IT'S OFFICIAL: THEY'RE WAR CRIMINALS

I was reading this essay on ZNet earlier today, and I was absolutely amazed by what the mainstream press didn't say about the recent Amnesty International annual report on human rights abuses. So I did some Googling and found the report itself on their website.

Check this out:

It is a failure of leadership to prosecute only enlisted soldiers and a few officers while protecting those who designed a deliberate government policy of torture and authorized interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The government’s investigation must climb all the way to the top of the military and civilian chain of command.

If the US government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior US officials involved in the torture scandal. And if those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them. The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998.

And

Foreign governments that are party to the Geneva Conventions and/or the Convention against Torture—and that is some 190 countries—and countries that have national legislation that authorizes prosecution—and that is at least 125 countries—have a legally binding obligation to exercise what is known as universal jurisdiction over people accused of grave breaches of the Conventions. Governments are required to investigate suspects and, if warranted, to prosecute them or to extradite them to a country that will. Crimes such as torture are so serious that they amount to an offense against all of humanity and require governments to investigate and prosecute people responsible for those crimes—no matter where the crime was committed.

Click here for the rest (emphasis mine).

Two points to consider.

First, Amnesty International, who seems to still have a firm grasp on reality despite the prevailing insanity within the United States, believes that the torture being practiced by the US military is so horrible, so awful, that American commanders and civilian planners (see the report for a list of names) should be arrested and prosecuted anywhere in the world!!! Our government is committing crimes against humanity. You know, like the Nazis did. Actually, my buddy Mike Switzer of This is not a compliment made exactly that point a couple of days ago when I last wrote about torture in Real Art comments:

Not to invoke Godwin's law or anything but, "I keep telling myself that these are the actions of the government and the corporations who run it, not of the American people." How many Germans do you think were saying the same kinds of things in 1938? 1940? 41? 42? We gotta make the decision to run or fight soon...

(By the way, "Godwin's Law" is something to the effect that, in a UseNet discussion, the first person to make a comparison to the Nazis is probably wrong or is the most likely to lose the argument. Something like that.)

The point is that this is fucking serious.

Secondly, these AI statements are pretty inflammatory; why didn't the media report them? I could go into a long treatise about how the routines and corporate structure of the media make it likely that news coverage will slant towards favoring a goverment and corporate outlook on issues, but I've done that before, so I'll leave it with this: the media didn't report this because it would make the White House look bad. Essentially it was self-censored, and that's almost as outrageous as the torture itself. Almost.

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