"Of Incorrigible Transgressors, Tacit Complicity, and Lady Justice's Conspicuous Absence"
"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."
---Henry Kissinger, New York Times, October 28, 1973
Baghdad's kangaroo court has issued a verdict that virtually guarantees that Saddam Hussein will launch his journey into the hereafter from the platform of a gallows. Convicted of "revenge killings of 148 people, deportation of 400, and razing of orchards," (1), and still facing a charge of genocide that resulted in the deaths of 180,000 Kurds, Hussein is undoubtedly a malevolent individual.
Yet to ensure public furor against Hussein (and to distract the hoi polloi from focusing upon those guilty of similar crimes), the corporate media have conveniently jettisoned several important aspects of history down the Memory Hole:
1. Hussein committed his crimes with the tacit approval and complicity of the United States government because he was waging a war against their enemy, Iran.
2. Numerous members of our own power elite (Democrat and Republican alike) share responsibility for an ongoing United States genocide against the Iraqi people that began with the Gulf War (2).
3. The Iraqi administration prosecuting Hussein conducts its purportedly "sovereign" governance in a nation occupied by 140,000 US troops.
4. And perhaps most disturbingly, the United States is rife with government officials of varying capacities, both active and retired, who have committed crimes as egregious as those of Saddam. Acting with impunity and actually deriving prosperity from their transgressions, these individuals have historically ridden off into the golden hue of the setting sun, pausing just long enough to turn and flash a sneer at their would-be jailers or executioners.
If the US criminal class did actually face the Hammurabic style of justice they have imposed upon their former ally, Bush, Kissinger, and a number of other revolting miscreants would find that simply surrendering their sight and capacity to chew would fall well short of satisfying the Babylonian arbiter.
And what punishment could an international tribunal impose upon the American Empire's ruling elites to balance the scales of justice by retribution?
Nothing short of shattering their cervical vertebrae with 1000 pounds of force, reducing them to asphyxiated corpses devoid of the capacity to cause more suffering. After days of twisting in the wind, unable to fend off persistent molestation by an array of avian scavengers, their decayed corporeal shells would be hastily laid to rest in rickety pine boxes buried in a potter's field.
Now that would restore the gleam in Hammurabi's eyes and probably inspire him to dance a frenetic jig of mirth.
But despite obvious signs of decay, the world still belongs to the American Empire. And it is doubtful that the ancient law-giver will be enraptured any time soon.
Representing the victors in the struggle for global supremacy, reprehensible individuals like Donald Rumsfeld can engineer the liquidation of horrifying numbers of human beings while blithely dismissing their victims as "collateral damage" in "just wars".
When the Empire's architects of conquest set their sites on sorely over-matched nations like Vietnam or Iraq, infants are butchered and obliterated. Women are raped and eviscerated. Men are decapitated and mutilated. Children are mangled and dismembered. Innocent human beings are imprisoned and tortured. Millions of people are displaced. Infrastructures are decimated. Resources are plundered. Environments are severely contaminated....Hell is unleashed.
Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano's Journal Online's associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine's Corner within Cyrano's at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/.
