As vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide
torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended
far beyond waterboarding), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq,
which caused the deaths of at
least 500,000 people and more likely over a
million. As such, he is one of the planet’s most notorious war
criminals.
President Obama made
the decision in early 2009 to block
the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting
Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect
them from foreign
investigations and even civil
liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a
campaign
decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and,
more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by
Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute
their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture
from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable
policy question, which is why so
many GOP
candidates are
now openly suggesting
its
use.
[ picture at URL ]
[ picture at URL ]
But now, the Obama administration
has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing
over them in public. Yesterday, the House of Representatives unveiled
a marble bust of former Vice President Cheney, which — until a person of
conscience vandalizes or destroys it — will reside in Emancipation Hall of
the U.S. Capitol.
At the unveiling ceremony, Cheney
was, in the
playful words of NPR, “lightly roasted” — as though he’s some sort of grumpy
though beloved avuncular stand-up comic. Along with George W. Bush,
one of the speakers in attendance was Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke
movingly of Cheney’s kind and generous soul:As I look around this room and up on the platform, I want to say thank you for letting me crash your family reunion. I’m afraid I’ve blown his cover. I actually like Dick Cheney. … I can say without fear of contradiction, there’s never one single time been a harsh word, not one single time in our entire relationship.Leading American news outlets got in on the fun, as they always do, using the joviality of the event to promote their news accounts and generate visits to their sites:
As NPR put it, “This was not an event for Cheney critics — on the war or torture or related topics.” Totally: why let some unpleasant war criminality ruin a perfectly uplifting ceremony?Watch former President Bush unleash the Dick Cheney jokes at Washington ceremony https://t.co/3Ps6PKxU3O pic.twitter.com/EAWtdlYIR3— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 4, 2015
It is a long-standing trope among self-flattering Westerners and their allies that a key difference between “us” and “them” (Muslim radicals) is that “they” honor and memorialize their terrorists and celebrate them as “martyrs” while we scorn and prosecute our own.
Yesterday, the U.S. government unambiguously signaled to the world that not only does it regard itself as entirely exempt from the laws of wars, the principal Nuremberg prohibition against aggressive invasions, and global prohibitions on torture (something that has been self-evident for many years), but believes that the official perpetrators should be honored and memorialized provided they engage in these crimes on behalf of the U.S. government. That’s a message that most of the U.S. media and thus large parts of the American population will not hear, but much of the world will hear it quite loudly and clearly. How could they not?
In other news, U.S. officials this week conceded that a man kept in a cage for 13 years at Guantánamo, the now 37-year-old Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri, was there due to “mistaken identity.” As Joe Biden said yesterday, “I actually like Dick Cheney.”
No comments:
Post a Comment