Impunity

This from the Denver Post yesterday with regard to the Bush Administration's valiant efforts to control AIDS worldwide, reminded me of this from Alternet which speaks about that good word impunity. The Alternet article reads, in part:

Impunity – the perception of being outside the law – has long been the hallmark of the Bush regime. What is alarming is that it appears to have deepened since the election, ushering in what can only be described as an orgy of impunity. In Iraq, U.S. forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone – doctors, clerics, journalists – who dares to count the bodies. At home, impunity has been made official policy with Bush's appointment of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, the man who personally advised the President in his infamous "torture memo" that the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete."

This kind of defiance cannot simply be explained by Bush's win. There has to be something in how he won, in how the election was fought, that gave this administration the distinct impression that it had been handed a "get out of the Geneva Conventions free" card. That's because the administration was handed precisely such a gift – by John Kerry.

In the name of "electability," the Kerry campaign gave Bush five months on the campaign trail without ever facing serious questions about violations of international law. Fearing that he would be seen as soft on terror and disloyal to U.S. troops, Kerry stayed scandalously silent about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. When it became painfully clear that fury would rain down on Fallujah as soon as the polls closed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan, or against the other illegal bombings of civilian areas that took place throughout the campaign. When the Lancet published its landmark study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as result of the invasion and occupation, Kerry just repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist) claim that Americans "are 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq."

There was a message sent by all of this silence, and the message was that these deaths don't count. By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone's lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are expendable, insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.

It is, I believe, this last paragraph that seems to dovetail the Bush Administration's pathetic lip service with regard to supporting worldwide AIDS efforts -- which Dubya touted during the campaign with such impunity -- along with the observation that the Democrats, John Kerry and company, allowed Dubya and his minions to get away with it. Yes, I know, the article is about Iraq, but I do believe it is equally applicable to the pitiful, misdirected efforts of the Bush Administration with regard to AIDS.

Finally, this from Alternet, noting that half the worldwide cases of HIV infections are women. The article notes, in part:

We deplore patterns of sexual violence against women – violence that transmits the virus – but the malevolent patterns continue. We lament the use of rape as an instrument of war, but in eastern Congo and western Sudan, possibly the worst-known episodes of sexual cruelty and mutilation are occurring, and the world barely notices. We see Rwanda's women survivors, now suffering full-blown AIDS, demonstrating how such stories end.

Nearly half of the HIV cases in the world are women. In Africa, it's more than half, and young women bear the brunt of the pandemic.

And, in order for countries to qualify for American dollars to fight AIDS, Dubya -- according to the above Denver Post piece -- "...requires that target nations open their economies to international trade and take other actions that have nothing to do with fighting AIDS."

Impunity. Good word. How long are we going to let him get away with it? How long?