Editor,
Two weeks ago, peace activist Daniel Burns was sentenced to six months in prison for protesting the American violation of international law with the illegal war of aggression against Iraq. He is one of four war protesters, known as the Saint Patrick's Four, who poured their blood inside a military recruitment center on the eve of America's invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.
Since then his fellow activists have received similar sentences, 20 months altogether. All four have begun to serve time in jail. At the time of Burns' sentencing in upstate New York, convicted killer Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr., who murdered a detained Iraqi general during an interrogation session, was set free in Colorado. It is worthwhile to know that the general had turned himself in to the occupiers of his country. Sixteen days later he was dead after suffering severe beatings and outright torture by American soldiers and officers who apparently acted under higher orders.
While there does not seem to be a direct link between these two judicial incidents, their coincidence is symptomatic of the moral decay of this nation. Peacemakers are punished by law for their religious, moral and political convictions expressed in acts of traditional, nonviolent civil disobedience - a tool made fashionable in this country by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Now, in open daylight and under the national, judicial and military banner of approval, convicted torturers and murderers are set free under the torrential hail of delighted applause by family friends and comrades. Welshofer is not the first army criminal to walk free. Others, especially those of higher rank, do not even face trial.
The highest authorities, however, who masterminded the American institution of worldwide torture as a tool of war wash their bloody hands with creative legalisms. What other nations and decent human beings call "torture," the United States has relabeled harsh and necessary interrogation procedures indispensable in their war on terrorism. Now the United States openly justifies the kidnapping of people around the world, their secret and indefinite detention, their torture or rendition to countries that practice torture and ultimately their murder. As long as Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Dick Cheney - who all signed off on the inhuman perversity - represent this nation with the apparent support of a docile population, Americanism becomes inadvertently defined as brutal, hegemonic imperialism. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are only the tip of the cold-blooded iceberg that permeates a whole nation, to the disgust of the rest of the world.
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Those to whom this judgment sounds like unqualified anti-American hate rhetoric should know that the facts speak for themselves, regardless whether one chooses to listen to them. The unnumbered victims of America's war on terrorism understand what the defenders and supporters of such reckless policies refuse to see - life is not a joke.
Every day, new revelations of America's war crimes fuel anti-American resentment. Frustration has grown beyond the Arab and Muslim world and reached global dimensions.
The earlier this nation wakes up to its atrocious moral and political reality, the sooner it can redeem itself and rejoin the decency of a just and peaceful humanity.
Joachim Oberst
UNM staff
