No Time for Justice: USA as Global Threat

Exceptionalism that Threatens All

Editing and commentary by Carolyn Bennett

When exceptionalism as acted out in foreign and domestic policy and practice means exempt ── that everybody except the exceptional are subjected to or otherwise constrained by the rule of law, moral principles, conventions, constitutions and or declarations guaranteeing universal human rights; that these exceptional reserve for themselves a standing code of impunity, of lawlessness, of cruelty ── then they are the greatest threat to the world’s peoples and to their lives, to world peace and freedom.  

There is a congenital and chronic display of madness in evidence that must be excised or exorcised, balanced, checked or otherwise restrained.

W

herever it happens whether it is in Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Libya or Syria or Ukraine or Somalia or Japan or in New York ── the United States is the carrier of a congenital disease of paranoia, separatism, “gated-ness” that manifests in authorities’, public officials' (presidents, governors, police) and concentrated power’s failure to obey and to uphold laws and the rights of human beings as human beings. This rottenness will not abate as long as extreme self-centeredness and “otherness” pervades public and private spaces. 

There’s no point in feigning occasional outrage or even real outrage occasionally when the ground, the groundwater has been poisoned ── by narrow-minded media, government, militarists, advertising, religion and other sectarianism, by propaganda, inordinate, often laundered, money hijacking and privatizing public space and airwaves creating subliminally and often blatantly an endless stream of dogma that brainwashes, coercing group-think and banishment of “other.” In this onslaught, this inundation, we (the masses) are lulled into our own annihilation. 

We accept the unacceptable and aid in creating and recreating our own dark and toxic minds; we disconnect from and are insensible to humankind (who we are, Homo sapiens, no more and no less) ──whether in Asia or Africa, Europe or Australia, in the Americas or more narrowly in the parks of New York City, USA.

Global Human Costs 

U.S. Violent Imprint Abroad

GLOBAL: UN News Centre global reports Human Costs of Endless Wars: “UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report shows that the number of refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-World War II era, exceeded 50 million people.… The annual survey also notes that

Global Human Costs 

Global Human Costs 

3.5 million refugees, or one-third of the global total, were residing in countries covered by UNHCR’s [UN High Commissioner for Refugees’] Asia and Pacific region.

Of these, more than 2.4 million were Afghans (69 per cent) in Pakistan and Iran.

Sub-Saharan Africa was host to more than 2.9 million, or one-quarter of all refugees, primarily from Somalia (778,400), Sudan (605,400), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (470,300), the Central African Republic (251,900), and Eritrea (198,700). 

USA in Iraq

IRAQ: Democracy Now Headlines June 20, 2014, “[U.S. President Barack] Obama Deploys 300 Military Advisers to Iraq, Leaves Open Potential U.S. Strikes”

Democracy Now Headlines June 19, 2014, “Report: U.S. Conditions Iraq Military Intervention on [U.S. INSTALLED Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki Resignation”

PressTV Headlines June 20, 2014, “U.S. military instructors trained Takfiri militants of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) at a secret base in Jordan in 2012, informed Jordanian officials say. The officials, who were not identified, revealed to American news website WorldNetDaily (WND) that dozens of ISIL members received training as part of covert aid to militants fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

Mississippi, USA
1964

 LIBYA: Democracy Now Headlines June 19, 2014, “Libya Condemns U.S. Raid on Benghazi── Libyan Foreign Ministry spokesperson [says],“‘The government [of Libya] condemns [United States's] unfortunate attack on Libyan sovereignty, without prior knowledge of the Libyan government, in a time [in which] the city of Benghazi suffers from security disruptions.’”

U.S. Violent Imprint at Home

U.S. SOUTH Fifty years tomorrow June 21, 1964: in Nashoba County, Mississippi, USA, Americans murdered three other Americans: civil rights workers James Chaney, age 21; Andrew Goodman, age 20; and Michael Schwerner, age 24. The young men had been working with voter registration of Negro citizens during “Freedom Summer” and had gone to investigate a church burning. In the course of doing the work, Mississippi law enforcement had arrested the young men “on trumped-up charges, imprisoned them for several hours, and then released them after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.” The Klan “beat and murdered them.” And later evidence presented in court showed that “members of Neshoba County’s law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan had conspired to kill” the civil rights workers.

New York City, USA
1989-2014

U.S. NORTH Twenty-five years from Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner ● 25 years illustrating a pathological NO TIME FOR JUSTICE: Someone else committed the 1989 Central Park crime and talked about committing it; but New York police had no time for justice. They “railroaded” five teenagers “into making incriminating statements against themselves and each other.” Later DNA evidence identifies the actual rapist police had failed to catch; he comes forward and confesses to the crime. Though the five men are then exonerated, the head of New York’s government refuses to make these victims, these injured, whole. 

 

James Nye’s  synopsis at the UK Daily Mail Online today: “The ‘Central Park 5’ - wrongly convicted for crime which shocked the entire nation - to settle with New York City for $40 million: •Central Park 5 - Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam,

USA in Pakistan

Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise - to settle 25-years after the crime •Convicted of the April 1989 rape and beating of 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili • Crime stunned nation after Meili was left for dead and with no recollection •Central Park 5 were all aged between 14-16 and claimed the NYPD coerced them into confessions •They all served between seven and 13-years behind bars •In 2002 new DNA evidence discovered a convicted rapist was responsible •He confessed and the men were exonerated of the brutal crime •The men, now in their late 30s and early 40s have spent more than a decade fighting for huge settlement.”

A

s this exceptionalism violates all ── and as a serial killer escalates as it violates, unconscionably── it violates all of us. 

Sources and notes

“Central Park 5,” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2663382/The-Central-Park-5-wrongly-convicted-crime-shocked-entire-nation-settle-New-York-City-40-million.html

New York Daily News, June 19, 2014, reporting by Michael Feeney, Ginger Adams Otis, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/central-park-40m-settlement-article-1.1836991

Democracy Now Headlines June 20, 2014,

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/20/headlines

PressTV HEADLINES, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/06/20/367852/us-trained-isil-at-secret-jordan-base/

“The Murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner,” Infoplease,

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjustice4.html

“Libya Condemns U.S. Raid on Benghazi Suspect; Obama Admin Invokes Self-Defense,” http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/19/headlines

“‘War’s Human Cost’: World’s population of displaced tops 50 million, UN refugee agency reports,” http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=48089#.U6RzsI0g-1s

___________________________________________________

Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

___________________________________________________