Posts
The
American media and government are ballyhooing the kidnapping of a guy
they claim “masterminded” the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and
Tanzania, Africa, in 1998. The Libyan government wasn’t told. There
was no extradition request. A gang of U.S. commandos, FBI agents, and
CIA officers swooped down in the middle of Tripoli, Libya, and
grabbed a Libyan off the street by the name of Nazih Abdul-Hamed
al-Ruqai, now known as Abu Anas al-Liby. (You’ve heard of him, I’m
sure. The FBI was dangling a reward of $5 million for turning him in,
so you probably had your eye out for him.) [1]
Gee, I wonder if the U.S. would mind if
a Libyan commando squad grabbed an American off the streets of
Washington, D.C. and spirited him away to a secret torture cell? (For
now, apparently a Navy brig on a ship in the Mediterranean.) [This
occurred on October 5th, the same day another U.S. mission
didn’t go as well. See “Invincible U.S. Navy SEALs Repulsed ByAl-Shabab.”]
Yet
another U.S. violation of another nation’s sovereignty- and thus of
international law, the body of law the U.S. so thunderously invokes
when condemning enemy nations. So what’s new? The U.S. overthrows
governments it doesn’t like. It assassinates presidents. (The U.S.
state-within-a-state even assassinated the American president
in 1963.) It sabotages economies, poisons crops, spreads diseases.
[2]
U.S. Secretary of
State John “Swiftboat” Kerry brayed “He can run, but he can’t
hide,” cribbing a hoary line of boxers’ trash talk.
Can’t hide? How
come you couldn’t get him for 15 years? Sure he can hide- just not
indefinitely.
Besides, he wasn’t
even hiding, but living openly now. Apparently he got complacent and
overconfident. Guess he forgot the warning, Don’t Mess With The
U.S. They don’t forget. They
hunt down AWOL American soldiers DECADES later, as they recently did
with one in Spain. (The Spanish told the U.S. to shove off, he’s a
Spanish citizen now.) There are other cases, such as in Sweden. The
FBI is still trying to find the bones of airline hijacker D.B.
Cooper,
who parachuted out of the jet with a suitcase full of ransom money in
1971. The government is still
picking at the scab of the 3 prisoners who escaped Alcatraz
in 1962
in a homemade rubber raft, trying to determine definitively if they
made it to shore or drowned. Later
it emerged that a raft was found on an island and a car stolen in the
vicinity. The U.S. Marshall’s service is going to investigate until
the escapees’ 100th
birthdays. (How’s that
for Javert-like
fanaticism?)
The power-mad can’t stand it when someone escapes their clutches.
Of course, the U.S. decided it couldn’t trust the Libyans not to
tip off their prey, same as they couldn’t trust the Pakistanis when
they sent the SEALs to assassinate bin Laden.
But it’s not as if the U.S. hasn’t seized anyone involved in the
embassy bombings. Is slacking the thirst for revenge worth trampling
on international law and cordial relations with other nations? (I
guess so.)
According to the
New York Times, al-Liby’s seizure ends a 15-year manhunt-
i.e. one starting in 1998. And they said he was indicted in New York
in 2000. (“U.S. Commando Raids Hit Terror Targets in 2 Nations,”
Sunday, October 6, 2013, p.1.)
So- what right did
they have to hunt him in the two years prior to his indictment? And
what were they trying to do in those two years- assassinate him? (The
U.S. media keeps referring to U.S. Military seizures of people as
“arrests.” Soldiers aren’t police, so they can’t “arrest”
anyone. The use of the word “arrest” is to legitimize
illegitimate seizures, since the U.S. refuses to call its military
prisoners prisoners of war- even though they claim to be in a “war
on terrorism.”)
1998 was a year of
the Clinton Reign. Clinton initiated the current practice of secret
kidnappings and hiding prisoners in torture cells outside the U.S.-
aka “rendition.” But illegal kidnapping goes even farther back in
U.S. history; for example, “atomic spy” Morton Sobell was
kidnapped from Mexico by FBI agents and dragged to the U.S. for
show-trial.
The
U.S. has issued its usual opaque and vaguely ominous statement that
their prey is being held “in a secure location” outside Libya.
That is,
he’s in their clutches, (probably
on a ship in he Mediterranean), and
being subjected to Torture Lite (since they plan on staging a show
trial in New York for him, they’re
going easy on him). And
he has no right to remain silent and no right to an attorney, in the
weeks (or months) before
they finally haul him into a U.S. Courtroom
for faux due process.
