War Crimes: Bush Indicted on 13 Counts: US Corp. Media Shields Disgrace

Sheila Samples: Butt Prints In The Sand

It’s time.

Before this obscene, gaping hole gets any deeper, it’s time we convinced the media to stop digging. As someone once said...and said...and said — time is not on our side. Storm clouds are gathering on the dashboard of our democracy. We must act, sooner rather than later — before we are faced with sudden horror like we’ve never known before. I couldn’t agree more, because when you consider the media horror show of the last four years, it could get hairy out there unless we wake up, stand up, and do something about it...

It’s time we told the media it’s either them — or us. We need to pass them by, boycott their advertisers, protest them — shake them until their teeth rattle. It’s time we realized there is no entity more to blame for the mess we’re in nor for the needless loss of life than our shameless and treasonous media. The media is even more obscene than Bush and the glowering, power-mad warmongers who surround him in both his administration and in his Congress.

Face it. Bush gets away with murder for just one reason — because the media allows it, encourages it, and spends big bucks producing it. Bush’s war-on-evildoers-turned-war-on-terror-turned-regime-change-turned-crusade- for-freedom-and-democracy is a media-orchestrated production, complete with banners, flag backdrops, bells and whistles. In case you haven’t noticed what the rest of the world knew at the outset — the illusion of Bush as a strong, principled leader is also a media creation. Totally.

It is folly to think we can continue to sit on our butts and there will be no day of reckoning for the total breakdown of fundamental journalistic principles. I hate to keep dragging poor Walter Williams, the first University of Missouri Journalism dean, across these pages like some old worn-out "Weekend at Bernie’s" skit, but the Journalist’s Creed Williams wrote a century ago still applies today, and is a clear statement of journalistic ethics. Williams fervently believed that journalists were totally — and only — trustees for the public, and that anything less than accuracy and fairness in reporting the news was betrayal. He believed that suppressing or ignoring news that might embarrass the powerbrokers is indefensible.

Betrayal. Indefensible betrayal.

If Williams had an idealistic vision of what journalism should be, John Swinton, former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, was more realistic about what the business of journalism really is. In a confession before the New York Press Club, Swinton said —

"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Corporate giants such as Time-Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Viacom, General Electric, and Vivendi own all media in this country; therefore, they own everything we see, hear, feel, smell or touch. They are our sensory masters. If it were not so, we would rise up against the racuous, political-agendae-driven, circle-jerk speculation by paid political activists that passes for today’s news.

It’s time we woke up and realized that not everyone who "journals" is a journalist, especially in the electronic media, and most notably on cable TV. Can you imagine the consternation of folks like Fox’s Greta Van Susteren and CNN’s Jeffery Toobin, attorneys who abandoned their law careers for the bright lights, if each were handed a pair of scissors and a jug of glue and told to "cut and paste" their transcripts, uh, after they pounded them out on manual typewriters?

How long would CNN’s resident brain surgeon, Dr. Sonjay Gupta, last as a full-time "journalist" if Americans stopped dieting, refused a breakfast of Total cereal, and boycotted Walgreen’s? Thanks to CNN, Dr. Gupta will save us a trip to the hospital — he will come right into our homes and perform the lobotomies.

"Mainstream media" is the mother of all oxymorons. To really appreciate "fair and balanced" in action, see Robert Greenwald’s "Outfoxed." Aside from daily humdrum chores of cleaning up George Bush’s tortured rhetoric and rewriting quoted material to reflect what Bush meant to say rather than what he actually said — aside from covering up or completely ignoring critical matters such as a revengeful White House leak blowing the cover of a covert CIA agent and endangering the lives of contacts throughout the world, a stolen election, a teetering economy, the unconstitutional silencing of an FBI translator, billions of taxpayers’ dollars missing in Iraq, rampant abuse and torture of prisoners, the cruel abandonment of veterans — the media continue to whoop it up in one huge journalistic Karaoke gig. There seems to be no end to their capacity to embarrass themselves by singing along to the propaganda track furnished them by the White House.

The entire mainstream media apparatus appears to be in "stand down" mode, much like NORAD was on the morning of September 11, 2001. With malice aforethought they ignore the destructive blips on their news screens, knowing full well the majority of Americans will not venture beyond what they are told to believe. Most Americans have no idea of what is actually going on in the world, either at home or abroad. Most accept without question Bush’s recent pronouncement during his news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin —

"I live in a transparent country. I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open and people are able to call people to me (sic) to account, which many out here do on a regular basis. Our laws and the reasons we have laws on the books are perfectly explained to people," he said. "Every decision we make is within the Constitution of the United States. We have a constitution that we uphold."

Think about that. Think about it while you’re waiting for the media to report that policemen across this country are "tasering" our children in classrooms to shock them into submission — zapping the elderly in nursing homes to keep them docile and obedient, handcuffing students and dragging them off to jail for wearing "anti-American" peace symbols on their T-shirts. Think about it while you’re reading the repressive Patriot Acts I and II that literally strip the Bill of Rights from the US Constitution that Bush says he is so proud to uphold.

