As Long as You Don’t Peek under My Bed

“US begins sharing Russian war-crimes evidence with Hague court,” reads the Guardian headline.

The change in U.S. policy was supported by all agencies except the Pentagon, which worries about the Hague Court one day deciding to go after the American military.

Ah, how long our pointed finger, how short our memory

Remember Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantanamo Bay incarcerations, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, The Guardian itself, along with The New York Times and The Washington Post? All of those media outlets published the Wikileaks documents. All exposed the numerous foreign countries that did our torturing offshore in an illegal maneuver aimed at hiding our complicity?

No? Don’t remember?

While Russia seems to have concentrated on Ukraine, we Americans spread our eagle-wings over the entire Middle East

Here’s one for you:

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the strangling, dismemberment and disposal of the remains of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and suffered the reputational if not the legal, implications of the deed. Joe Biden, who promised (pre election) to make Saudi Arabia a pariah of the world, all but threw his arms around the killer Prince once gasoline got expensive again.

And another:

The murders, rapes and killings of Iraqi and Afghan civilians by U.S. soldiers and the torture of Muslim civilians at Guantanamo, devised by Vice-President Dick Cheney and approved by President Bush, have been swept under the bed as insignificant details of a long-lost military past.

Even so, it seems the US has a very long accusatory finger

And we point it for our own self-serving purposes.

Edward Snowden, you may recall, had his American passport disavowed by the American Embassy while changing planes in Moscow, spent 39 days detained in that airport and has been left without recourse, to live in Russia these past ten years. Assange, under threat of deportation to the United States, spent seven years at the Ecuadorian Embassy in Central London before being transferred to a British prison, where he awaits a ruling on his transfer to the U.S.

The long arm of the law is sometimes merely a mistaken accusatory finger, but that’s often sufficient to ruin a life

And what, pray tell, were these crimes with which Julian and Edward were accused?

Well, it seems they disclosed to the public the crimes of others, which was once a laudable thing to do. But now that’s apparently become a crime itself, depending upon just who those others might be. In both cases, those others were part and parcel of the American war machine—that famed ‘military-industrial complex’ Eisenhower warned us about at the conclusion of his presidency. Seems they’re not only in the war business, but up to a bunch of other nefarious dealings and doings your and my government would rather keep undisclosed.

They (along with newspapers and other media formats) exposed America’s vast illegalities regarding the Geneva Convention--the four treaties, and three additional protocols that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war.

Oh, those.

The very articles under which Putin is being charged. Quite rightly in Joe Biden’s mind, as he assumes all that Geneva business is just for nations other than America. After all, he was in office when all this un-American shit hit the fan.

Here's a useful tidbit of information you might trot out at a dinner party

(Esquire, June 15, 2015) In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were found guilty of war crimes. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia. At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

I guess we know what wastebasket that all ended up in

If Biden had any intellectual courage, he’d pardon Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and probably a half-dozen lesser known whistleblowers. What nation that purports to have even a casual relationship to democracy and the rule of law, prosecutes those who keep it in line by responsible journalism?

Is there a circumstance whereby a witness to a crime is criminalized for giving evidence as to the nature of that crime? Certainly not in the America we hold dear as a nation where all are accountable to the law. Embarrassed we may be, but co-conspirators, never.

How about motives?

Did either man profit from the act? Did either have any sort of ulterior motive or did they act out of the most difficult of decisions, knowingly risking their reputation and, quite possibly, their freedom?

I leave that to you.