Africa, our plight, and justice

If you know me, you'll know that I spend a lot more time complaining about how Big Picture things are then crowing about how right I was.

Going back to the time of the "news" pump-up for the invasion of Iraq, I was feverishly writing to my programmer friends that it was a major mistake we would seriously regret and that a far better plan would be to solve the problems in Africa, and then the world would be on our side, simply because far fewer people would hate us if we indulged in humanitarian efforts then war.

Today, I read this article in Newsweek, that says in part:

"When retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair took over as Obama's "intelligence czar" in January, he told his staff he wanted concerns about the recession at the top of his annual "worldwide threat assessment" to Congress. Among the questions: Would Russia be destabilized? What about China and India? Does a huge new humanitarian crisis loom in Africa?"

Note the "Does a huge humanitarian crisis loom in Africa" part. This is precisely what I foresaw coming, and what we should have done something about, instead of murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people so the neocon gang could take out an enemy of Israel and stake their claim to authority in the Middle East.

Not only was their Middle East conspiracy an utter failure; not only is Africa bearing the brunt of the world's hardships, but the trillion dollar, bottomless military spending boondoggle and criminal financial dealings in banking and Wall Street have the entire world at the doorstep of depression.

We can get out of this mess. We can recover. The are two ways to do this: one is to slog it out and crawl out of this pit without ever acknowledging the neocon's role in what happened. The other way is to embrace the concept of justice and put that gang on trial for the war crimes they've suckered America into committing for their cause and their enrichment.

How do you put hundreds of people on trial? It was done at Nuremberg.

You'll notice the "news" (our propaganda machine) is allowing a piece of the concept of justice to (barely) inch it's way forward: the matter of putting Bush and Company on trial for torturing people. Excuse me, but while that aspect of justice is well deserving, there is a far Bigger Crime that begs justice: the criminal invasion of Iraq. Where is this story in the "news"? Nowhere to be found.

How would that be? Is the entire notion of justice for all the monstrous crimes committed in the Middle East to be reduced to the torture angle? How is that possible?

It's possible because the "news", if you recall, was the mouthpiece for pumping up the invasion in the first place. That is, the "news" was part of the scheme all along. Of course they aren't going to allow any fingers to be pointed in their direction, so they'll give us our "justice" by allowing some talk of pursuing the torture angle, and puff that into the whole story. But we know better, or should. Yes, the torture was a horrible part, but it's NOT the whole story, and it's NOT the big deal. The Big Deal was the invasion of Iraq and the lies that made it happen.

Someone will ask "if it's that big, where you you start?"

Vincent Bugliosi has written a book outlining the legal framework for doing it. Yes, he focuses exclusively on Bush, but he knows, and we should know, that the prosecution of Bush will open that whole box, because Bush isn't about to go down alone.


Bill