Sunday, November 20, 2005

Brent Scowcroft Talks Turkey - Sibel Edmonds Fights Fascism

The Sibel Edmonds v. Department of Justice saga continues as the year 2005 draws to a close. The only breaking news to come from the ongoing drama is the implication, published in Vanity Fair, that Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of US Representatives, was the recipient of campaign contributions and assorted bribes from the Turkish-American community. That another US politician is on the take comes as no surprise. But more on that later. Sibel's story may have quietly died from the suffocating oppression of the US government had it not been for very recent revelations that the US sanctions and operates interrogation/torture facilities in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's and Vice President Dick Cheney's New Europe (Poland, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.). While the buzz is all around the Plame-Wilson-Libby-Woodward-Rove-Hadley affair, and the lies that got the US into Iraq again, the real news is that military and non-military torture chambers stretching from Mexico to Asia have become standard operating procedure for the US. Further, the response of official Washington to the torture expose was not disgust, but a call to prosecute the whistleblower that leaked the awful news.

Within the remarkable public revelation from the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch, is the imprimatur of Rumsfeld and Cheney—the two crusty Nixon Administration buddies--and perhaps the most ruthless and dangerous Americans ever to hold office in the corporate/government world. They and their disciples share the view that "conduct unbecoming" does not exist. No law, no boundary, no moral code, no amount of lives or an outdated parchments like the US Constitution and Bill of Rights will be a barrier as they push forward their foreign and domestic agenda for some of the US population, Turkey and Israel. They hide behind the veil of "the national security of the United States of America" and label Top Secret/Special Compartmentalized Information the data that would implicate them, not save a US soldier in a Humvee, or they slap a State's Secret order on the likes of Sibel Edmonds mainly to protect balance sheets and business deals.