One Tiny Voice

[Octafish]

A sound we should hear, loud and clear...

All Together Now

One Tiny Voice

By WILLIAM MANSON
Weekend Edition
June 24 - 26, 2011

Last night I heard something. We were all celebrating--kind of a going-away party for Bob and Gretchen. They've had a great year—Bob's a big oil company honcho, you know, and we were toasting (and roasting?) him about his six-figure bonus. Not bad, right? So they're off to Martha's Vineyard Monday—now that they've solved this year's servant problem—and we were all in high spirits, laughing and joking about nothing in particular.

All this trouble about Afghanistan, Bob groused, as if the war had exhibited bad manners by interrupting his leisure. Gretchen had a sudden brainstorm: "You know, forty years ago, all the stylish young women who shopped at Bloomingdale's for Christmas wore an embroidered, quite expensive, sheepskin coat, called…an Afghan. Isn't it a shame…" she mused, trailing off.

We all toasted Afghan seamstresses, laughing carelessly. I suppose, as usual, we'd had a little too much to drink—but the wine was first-rate! Before we left, Bob extracted a promise from us to fly up to see them just before Labor Day. He especially wants to take us to a new Vietnamese restaurant in the Haven, not too expensive either.

With our usual last-minute banter at the door, Anne and I—my name's Steve, by the way-- said our goodbyes and walked to the car. Then something unusual happened. A little voice, a little voice whispering urgently, said:

George W. Bush is a mass murderer.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/manson06242011.html

Now, that's a "Wow!" -- and what DUers have been saying for years.

[NYC_SKP]

1. A Six Figure Bonus? Clearly, this wasn't written by an actual insider.

These days, a Seven figure bonus would be a smack down to an oil company honcho.

$15,000,000 would be a bonus to celebrate.

Anything under $1,000,000 sounds like an insult.

To an oil company honcho.

:kick: and Recommended.

An amusing, if sad, read.

:hi:

[Octafish]

7. Absolutely. I wonder how much in taxes he paid on it?

Whatever it would be, it's not enough to buy back democracy.

¡¿Como handas, NYC_SKP?! ¡Muchisimas gracias, Herman'!

[SpiralHawk]

2. "Smirk." - xCommander AWOL Bush (R)

[Octafish]

8. 'Money trumps peace.' -- George W Bush on Valentine's Day, 2007

Caligula, Jr

[Donnachaidh]

3. kick and frigging REC! n/t

[Octafish]

9. I liked the part of his defense portfolio doing very well during a time of war...

Works wonders for one's outlook



HARKEN got lucky, back in the days of Gulf War I.

[ImNotTed]

4. KR

[Octafish]

11. Things happen for a fellah named Bush.

The Oil Business: Rewarded for Losing Money

[alsame]

5. k&r for all little voices.

[Octafish]

12. ''Commas,'' he called them.

The Worst Talking Point Ever: The Comma

EXCERPT...

"I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma." -- George W. Bush September 24, 2006

"When this chapter of history will be written . . . it's going to be a comma -- the Iraqis voted, comma, and the United States of America understood that Iraq was a central front in the war on terror and helped this young democracy flourish." -- George W. Bush October 3, 2006

[ensho]

6. kick

nt

[Octafish]

13. Nuremberg Prosecutor: 'Bush qualifies for prosecution for illegal war.'

Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.'

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted July 10, 2006.
Alternet.org

EXCERPT...

Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis are our "gold standard of evil," as author John Dolan once put it.

But the truth is that we can, and we have -- most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz's biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or "aggressive" war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a "prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. It says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

It's that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a "clear breach of law," and dismissed the Bush administration's legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn't have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, "So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive."

CONTINUED...

http://alternet.org/waroniraq/38604 /

[G_j]

16. Statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson

Statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson
Chief U.S. Prosecutor
at the Nuremberg Tribunals
August 12, 1945
on War Trials Agreement; August 12, 1945

There are some things I would like to say, particularly to the American people, about the agreement we have just signed.
For the first time, four of the most powerful nations have agreed not only upon the principles of liability for war crimes of persecution, but also upon the principle of individual responsibility for the crime of attacking the international peace.

Repeatedly, nations have united in abstract declarations that the launching of aggressive war is illegal. They have condemned it by treaty. But now we have the concrete application of these abstractions in a way which ought to make clear to the world that those who lead their nations into aggressive war face individual accountability for such acts.
<snip>

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which
their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the
war, but that they started it. And we must not allow
ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war,
for our position is that no grievances or policies will
justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced
and condemned as an instrument of policy."
<snip>

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson
Chief U.S. Prosecutor
at the Nuremberg Tribunals
August 12, 1945

READ THE ENTIRE STATEMENT HERE:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/jack02.htm

[Electric Monk]

10. George W. Bush is a mass murderer.

k&r

George W. Bush is a mass murderer.

[Octafish]

14. More than the ring of truth, it echoes a shame every American can feel and must bear.

Not that some didn't try to stop him. Remember John Kokal.

[seafan]

18. We remember John Kokal.

That story was deep-sixed immediately.


When it happened:

State Dept. Worker Found Dead Outside Agency, November 8, 2003

Update, November 25, 2003



Thanks for posting about our sordid history, Octafish. All of these seemingly disparate pieces fit together very closely, eh? The story they tell isn't pretty.


And it is long past time our country's people awaken from this corporate/neocon/MIC/globalist-enforced hypnosis and look at just what these people are doing.

Only then is effective action possible.

[G_j]

15. K&R

[Kurovski]

17. K&R. (nt)

[lonestarnot]

19. Serial killing motherfucker!