October 10, 2006



IMPEACH BUSH




IMPEACH CHENEY


A MERCENARY ARMY

Neocons claim that private business can do anything and everything better than government. If you've ever hassled with a corporate bureaucracy, you know that corporations can be just as bloated, just as infuriating, and just as inefficient as any government operation. Corporations look out for the bottom line. If they can shaft you and get a few more cents, that's just what they will do. If they can cut corners, possibly endangering life and safety, they will do that too. In the Bush era we're seeing private corporations even getting into the military business. Mercenaries aren't restrained in the same way the military is restrained, and that creates real dangers to our democracy. Thom Hartmann writes about it in this article at www.opednews.com:

As anybody who's been in the military can tell you, the old cliche is true that the job of an army is to "blow things up and kill people." The nature of an army includes licensing people to kill other people. This license to kill is governed by national laws and by international treaties.

Private corporations, however, are under few such constraints when they act as a mercenary army on behalf of a government. While the government pays the corporation, the same laws and treaties do not govern it as they would an army of the government. A private corporation is not answerable to We the People. To the contrary, laws and Supreme Court precedents say that private corporations can hide things behind the secrecy of "corporate personhood," claiming Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment "human rights" in ways that governments never could.

When you combine that lack of oversight with the profit motive, you get situations like the horrendous torture at Abu Ghraib, a process that, according to people who were there, was heavily influenced by the presence of and the orders from "private contractors." At least a thirty-strong team of interrogators at the prison, for example, were employed by CACI International, which is based in Virginia. According to the grunts who were convicted, private contractors told them to come in and do many of the things for which they went to jail: private contractors were in charge of many of the interrogations.

BUSH'S TOTALLY INEPT FOREIGN POLICY

George W. Bush has taken the "my way or the highway" approach to foreign policy just as he has in domestic affairs. If he doesn't like a law, he doesn't veto it. He just issues a "signing statement" saying that he won't comply with the law. If he doesn't like anti-wiretapping legislation, he just wiretaps anyway. If he has no evidence that a country presents a threat to the United States, he attacks that country anyway. Now, with North Korea possibly acquiring nuclear weapons technology, we're seeing the bitter fruits of Bush's bellicose and arrogant foreign policy. Robert Parry writes about it in this article at www.consortiumnews.com:

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush got tougher still, vowing to “rid the world of evil” and listing North Korea as part of the “axis of evil.”

More substantively, Bush sent to Congress a “nuclear posture review,” which laid out future U.S. strategy for deploying nuclear weapons. Leaked in 2002, the so-called NPR put North Korea on a list of potential targets for U.S. nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration also discussed lowering the threshold for the use of U.S. nuclear weapons by making low-yield tactical nukes available for some battlefield situations.

By putting North Korea on the nuclear target list, Bush reversed President Clinton’s commitment against targeting non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons. Clinton’s idea was that a U.S. promise not to nuke non-nuclear states would reduce their incentives for joining the nuclear club.