I refer to Mr. Freddie Kissoon’s Column of April 22, 2009 in the Kaieteur News, with the title ‘President Jagdeo’s fatal mistake in understanding American democracy.’
He admonishes President Jagdeo for taking a critical stance on the nature of democracy in the United States; where the President said, according to Kissoon, that the U.S. could keep a person in custody for 6 years without giving that person access to an attorney-at-law.
Kissoon noted that Jagdeo may be correct. But Kissoon claims that President Jagdeo needs to follow the fundamentals of American Democracy, as espoused under the Bush Administration. Kissoon is blatantly incorrect, and maybe he should follow the dubious trail of American Democracy, which would lead him to the grey garden. OR do I mean the black garden.
And Kissoon excessively provides credit to American institutions which he claims exist to counter autocratic predispositions of the Bush Administration. How come the U.S. institutions did not rescue those prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan, who languished there without gaining access to Attorneys-at-Law and who experienced sustained tortures; where were these ‘holy’ U.S. institutions, the bastion of democracy, to prevent the vulgar violations of these persons’ due process?
Again, why did the Senate Armed Services Committee on November 20, 2008 release a 232-page report, regarding the approval that the Bush administration gave to its officials to use harsh military interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects. The report illustrates gross infringements to the fundamentals of democracy. It states that American soldiers have been training under SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) that teaches torture methods that Communists in the Korean War applied. The Bush Administration applied SERE to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq.
And President Barack Obama recently approved the release of CIA memos that show the U.S. Government’s violations against the international convention against torture, and also its own CIA Rule book. These memos indicated that the 9/11 terrorist planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apparently waterboarded 183 times and suffered rough interrogation techniques for 2 weeks. Many others suffered tortures along similar lines. The American people were unaware of these human atrocities; where were the U.S. institutions to guard against these offensive predispositions?
And in a ‘Stop the war’ statement, U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich a Democrat of Ohio Congressional 10th District, said on the floor of the House of Representatives, “Stop the war now. This war has been advanced on lie upon lie. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for any role al-Qaeda may have had in 9/11. The war is built on falsehood…It is illegal.” However, the Bush Administration still proceeded to war.
Today, we know the truth. That truth is that there has been no evidence of Iraq’s connection with the ‘9/11’terror attack on the U.S. and no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Then why the Iraq war? Why the lies to the American people? Where is the democracy to inform people of happenings about to take place, like a war? How come the Freedom of Information law that Kissoon so proudly spouts, did not enable the American people to know the truth about the U.S. War on Iraq? The President lied to his people.
Clearly, the U.S. War on Iraq carried enormous falsehood. And now we have the Iraq Study Group Report which the Chicago Tribune describes as ‘one of the darkest and gloomiest public documents ever written’.
In fact, President Bush misled the American people and placed his own and the ultra-conservatives’ interests over those of the nation. How come the sacrosanct American institutions did not oppose the autocratic predispositions of the Bush crowd when it came to deceiving the American people?
Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Tom Morello in the summer of 1996, stated that a Gallup poll for years showed that in 1995, 82% of the people believed that the U.S. Government did not represent the minorities and that it only represents the whites. That is another story to show that democracy exists only for those who have power!!
Prem Misir