They’ll
say he “waived” his “rights,” of course. Why wouldn’t
a hardened terrorist, a fanatical enemy of the U.S., voluntarily
waive his rights and willingly
tell his enemy interrogators everything they want to know? Perfectly
plausible! And stop that chatter about “human rights!” This is no
human being, this is a “terrorist.” Same as anti-war activists,
environmentalists, and the Occupy Movement are! Just ask the FBI! And
Thanks to Barack Hussein Obama, Carl Levin, and the U.S. Congress,
they are subject to indefinite imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay or any
other military dungeon in the global U.S. gulag at the whim of the
president of the U.S. under
U.S. Law. But that’s OK! Because it’s legal! Just like Nazi
persecution of Jews was legal- under duly enacted Nazi law.
The
point is, don’t ever confuse legal
with legitimate,
moral,
or just.
Hey, if a guy
commits a crime in Kenya, and Tanzania, shouldn’t he be tried in
Kenya and Tanzania? Oh never mind, when one country rules the world,
that country’s law applies everywhere. [3]
The boilerplate
U.S. statement after the kidnapping also said, rather defensively and
apparently to preempt objections, that it was “legal.” I suppose
that’s because, as Nixon said, “when the President does it, it’s
legal.” Which in turn is merely following the legal precedent set
earlier by the Third Reich, the Fuhrerprinziple, which stated that
the word of Adolf Hitler was law, according to German legal experts.
That’s the same kind of legal expertise that serves power as
demonstrated during the regime of Bush the Younger by John Yoo, James
Bybee, and Alberto Gonzales.
A few words are in
order here about those embassy bombings. About two hundred African
passersby were killed, and around a thousand wounded, some maimed for
life. Eight American government personnel were killed. That’s a
huge amount of “collateral damage” for a mainly symbolic attack.
It demonstrates the contempt for human life that al-Qaeda has, and
the ruthlessness and monomaniacalness with which it pursues its
goals. And of course its ultimate ends- to impose a hyper-repressive,
hyper misogynist and male supremacist social order on unwilling
people, and to rule in totalitarian fashion- is evil, anti-human. So
I don’t have sympathy for the al-Qaeda members and their ilk per
se. What is alarming is the superpower U.S. systematically
destroying human rights. Because those rights are indivisible. Either
everyone has them, or no one has them. All that is left is privileges
for the shrinking number of the
favored few. The
privilege of not being tortured, of having a lawyer, of having
a genuine trial, of not being convicted based on secret “evidence,”
and so forth. Privileges can be taken away at the whim of those in
power. And as we see, anyone the repressive U.S. government and its
numerous reactionary secret police agencies and military don’t like
can be branded “terrorist” (the replacement for the older
demonizing words “communist,” and before 1917, “anarchist.”)
[1] Funny
thing about FBI “rewards” for mega-terrorists, those
luridly-presented comic-book-type super-villains. No one ever turns
any of them in to collect the rewards. The U.S. was teasing people
with a $20 million reward for Obama bin Laden, with no takers, and
there are other multi-million dollar “rewards” that no one seems
interested in claiming.
Just as well for
potential claimants. The U.S. wouldn’t bother protecting whoever
turned in the terrorists, so they’d likely be killed sooner or
later. And here’s a dirty secret about FBI rewards- they don’t
really pay them, certainly not in full.
2] All
done to Cuba, among other nations. I recall reading the boasts of a
professor who invented an oil for the CIA that instead of
lubricating, destroyed motors, wearing them out ten times faster than
normal, which was
infiltrated into Cuba and
used for sabotage.
3] But
it doesn’t work the other way. Other nations can’t try people for
crimes committed in the U.S., or snatch people off U.S. territory and
drag them back to their own dungeons. And people outside the U.S.
victimized by corporations can’t sue in U.S. courts,
generally. Ditto most victims of U.S.-backed torture regimes. The
U.S. has what is know as a Double Standard Heads We Win Tails You
Lose legal code. Glenn
Greenwald just wrote a book that naively stumbled across this fact,
With
Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality
and Protect the Powerful. Greenwald’s
focus is on the blatant class bias of the U.S. legal system, not the
political persecution of dissidents and various enemies.
The facts he lays out are
important enough that you should familiarize yourself with them.
