Where Dick Goes, Trouble Follows

While I'm processing videos from DNC protests on Sunday, I thought I'd point out that our dear friend Dick Cheney is heading to Georgia to cause trouble. Said he was already planning to go before the Russia-Georgia showdown. Funny how the announcement came a day after Russia said it considered NATO re-supply of Georgia to be pre-positioning for war.

Indictments Are In Order

Final confirmation came in a one-two punch over 48 hours: On June 17, a Senate report confirmed that the executive branch had regularly transferred prisoners among various locations so that "illegal combatants" could not be seen by the Red Cross. The next day, Physicians for Human Rights released a lengthy report confirming extensive and systematic physical torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Kandahar. The report specifically said the torture was too routine and systematic to be the work of bad apples, and called for the appointment of a prosecutor to check on Defense Department and White House behavior. There is no room in this to even be glib or droll. We need to see war-crimes indictments of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld (and perhaps Robert Gates?)

Thou Shalt Not, Except Sometimes

The State Department has taken a distinct and troubling new step by praising the assassination by car bomb of Imad Mughniyeh of Hezbollah. Not that I'd disagree too much, mind you -- the man who planned the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, and several of the Beirut Hezbollah kidnappings of the late 1980s, is probably indeed better off dead. A strict Christian approach to confronting evil would say that one can never rejoice over another's death. But let's face it, I was overjoyed the day Augusto Pinochet bit it, and will probably feel similarly for, say, Henry Kissinger or Dick Cheney (not the president, who is too much of a bumbling tool of the powerful). But I know I'm wrong to have a "party on the gravestone" view, and it seems troubling that the governments of the U.S. and Israel would make an official statement to praise a murder.