The Journal, the most avid champion of privatizing the world, points to the dilemma Obama is in when it comes to "Handling captured killers who refuse to obey the rules of war, much less of civilized society." I assume the "civilized society" they have in mind is the US, a society that executes the mentally ill, and young children and has two million people in prison, almost 50% of them black people who are a mere 13% of the population. Where an individual can earn $3 billion in one year without having to do any socially productive work while millions of others are unable to receive basic medical care.
But we are talking about the Wall Street Journal here. Given the deadlock over the use of civilian trials for the Guantanamo detainees which the Journal and its capitalist patrons would oppose as the general public cannot be trusted to find people guilty when the Pentagon demands it, as opposed to military tribunals which the Journal supports but are also controversial; the paper's editors figure the prisoners will stay in Guantanamo for a long time.
The Journal repeatedly refers to the inmates as "The Killers" to ensure that they are not legitimate killers, those sanctioned by the Parliament or Congress of an "official" nation state. We know for a fact that not all of them are "killers" because those that the US has been forced to release have spoken out and some have sued the US government. The three British Muslims who were in Pakistan for a wedding, crossed in to Afghanistan for a visit, and were rounded up by the US government's thuggish allies in the Northern Alliance, tortured and sent to Guantanamo were definitely not "killers". The US offered tribal warlords $100 a head for "terrorists" so they found some.
But even if there are "killers" in Guantanamo, how do we respond to people from the affected nations when they point to the murderous crimes of US capitalism? What can we say when they call these people defenders of their rights and homeland? The US invaded Iraq in an unprovoked attack. The Iraqi's never attacked the US, never threatened the US, and the US has killed maybe one million of them.
And Afghanistan? What right did the US have to invade this country run by its former allies, the Taliban? Do we honestly believe that it was to find Osama bin laden? And if we do, do we really think that they couldn't find him?
The WSJ editors write about these "Terrorists who kill innocents" and that they "deserve to be convicted and punished appropriately, which in many cases should mean the death penalty."
As we wrote in that previous blog, this makes it abundantly clear that the WSJ, the Pentagon and the Obama administration view the purpose of the tribunals as simply to legitimize the prisoner's guilt and give state sanction to a lifetime in prison or execution. There are no innocent people in Guantanamo just as there are no innocent people in the US's vast and racist justice system. They have to maintain their "War on Terror" in order to keep the American people in a permanent state of siege.
The journal explains from its high moral ground that there is a "legal wartime paradigm developed over centuries" that is at stake here. "This paradigm" the Journal states, "Distinguishes between lawful combatants who wear a national uniform and obey the rules of war and unlawful combatants who do not." By this measure, the Wall Street Journal editors would have been squarely on the side of the British in the American revolution. After all, the American revolutionists wore no uniform, they didn't fight fair hiding behind trees and whatnot, and they were not part of the army of a nation state. They were terrorists by the Wall Street Journal's definition.
The difference is that the US revolutionists were a historically progressive force, religious fanatics are not. But even the rise of religious fundamentalism is a by product of the interference of the imperialist powers, particularly the US, in the former colonial world. The CIA has been notoriously successful in crushing nascent democratic movements in the developing world an replacing them with autocratic regimes like the Shah of Iran who banned all opposition which gave rise to the Mullahs. In other situations, the CIA simply assisted in the extermination of national democratic leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Mohammed Mossadegh.
If military justice is not meted out the Journal cries, "We will have degraded the punishment for engaging in barbaric behavior against all civilized norms."
Again with the civilized. This is from the ruling class of a state that is the only country in history to have dropped nuclear weapons on a civilian urban population. This is from a state whose agents have overthrown democratic regimes and assassinated world figures who demanded independence and freedom to control their own national destiny without direct interference from Washington and Wall Street. This is from the ruling class of a regime that supplies the world with arms and, will, if it strengthens their efforts to control the worlds resources, supply military hardware to both sides of a conflict. This whining about civilization comes from the ruling class, many still alive today, who are responsible for the holocaust in Vietnam where as many as 4 million people were killed and many more born deformed due to the dropping of chemicals on the population and its food supply by the US military.
This talk of civilized norms is from a ruling class that lies to its own people on a daily basis including why it wages wars. This is a ruling class that rose to power on the backs of human slavery of the commodity production type, the exploitation of starving workers and their children in the factories and workplaces of America and the decimation of the native population of the land they now call the United States.
The problem is that most Americans don't travel abroad as we are under siege from the foreign hordes that want to destroy us because they are jealous we can ride a Harley. So folks are happy to just stay home. The average American will never be confronted with questions about their government's murderous exploits in other countries from the surviving brother, sister, father or mother of the family that was wiped out by an unmanned drone. We, as Americans, suffer because of the actions of our government; we lose out. I was in Iraq, Turkey and northern Syria as a youth---I can't go there now.
It is important for us as Americans to think about this; think about what we would say if we were confronted with an Iraqi, or Iranian, whose democratically elected government was overthrown in a CIA backed coup. What would we say to an Iraqi who lost family members prior to the wars and opposed the US's propping up of the dictator Hussein? What do we say to the people of Latin America whose dictators have been directly installed or propped up by US capitalism? What do we say to the relatives of those murdered by Pinochet after the US orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean Salvadore Allende? This same US ruling class is presently throwing Americans out of our jobs and homes in unprecedented numbers.
We need to give some serious thought to this and consider taking action to putting a stop to it. Society needs new managers.
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