Sullivan: "We Have War Criminals in the White House"

When Andrew Sullivan calls Bush a "war criminal," something significant has happened.

Sullivan is a conservative. Sullivan is highly educated, well informed, and adept at rubbing his brain cells together. Sullivan is well connected, and he is not generally given to hyperbole. He is one of a handful of people on the Right whom I respect. He has The Atlantic as just one of his platforms, and if he weren't also out, gay, and gaily married, he'd be really influential.

Sullivan concludes a short piece on today's New York Times revelations about yet another "hide, distort, and lie" Bush episode thus:

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

A couple of suggestions.

One of most shameful, paralyzing dissemblings of late is the spin that only Democrats occupy Congress. They could do much more than they're doing, but the rest of the truth is that Republicans in Congress that protect, enable, and permit this President to remain in power.

It is time for Republicans who love the constitutional promise of America to step up to impeachment, to show statesmanlike leadership instead of craven capitulation to a rogue Republican junta.

It is similarly time for conservatives, moderates, liberals, and progressives to put relentless pressure on all our senators and representatives, Democrat and Republican, to impeach and remove both Bush and Cheney from office.

What have we to lose? If we fail, the blueprint that Naomi Klein has laid out for us in The Shock Doctrine may well be our fate. Yes, I'm serious. Too many sinister correspondences have accumulated between the people and ideas that plunged Chile's 160-year old stable democracy into a bloody coup d'etat and the people and ideas that rule us today for a responsible citizen to ignore them. It happened there and it can happen here. If we continue to be drowsy sheep, it will.

Here's what I see: There are the unitary president's boggling power grabs: He has put himself beyond the reach of ordinary law and given himself and his men extraordinary, unconstitutional powers. There are his extensive and largely secret domestic spying networks.

There are the administration's systematic attempts to privatize education, intelligence, warmaking, and Social Security. There is its successful de-funding of the federal treasury and its creation of a crippling $10 Trillion debt in order to enrich his fellow oil, construction, mercenary, and weapons princes.

There are his relentless attacks on what shreds of social safety nets remain.

There are his "privatization laboratories" in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast and his demonstrated contempt for human life in the service of enabling the shocks that permit those privatization wealth transfers.

There is the unbelievable travesty of a voluntary war for profit--another privatization shock lab in which oil giants get Iraq's oil, Iraqs get impoverished, demoralized,and bought up, Bush and his buddies get even richer, and hundreds of thousands are killed, maimed, and/or displaced.

There is now also legal torture and indeterminate detention of US citizens on US soil without court oversight or, apparently, even court reach.

Unfathomably, with all the resources that have gone to das Heimat Sicherheit (the Nazi name for the Department of Homeland Security), every day comes another report that nothing, really, has been done to make us more secure. It's beginning to look a lot like a bait and switch deal to me.

Finally, just in case that hasn't gotten your attention; there's the ENDGAME. This from Residentcynic on Daily Kos:

ENDGAME is the policy executed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Office of Detention and Removal (DRO), that is part of a sweeping 10-year plan (2002-2012) to: 1) apprehend, 2) incarcerate (detain), 3) "process"—(investigate and question), and 4) remove all removable aliens or potential terrorists. The order of apprehension to removal is literal, as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under DHS shifted the traditionally two-pronged approach of 1)investigation, 2)detention-removal to a one-pronged approach in 2000: detention-first and "process" the person while incarcerated. (p. 2-7 of ENDGAME document)

Bush already has $400 million to work with, and, with his crony Halliburton, is in process of creating 40,000 detention beds in this country, for "aliens and potential terrorists." What exactly is a "potential terrorist" when only The Decider gets to decide? If he doesn't lie the way the election turns out, what's to stop him from declaring martial law and using one of his mercenary armies to enforce it? Or maybe the bombing of Iran will be the shock that precipitates the fall of the United States at the hands of its own president.

Andrew, what do you make of this? The same "free market/privateers" and Neo-Cons who pulled off Chile and Argentina and Indonesia are either in our Administration or allied NGOs or think-tanks as we speak, or just were, or are its gurus (Kissinger, Strauss, Friedman) or disciples. I mean Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, Norquist, Moore, et al.) It looks very like they have everything they need to pull it off, and are devoted to the idea that they should.

Yes, "our refusal to absorb what is staring us in the face is staggering." But really, how many more bread crumbs do we need?

I'm doing my bit where I am. Call on your people to do theirs. Now.

[Inserted October 7: Received this update from Residentcynic, author of the important research on ENDGAME referenced above. This update is also available in the comments addressing this post:

"Just wanted to alert you to a couple of changes/corrections to the diary I posted at dKos.

"First, the 'potential terrorist' cite is actually on p. 2-11 of the document, and not in the Executive summary.

Second, I accidentally noted that KBR had a contract with DHS in 2000, 2004, and 2006. DHS was not an official agency until 2002, thus, the contract was between KBR and what was formerly the INS and now is ICE/DHS. Link can be found at:

Thanks for spreading the word, I really think this is important and should not be shrugged off."]