Dear Mr. President,
Viva la Revolucion! Egypt! Who’d a thunk? Even America’s greatest friend in the Middle East, Mubarek, with his feared security forces can’t stop it. Even the $1.5 billion a year we give him can’t isolate him from revolution. And if he goes, there goes the pillar of America’s Middle East policy. There goes stability. Poof! Just like that. All that money we poured into Mubarek’s regime, all the military weapons we sent him – 30 years worth, in danger of going up in smoke in just a few days, the army sitting by in their tanks and armored personnel carriers, fraternizing with the protesters instead of crushing them. Maybe your CIA thugs will have to scratch Egypt off the list of rendition sites. Rendition. Remember that promise you made in 2008? No more torture, no more renditions? I actually thought you outlawed that evil practice, that we weren’t doing it any more and then, just this morning, I read a review of Stephen Carter’s new book, The Violence of Peace, and see nothing’s changed, that you weasel-worded your Executive Order so we don’t do the actual torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) any more but we still capture and take people to countries that do torture. So now we outsource torture, let others do it for us while we stand by and “monitor.” How’s your conscience these days, Mr. President? How do you live with yourself? You send drones into civilian areas to assassinate Taliban and al Qaeda leaders, pursue morally indefensible wars, support brutal dictators like Mubarek and genocidal regimes like Israel, and have the audacity to lecture China on human rights. And while we’re talking about torture, let’s talk about Bradley Manning. Still locked up in solitary confinement, no trial, not even a pretrial hearing, and the screws being tightened on him to try and force a confession so you can go after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. This is torture, Mr. President, and Bradley Manning is being treated like a terrorist in Guantanamo, maybe worse. If you had any shred of decency or conscience left, you’d give back that Nobel Peace Prize that you didn’t deserve. You’d stop the renditions, the torture, the drone strikes, the wars, you’d stop supporting regimes that are corrupt and brutal, that remain in power only because we fund them in the name of stability, in violation of everything we preach, of everything we supposedly stand for. The chickens are coming home to roost, Mr. President. Viva la Revolucion!
Free Bradley Manning!
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