Democrats really have no problem destroying the Constitution and killing people in faraway lands, so long as a Democrat president does the killing and trashing. In fact, when it comes to war crimes, Bill Clinton leaves George Bush in the dust.
Democrats are in a tizzy over a poorly produced and executed ABC television miniseries, the Path to 9/11, designed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the event and unabashedly capitalize on the success of Oliver Stone’s film, World Trade Center.
Former president Bill Clinton is angry over the release of the “docudrama,” and Democrats allege “fabricated scenes” that that do not “accurately portray history,” according to the Age.
Clinton factotums went so far as to write at least two letters to Robert Iger, president and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, demanding the show not be aired, in other words they want it censored. “Critics say the film blames Clinton, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and other senior aides for not adequately pursuing bin Laden, leaving him free to plan the 2001 attacks in which nearly 3000 people died,” the Age explains.
Democrat stalwarts such as William Rivers Pitt have come out of the woodwork to defend “measures” taken by the Clinton administration to “thwart international terrorism and bin Laden’s network.” Pitt cites the Constitution-busting Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) as a “historic” and “unprecedented” effort to fight “terrorism,” that is to say false flag covert operations created by a variety of intelligence organizations. “The adoption of the Antiterrorism Act of 1996 showed how little had been learned from the abuses of the past and how alluring remained the concept of unrestrained intelligence investigations focused on political ideology,” write David Cole and James X. Dempsey.
The Act’s explicit criminalization of support for peaceful activity effectively authorized FBI surveillance and infiltration of political, religious and ethnic groups engaged in peaceful humanitarian and political work. Its repeal of a prohibition against using First Amendment activities as the sole basis for an investigation further encouraged politically motivated investigations. Its reintroduction of guilt by association into the immigration laws allowed the exclusion and deportation of immigrants and foreign visitors not for what they have done but for the causes and groups with which they have associated. And the endorsement of secret evidence in immigration proceedings against alleged “terrorists” denied the most fundamental of rights—the right to defend oneself by confronting one’s accusers.
AEDPA targeted the writ of habeas corpus, known down through history as the “great bulwark against tyranny,” a natural right with origins going back to the Magna Carta. Edmund Burke called habeas corpus and English common law the “sole securities either for liberty or justice,” and with this in mind the Judiciary Act of 1789 created a statutory right of habeas corpus review for federal prisoners in the United States. AEDPA essentially trashed this right, especially in regard to prisoners sentenced to death, prisoners having nothing to do with terrorism.
Democrats really have no problem destroying the Constitution and killing people in faraway lands, so long as a Democrat president does the killing and trashing. In fact, when it comes to war crimes, Bill Clinton leaves George Bush in the dust. Clinton, writes Edward S. Herman, “has gone beyond the Bush [Senior] record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style…. Clinton’s crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.”
On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged but unproven Iraq plot to assassinate Bush Senior, killing Iraqi civilians, including the distinguished Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar. “This kind of unilateral action in response to an unproven charge is a violation of international law,” notes Herman. A few years later, in 1998, Clinton attacked Afghanistan and the Sudan, destroying a crucial pharmaceutical factory in the latter nation.
On a roll, Clinton also attacked Yugoslavia, targeting civilian infrastructure and civilian facilities (houses, hospitals, schools, trains, factories, power stations, churches, historical sites). Clinton’s crimes, according to lawyers from several countries that submitted a formal complaint with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1999, include “willful killing, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, employment of poisonous weapons or other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity, attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings, destruction or willful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments and works of art and science,” an “open violation” of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty, the Geneva Conventions and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
All of this, however, pales in comparison to Clinton’s enforcement of a brutal and genocidal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq. In 1996, the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, claimed sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children (UNICEF rounded the number off to 500,000), through preventable disease and malnourishment, a claim that prompted Clinton’s Secretary of State, at the time UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to declare on CBS’ 60 Minutes that the medieval siege of Iraq and the murder of hundreds of thousands of children was a price worth paying. Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, resigned after a 34 year career with the UN, declaring, “I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in disgust, as did Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq. All told, 1.5 million Iraqis died as a direct result of the sanctions.
“U.S. Ieaders commit war crimes as a matter of institutional necessity, as their imperial role calls for keeping subordinate peoples in their proper place and assuring a ‘favorable climate of investment’ everywhere,” explains Edward S. Herman. “They do this by using their economic power, but also (by means of ‘bombs bursting in the air’ and) by supporting Diem, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto, Savimbi, Marcos, Fujimori, Salinas, and scores of similar leaders. War crimes also come easily because U.S. Ieaders consider themselves to be the vehicles of a higher morality and truth and can operate in violation of law without cost. It is also immensely helpful that their mainstream media agree that their country is above the law and will support and rationalize each and every venture and the commission of war crimes.”
Democrat partisans such as William Rivers Pitt, so consumed with rage against the Republican Bush, are oblivious to all of this, and are thus unable to comprehend there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Bush, Clinton, or any other establishment politico. In the process, they become apologists for mass murder and, in regard to the flapdoodle over ABC’s “mini-series,” torch carriers for the official Brothers Grimm version of 9/11 events and, as well, subscribers to the fraudulent “war against terrorism,” more accurately described as a war of terrorism against millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, soon enough, Iran.
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