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October 10 2007
The problem is not just Bush. The U.S. Supreme Court just approved the secret torture of a German citizen by the CIA. The Bush administration lawyers argued that the torture was a "state secret," and the Supreme Court did not overturn lower court rulings favoring the government over the torture victim.(1) That proves it is not just the Supreme Court either, since the lower courts were involved. The problem is Amerikkka, period.
In Europe, the public already knows about the case of Khaled el-Masri. The silver lining in this Supreme Court non-ruling is that it will increase tensions with Germany. The German petty-bourgeoisie is basically united with the U.$. petty-bourgeoisie for war-mongering repression against the Third World, but there is just the weakest of contradictions or forces that we can take advantage of here, because the German and U.$. petty-bourgeoisie are not united under one state. So the secrets of one state come at the expense of the other. The "Clash of Civilizations" propaganda is designed to overcome this sort of problem.
A basic rule of bourgeois civics went out the window, "innocent till proven guilty." The military shows up in Afghanistan, shoots everything that moves including football player Pat Tillman and the remainder of people on the scene that survives for whatever reason gets dragged off to Gitmo. The people who do not support the bourgeois civics we learned in schools through years of drill assume that the CIA is always right and Bush is always right or they would not have detained someone to begin with, so there does not need to be a process. It's called lynch mob justice, been with the united $tates a long time.
Former President Jimmy Carter has now admitted that the united $tates tortures prisoners, but he says it is for the first time in his life.(2)
President Carter is too upper class to know what life is like in U.$. prisons, that Charles Graner was working Pennsylvania prisons before Abu Ghraib.(3) If he had been reading MIM Notes, Carter would have acted on Charles Graner before he got to Abu Ghraib.
If Bush and Cheney had not taken control of CIA torture and domestic surveillance themselves, Carter and similar kinds could ignore the situation of day-to-day life for lower-ranking government officials torturing lower-class people.
We have a key disagreement with president Carter when he says of Republican candidates for president: "'They're competing with each other to appeal to the ultra-right-wing, war-mongering element in our country, which I think is the minority of our total population.'"(2)
If Carter were right in his sunny view of the Amerikan majority, it would be hard to explain how Bush got 60 million votes in 2004, a record. The difference between a white nationalist like Carter and MIM is that Carter has optimism regarding the majority of Amerika. It does not occur to him that even if he were right, the active 30% tolerated by the inactive 60% will mean a huge pattern of racial and national oppression. In that situation, the 30% will call the shots most of the time. To this day, Bush has 30% support despite everything the public knows. This is not just a single Watergate break-in plus a Vietnam War. The public knows about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, CIA torture renditions, the Blackwater shootings etc. and still Bush approval is 30%. The reason is that 30% approves of monarchist repression consistently. In some counties and states, that monarchist population is the majority.
Democrats whittle away at Republican popularity, but because of the cost of war in money and deaths. Without the Iraqi insurgents, the Democrats would not be able to do that. The issues would remain gays, flag and Mexicans.
The United $tates is not a free country. It tortures people and gives reasons of state secrecy, just like all the other bourgeois dictatorships in the world.
Notes:
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10scotus.html?ref=us
2. http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/10/carter.torture/
3. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/iraq/iraqprisonconnections.html