture-lite" in the future.

According to Scott Horton, the proposed legislation is "designed to provide an OK to certain techniques which fall just short of torture that are being used by the CIA," including "waterboarding, longtime standing and hypothermia," techniques that have been "linked to severe injuries and fatalities."

3. The War Crimes Act will prohibit future Abu Ghraib-type outrages.

The Bush Administration's legislation would remove the prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Repealing the War Crimes Act, the Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith reported, is decriminalizing the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear that shocked the world at Abu Ghraib prison.

Derek P. Jinks an assistant law professor at the University of Texas, author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions, said in an August 9 Washington Post article that the "entire family of techniques" used to degrade, humiliate and coerce prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo "is not addressed in any way, shape or form" in the Bush Administration's proposal. Retired Army Lieut. Col. Geoffrey Corn, until recently chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General, said in the same article, "This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as 'rewriting'" the Geneva Conventions.

This "rewriting" could have very concrete ramifications in practice. The international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia deemed acts like placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and threatening them with "physical, mental, or sexual violence" to be humiliations, degrading treatment and outrages. The proposed changes to the War Crimes Act would indicate that it is not a crime for Americans to conduct such acts.

4. Gutting the War Crimes Act will promote the perception of the United States as an outlaw country.

As a letter signed by sixteen members of Congress recently said, such legislation "would harm the reputation of the United States as a leader promoting and protecting human rights." What would be more deserving of scorn than a country that lets potential war-crime defendants repeal the very law under which they might be prosecuted?

5. The Bush legislation unfairly exempts high government officials from the very war crimes charges they are leveling against lowly "grunts."

Since the start of the Iraq War there have been more than thirty prosecutions under the military law that prohibits war crimes, with many more pending. But they have all prosecuted low-level military personnel.

Gutting the War Crimes Act would leave the military "bad apples" at the bottom subject to prosecution but would let the civilian "bad apples" at the top evade all responsibility.

As Horton points out, the Uniform Code of Military Justice already incorporates the Geneva Convention rules, but it does not apply "to Donald Rumsfeld or Stephen Cambone or to people in the White House." The point of the War Crimes Act is that it "spreads the application of the Geneva Conventions the next level up to civilians, and particularly to civilian policymakers." From the beginning, the "prosecutorial focus" of the War Crimes Act "was intended to provide deterrence at that level."

Repealing it undermines the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.

6. Preserving the War Crimes Act is part of reasserting the rule of law in America.

The War Crimes Act has been a central focus of the Bush Administration's scorn for all Constitutional limits on the power of the President and the executive branch. It was the idea that the President could by fiat declare US and international law null and void that animated the Gonzales torture memo. It was this denial of constitutional limits that the Supreme Court resoundingly rebuked in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. A rebuff to the Bush Administration's attack on the War Crimes Act is a reassertion of those constitutional limits.

The War Crimes Act can be a bridge to a more just and peaceful world. The incorporation of the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on war crimes into national law affirms America's commitment to international law. It embodies an implementation of the global heritage of the Nuremberg trials, the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It embeds that tradition within our own national law.

In the wake of World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, observed that "the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law." Making statesmen responsible to law is what the War Crimes Act is all about.

Defending the Law

The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act are conclusive (except perhaps to those who might face criminal prosecution under them). Indeed, the Administration's decision to gut the War Crimes Act is a gift to those who want to see American statesmen held accountable to national and international law. It suggests that the Bush Administration itself recognizes the criminality of many of its actions. And it shows in the sharpest relief why the War Crimes Act is needed.

But, at least for the moment, Bush's Republican allies still control both houses of Congress; they are in a position to slip a repeal of the War Crimes Act into any piece of legislation they choose. Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, senior member of the House Committee for Homeland Security, told The Nation, "The Bush Administration and the GOP leadership in Congress is trying to quietly excuse and even codify cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, at secret CIA prisons abroad and even the abhorrent practice of extraordinary rendition [the outsourcing of torture and other cruel treatment to other countries]."

While the Administration has been lining up its ducks, the campaign to save the War Crimes Act has just begun. The advocacy group Just Foreign Policy has started an online campaign to save the War Crimes Act. "This is not an obscure point in the law. What's at stake here is whether, for example, the abuses of prisoners by sexual humiliation that shocked us at Abu Ghraib are clearly illegal under US law," national coordinator Robert Naiman observes. "If we found these actions outrageous, we are obligated to tell our members of Congress to protect the law that bans them."

Markey adds, "Every American citizen should call the White House and their members of Congress because these changes being made in the dead of night could be the green light for other countries that capture American troops to treat them cruelly or torture them."

by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH 

Coming Close to a Breakthrough on 9/11?

It appears the government is really starting to run scared about 9/11 now.

All kinds of counter claims are starting to appear in the MSM trying to rebuke the 9/11 'Conspiracy Theories'.

They haven't said anything new and they haven't done anything to prove or demonstrate their point that physical laws can be altered.I have stated before that physical and natural law cannot be altered.

It can only be enhanced and any counter physical force applied to change the end result would still have to follow the original physical laws as 'PHYSICAL LAWS CANNOT BE ALTERED'!

The US government made it very hard to counter their findings by eliminating the evidence before any forensics could be applied.

Their rhetoric is not actually aimed at 9/11 truthseekers because they know that a truthseeker will investigate and research anything they put out there.

It's aimed at the dimwits who still consider the MSM as the only source of current events.

It's aimed at the great unwashed who still believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It's aimed at the dummies who may have started to question the official lie but who are still too lazy or ignorant to investigate or research on their own.

It buys the government time until they can effectively shut down any and all other sources of truth.

That's what the government is feverishly working on.

If we let them, they will succeed.

As I wrote in an article, 'you will believe'.

You will believe what the MSM says as they will then be your only source of information.

You will believe that the events of 9/11, all of them, happened just as the government says.

Of course, there will be no way to prove them wrong besides your own senses.

That will not be an option.

I stated in '9/11 for Dummies' that you don't require Physicists and scientists of varying disciplines to tell you what really happened on 9/11/2001 but we might need them to prove it.

I propose that the government assemble their best and 9/11 Scholars for truth assemble their best.

Let them meet on a mainstream special report without interference from moderators, commercials or anything or anyone else.

No Alex Jones, no Mike Rivero, no Jeff Rense, no brain damaged president and, most of all, no assassins, no CIA, NO NOTHING!

Allow them to all present their science and prove their hypotheses or theories.

Note I said 'prove'.

I would love to see the government show, scientifically, how all of the anomalies they are calling natural under the circumstaces, occurred as I cannot believe any of it.

I believe that Professor Jones and his panel will shred them to pieces but, they are all claiming to be scientists.

Prove it!

Show, without question, how WTC 7 fell into its own foundation, in 7 seconds, as a result of fire and minimal damage.

Prove that the North and South Towers, both, could fall exactly the same way when, although both were hit by an aircraft, there were different logistics and physics.

Just like no two fingerprints are supposed to be the same, the physics of the two buildings could not be the same and yet, they both fell the same.

Explain and prove the events of the 3 trade towers in New York.

We can get to flight 93 and the Pentagon when the criminals responsible for the events of 9/11 are placed under arrest and set for trial.