Veterans For Peace: Bush’s Shock and Awe Impeachable. So Where Is Their Call to Impeach Obama?

Dees Illustration

Rick Gedeon
Activist Post

First, a connection to the Arizona humanitarian mission to save chickens

Are we living in The Twilight Zone?  It sure appears that way when a Head of State refuses to return a Nobel Peace Prize after it was belatedly realized that he did not deserve it.  And then we have actor Steven Seagal riding alongside militant Sheriff Joe Arpaio on a tank with SWAT teams raiding a house owned by a man named Jesus—accused of cockfighting.  Need more proof of a police state?  The lunacy unfolding in front of our eyes feels even more unreal when it is presented on television absent any mass public outrage. 

History all too often teaches us that the tactics used in foreign policy usually return in the form of those used in domestic policies.  Ergo, the inane use of a tank to stop a cockfight actually becomes akin to the imperial hubris of conducting the bombing of a people in order to help the people.  In the case of Mr. Jesus: “Thousands of dollars in damages were made to the property and 115 birds were euthanized on the spot.”  By which Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies later claimed to have “erred on the side of caution”.  Some error: it was their tank plowing into the house that killed all the chickens.

In such an insane world, we can actually draw several parallels between these disparate events.  All due to wrapping violence in the latest pretense:  Humanitarianism.

The tank used in Phoenix and the bombs dropped over Libya have similar objectives:

• Terrorize populations. 
• Advertise the effectiveness of the arsenal in order to generate revenue.
• Incrementally establish new methods as the status quo.
• Discourage disobedience through violent intimidation.

Setting Humanitarian Precedents
In a well-crafted speech, Obama justified why he refused to return his peace prize:   

I think the American people don’t see any contradiction in somebody who cares about peace also wanting to make sure that people aren’t butchered because of a dictator who wants to cling to power.

What’s even more hypocritical is that when Obama was interviewed by Justin Webb from the BBC, he was asked if he regarded Mubarak as an authoritarian ruler; Obama’s response was boastfully:  “No, I tend not to use labels for folks.”

Apparently this is why Obama did not see fit to enforce a no-fly zone when Mubarak was torturing his people.  Or perhaps it was because the US actually helped train the brutal Egyptian secret police. One cable dated November, 2007 and published by the Telegraph, describes a meeting between the head of the SSIS, Egypt’s secret police, and FBI deputy director, John Pistole, in which the secret police chief praises Pistole for the “excellent and strong” cooperation between the two agencies.  SSIS chief, Abdul Rahman, said the FBI’s training sessions at Quantico were of “great benefit” to his agency.  As an aside, how grand that the FBI was training the SSIS and now its former deputy director, John Pistole, is in charge of the TSA.  In all fairness, TSA abuses are tame by comparison.

What is it that the SSIS was doing that was so bad?

Electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state’,” the cable stated. The lawyers asserted that ‘this kind of torture’ is different from what [name redacted] normally sees, and speculated that a special branch of Interior Ministry State Security (SSIS) could be directing the torture.

The site of the FBI training sessions, Quantico, is where Bradley Manning is currently being tortured into a ‘zombie state’.  No wonder.  Peace Prize winner Obama approved the continued torture of Bradley Manning in a recent press conference.  Manning is being kept naked, in a dirty cell, with a mattress on the floor, no sheets, blankets or pillows. He has no contact with the outside world, save for his attorney. He has no access to the newspaper, Internet or TV. He has no reading materials and is in his small cell 23 hours a day. He was stripped of his eye glasses and, in his own words, “Forced to sit in essential blindness.”

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley showed his humanity and decency when he ended up resigning over Private Manning’s torture abuses (which Obama can stop with a phone call or stroke of a pen).  Crowley said Manning’s treatment by the Defense Department, which includes solitary confinement and being forced to sleep naked, “is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

We move, then, to Obama’s selective harsh language in labeling “folks” like Mr. Gaddafi as a butcher and dictator, even while Obama and Mubarak are closer to the definition.  Lew Rockwell clarifies who the butcher and dictator really is in his recent interview with antiwar radio:

How many people has he killed versus how many people has Obama killed?  Obama is a far bloodier dictator than Muammar Gaddafi. 

Obama is employing the distraction game, just as other warmongers always have when they want to involve the nation in more conflicts in order to steadily divert attention away from doomed domestic policies and failed promises.  In the US the real unemployment figure is 22%, and household wealth has gone down 23% in two years, but people are going to jail condemned as domestic terrorists for issuing silver as currency in a noble attempt to right the sinking fiat-currency ship.  Meanwhile, there is always one billion extra dollars to spend on identification systems at home and the steady reinforcement of the war machine abroad.

Obama finds himself losing creditability and advocacy.  On March 18, Minister Farrakhan’s YouTube video was briefly censored for a few days after he criticized Obama for invading Libya.  Farrakhan was a staunch advocate who once remarked “I love that brother,” which has now changed to “America will be bathed in blood, not because Farrakhan said so, but the dissatisfaction in America has reached the boiling point!”

VFP should call for Obama Impeachment
One of the reasons Veterans Force Peace was being spied on by the fusion centers in Florida is because the Central Florida chapter of Veterans For Peace passed a resolution on July 7, 2009 calling for the impeachment of President Obama for war crimes.

Phil Restino the Chapter Co-Chair, VFP Chapter 136, stated: “I’d love to hear Veterans for Peace put on the hot-seat again . . . in ’09 I went up to the convention and it was an Obama love fest . . . the antiwar movement has made itself a left vs. right thing.”

Mr. Restino contends that AFRICOM, which was created in 2007, was the prelude to this new Libya invasion. It’s extremely unreasonable and naive to expect any kind of populist consensus concerning a call from the “left” for the prosecution of the former President Bush without concurrently calling for the impeachment of the current President Obama for the very same war crimes; just as it is for the “right” to call for the impeachment of President Obama without concurrently calling for the prosecution of the former President Bush for the very same crimes.

It is high time that left and right come together against war criminals both abroad and at home.

Know your rights! 


Rick Gedeon is graduate from USAF Air University, amateur historian, and anti-imperial/anti-police brutality activist.   Rick Gedeon has traveled extensively throughout the US and Asia.  A political marketer, routinely bringing together and forging alliances with different political organizations that share similar goals. He considers himself a Political Atheist and sympathizes with many Libertarian causes.  He can be reached at [email protected]