Article: Mike Malloy

The Bush Crime Family has taken this country into deep shame, raw criminality, and acts of war to the point we have become, in the eyes of so much of the world, an outlaw nation; a country to be feared for our crazed actions, our disrespect for morality and decency, our utter contempt for the rule of law, our murderous actions.

A defining moment of this ripping to pieces of everything this country claimed to stand for came when in 2004 the photos from Abu Ghraib prison were released to the world. Here is your Judeo-Christian, Superpower Nation the photos screamed. Look at what it does, the images sneered. Muslim men stripped in front of female guards and sexually humiliated. Prisoners forced to wear dogs collars and leashes. Detainees, charged with nothing, humiliated by being hooded with women’s underwear, shackled in stress positions for hours, held in isolation for months, threatened with attack dogs, hung from overhead pipes until their arms slipped from their sockets. Frozen. Denied sleep. Driven insane. Beaten to death. Roasted alive in metal shipping containers.

But, were these Nazi-like atrocities limited - as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Ashcroft, et al, claimed - to isolated instances, most occurring in one unsupervised prison? No. They were not. As the lead editorial in today's New York Times states: "These atrocities were committed in the interrogation centers in American military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And they were not revealed by Red Cross officials, human rights activists, Democrats in Congress or others the administration writes off as soft-on-terror.

"They were described in a painful report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, based on the accounts of hundreds of F.B.I. agents who saw American interrogators repeatedly mistreat prisoners in ways that the agents considered violations of American law and the Geneva Conventions. According to the report, some of the agents began keeping a "war crimes file" — until they were ordered to stop."

The order to stop was not an order to stop torturing innocent people. The order was to stop adding to the evidence, to stop taking notes, to stop keeping a "war crimes file."

These criminal violations of human rights, military law, criminal law, and nearly every treaty or agreement signed by the U.S. since our independence that was concerned with the treatment of prisoners - these violations were ordered by the highest executive officials in this country. These were not random acts. It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners."

Where do we, as a nation, go from here? The crimes committed by George W. Bush and his associates are astonishing. They indicate a complete lack of a moral sense or an ethical center on the part of the leaders of this sad country and, unless action is taken against them, on the part of every citizen of the United States.

So. Where do we go from here?

Sooner or later all freedom loving Americans will realize that the only
way to stop those who would bleed our nation dry, dismantle our
constitution, and dissolve our national sovereignty is to say I will not
work for you, buy from you, fight for you, or die for you, until the
criminals are gone from the halls of our government."

A general strike is called for September 11, 2008, the anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks on New York City and Arlington, Virginia.

General strikes shut down the normal operations of a city, state, or nation for a period of time. These strikes aim to force action on a single issue or broader set of concerns. The 9/11/08 General Strike has a central location - http://www.votestrike.com - on the Internet, which is linked to and reproduced on a variety of other internet sites. The site states the rationale for the effort:

The General Strike is a national call to action, from citizens to other citizens.

It is not about a single issue. It is not an anti-war protest, a civil rights protest, an election fraud protest. It is not about torture, surveillance, corporate media, or the environment. This strike is about all these issues and more.

We all have different concerns, but we all have the same concern: we are being lied to and this government does not represent us. Join millions of Americans in demanding truth, justice, and accountability.

- MDM