You’ll have time to think, and to read, if you’re waiting for the media to report that many veterans are being stripped of their pay and benefits, are being charged for food while lying wounded in hospitals, and are being charged a fee (tax) for their health coverage. You’ll have plenty of time to think before the media breaks the news that, just last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was hit with a lawsuit in an Illinois federal court charging him with being directly responsible for the torture and abuse of detainees in US military custody. The lawsuit, far from being frivolous, was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First on behalf of eight men who were subject to such treatment and, if there is a God, Rumsfeld will be convicted of violating that most "quaint" of documents, the US Constitution, as well as federal statutes and international law.

Those who don’t read foreign media will never know that the International Criminal Tribunal for Iraq (ICTI) this week found both Bush and Tony Blair guilty of a series of charges, and found they deserve life sentences for war crimes and genocide in Iraq.

Kohki Abe, a professor of law at Tokyo’s Kanagawa University, said Bush and Blair should face the "maximum penalty available." He added that they should have been tried in the International Criminal Court, but admitted that, for "political reasons," they would not be prosecuted. Abe explained the ICTI had been set up so that acts such as those Bush and Blair are guilty of "do not go past without the criminals behind them being tried."

Like all thuggish bullies, George Bush, who is ever more deluded by both his senses and his judgment, is getting so full of himself he’s itching for a new fight. Like he told a cheering crowd at the National Defense University this week, "We will fight the enemy, we will lift the shadows of fear and lead free nations to victory. No matter how long it takes." So, Bush is back on the hunt, and he says ironically that he will topple "tyrants who don’t respect the rules of warfare..."

The darkness is closing around us. If ever there was a time in our history for the media to just do the right thing — that time is NOW. It’s time the media faced the fact that, sooner or later, Bush will pick a fight with someone who’s capable of fighting back, and then ratings and profits won’t matter. When that mushroom cloud hits the fan, it will affect us all, and it will be too late to do anything about it.

And nothing will remain but our butt prints in the sand.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0503/S00068.htm

Lawyers’ panel indicts Bush, Blair

Julian Ryall

Tokyo, Monday 07 March 2005 - US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair deserve life sentences, with the possibility of parole after 25 years, for the war crimes and genocide in Iraq, according to a lawyers’ panel.

Speaking on Monday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Kohki Abe, a professor of law at Kanagawa University, said they should face the "maximum penalty available". That would not include the death penalty, however, as the members of the tribunal opposed capital punishment, he added.

Abe is the chief justice of a four-person panel of the International Criminal Tribunal for Iraq (ICTI) that has judged the two leaders guilty of a series of charges.

The tribunal has headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey, and a final meeting of regional panels is scheduled for June.

Numerous charges

In conjunction with similar legal movements around the world, the Japanese chapter of the tribunal was set up in July last year, bringing together more than 25 lawyers from around the world. More than 10,000 Japanese people have supported its work with financial donations.

Abe said: "The people’s tribunal does not have any binding force, and critics say that makes it useless because it doesn’t have any power.

"But I believe that delivering this judgment and giving a legal interpretation of the acts committed by the defendants shows that it is playing an important role."

He added: "The tribunal has determined that injustices have been committed in Iraq and the tribunal is putting those injustices on the record."

As well as the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom, the ICTI has found Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Gloria Arroyo, the president of the Philippines, guilty of numerous charges relating to their involvement in Iraq.

Non-binding ruling

The ICTI held a series of hearings to consider evidence and testimony before the four judges - two from Japan, a Korean and an Indonesian lawyer - and delivered its non-binding judgment on 5 March.

The tribunal found Bush guilty on 13 counts, Blair guilty of eight crimes, Koizumi guilty on four counts and Arroyo guilty of aiding and abetting the other defendants of crimes of aggression and crimes against humanity, Abe said.

Bush is guilty of genocide for the use of "devastating" economic sanctions, as well as war crimes for attacks against civilians and the use of indiscriminate weapons, such as cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons. The attack on Falluja also makes him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Guilty of genocide

Blair stands guilty on similar counts, Abe said, while Koizumi’s decision to support the US administration and provide refuelling capabilities, transportation facilities and home bases for US troops in Japan, as well as committing the Self Defence Forces, make him guilty of war crimes and genocide.

"Japan says it is a ’pacifist nation,’ but it is a key country for US operations and Mr Koizumi bears a strong responsibility for that," Shin Hae Bong, a law professor at Aoyama Gakuin University and the Korean member of the panel, said.

"The Japanese government is tolerating the abuse of US bases on Japanese soil and gives them a free hand to use bases here to invade and occupy Iraq."

Abe added: "I have to emphasise that these acts should have been prosecuted in other venues, such as the International Court for Justice, but for legal or political reasons these four defendants are unlikely to be prosecuted.

"The international civil society has set up these tribunals because we cannot let these acts go past without the criminals behind them being tried."

http://www.icti-e.com/englishsite.html

http://tinyurl.com/6rgz8