“I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds”
Macbeth, act 4, sc. 3
For the unfamiliar Eric Holder is the US attorney general – he too partakes of the “niggerization of the plantation” to use Cornel West’s colorful expression. Meaning the trickery and the treachery of appointing a few African Americans in the administration. And this to give the illusion of change while hiding the functional apartheid affecting the overwhelming majority of the others.
The said Holder has dispatched an epistle to Russia “requesting” the delivery of Edward Snowden to the Unites States. The document makes these extraordinary statements: “Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States. If he returns to the United States, Mr. Snowden would promptly be brought before a civilian court convened under Article III of the United States Constitution and supervised by a United States District Judge.” And in a final touch, “We believe [that] these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds for Mr. Snowden’s claim that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum, temporary or otherwise.”
It is inconceivable to pack so much ridicule and shamelessness in so few words. Given just the last known episodes, actions, statements and words of this administration, even Pinocchio at his lyingest is more credible. “Mr. Snowden will not be tortured” …. The reader has only to consult the article of July 12, 2013 on this site, “Shakespeare and the Confirmation Hearing of the FBI Director”. It contains copy of an original text of the administration – a pretty gruesome description of “torture” is well reported in an official document, signed by the newly confirmed FBI Director. Except that…. it is not torture, it is “enhanced interrogation”.
Incidentally, the recent developments with Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have forced the administration officials and their hired spokesmen, minions and pimps to replace almost completely conventional American English with Orwellian English. What was the exception has become the rule.
That “torture is unlawful in the United States” is a sick joke knowing about the super-secret “renditions” and, for that matter, the treatment doled out to the very Bradley Manning, guilty of exposing US war crimes.
In the circumstances even the term “Constitution” in the mouth of the attorney general is a sick joke, given that the word is but a half-assed attempt to pretend that contempt of the Constitution is constitutional.
As for the “United States District Judge”, we have seen how “independent” has been the judge in Bradley Manning’s case.
And finally…” We believe [that] these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds… for asylum.” The words of a weasel… even the assurances of King Richard III are more believable and, if not else, more elegant.
Keep in mind that within a day or so of this extraordinary letter to Russia, the US ordered Panama to deliver to the United States a CIA criminal who had been condemned in Italy to 20 years in prison and whose extradition Italy had requested.
Perhaps the attorney general expects Russia to comply. It is to be hoped that Russia will not. What is disturbing, however, is Putin’s reference to the US of A as “our partner”. Ominous and frightful prospect.
Readers will know that, after Snowden’s revelations were made public, there were rumors in the Congress about a measure to curtail of the universal surveillance of all and everything. From what reported, there was a last minute intensive lobbying efforts (read “campaign contributions”) by the subcontractors who gorge themselves from the public trough. Conclusion? The measure wasn’t even discussed.
It may be interesting to meditate on the words of Tom Paine, one of the motors of American Independence. He referred to the “national institution of churches’ but it is equally applicable to the church of “America the Exceptional”,
“…A man should be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?”
It is surreal that the thin thread of liberty is held by the likes of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. While, from afar in time, ring the words of Thucydides, “All empires will eventually turn against their own people.”
In the play. Malcolm to Macduff referring to Scotland.