[Osx-nutters] Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty in Florida - Google Video

[Kevin Callahan]

video here:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4291694866835252763&q=bush 
+death&hl=en>

related story:
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JAMES CARROLL
The lynching of Iraq
By James Carroll  |  January 8, 2007

THE HANGING of Saddam Hussein Dec. 30 offered a view into the  
grotesque reality of what America has sponsored in Iraq, and what  
Americans saw should inform their response to President Bush's  
escalation of the war.

The deposed tyrant was mercilessly taunted. As he stood on the  
threshold of the afterlife and was told to go to hell, the world  
witnessed a chilling elevation of the ancient curse, making an  
absolute villain an object of pity.

And then, in chanting the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose family had  
been a particular target of Hussein's his executioners made clear  
that the execution was an act of tribal revenge, not of national  
restoration, much less justice. It was a lynching. This Shi'ite  
brutality is guaranteed to spawn Sunni savagery. Iraq itself is hell.

Officials of the United States, from military commanders in Baghdad  
to members of the Bush administration in Washington, sought to  
distance themselves from the bedlam, but they are essential to what  
happened at the last moments of Saddam's life. Decorum would have  
been the main note of his death if Americans had managed it, but the  
execution would have been no less an act of false justice.

The harsh fact is that the Shi'ite dominated government of Nouri al- 
Maliki, in its contemptible treatment of a man about to die, laid  
bare the dark truth of Bush's war. This is what revenge looks like,  
and revenge (not weapons of mass destruction, not democracy) drove  
the initial US attack on Saddam Hussein every bit as much as it  
snuffed out his life at the end. The hooded executioners took their  
cue from George W. Bush.

And why should they not have? Let's remember who this man is. As  
governor of Texas, he presided over the executions of 152 people,  
including the first woman put to death in Texas in a century. Her  
name was Karla Faye Tucker. Bush's response to the world-wide plea  
raised in her behalf was an astounding display of cruelty, a mocking  
imitation of the woman begging not to be killed.

Bush rejected appeals for clemency in every death penalty case that  
came before him. The Texas death chamber, with its lethal injection  
gurney, is a place of decorum. And savagery. That executions defined  
the main public distinction that Bush brought to the US presidency  
sums up the national disgrace, while suggesting also how little  
surprise there should be that America is presided over now by an  
executioner-in-chief.

Capital punishment is to individuals what aggressive war is to  
nations. The 20th century, for all its brutality (or because of it),  
marked the watershed era when world opinion shifted against both.  
Once, princes exercised life-and-death power over subjects with  
unchallenged authority. Once, the only check on a state's freedom to  
attack another state was its power to do so.

These two absolutes of realpolitik have changed. From the Kellogg- 
Briand Pact of 1928 to principles laid down at the Nuremberg  
tribunals to the United Nations itself, wars of aggression stand  
condemned. The force of state violence is to be exercised only in  
self-defense or in defense of a victim people, in circumstances  
defined by international agreement. Similarly, nation after nation  
has abolished the death penalty, understanding the absurdity of  
defending human life by destroying human life. If killing can ever be  
justified, individually or communally, it is only as an absolute last  
resort. In sum, an international moral consensus has taken shape  
against unnecessary violence, whether targeting a criminal or a rogue  
state.

George W. Bush is the impresario of unnecessary violence. America has  
followed him into the death chamber of this war, and now he wants us  
to believe that the way out is through more death.

Iraqi loss of life remains mostly unimagined, but every evening on  
the television news, Americans see the sweet faces of young soldiers  
who have died in Bush's war. They were heroes, not criminals, yet  
Bush dragged each one of them up onto a gallows. He positioned them  
on the trap door, hardly wincing as they then fell through. And now,  
in perhaps the greatest outrage of all, Bush claims that the way to  
justify the unnecessary deaths he has caused is to add to them.  
Escalation is his way of saying, go to hell.

With his lies at the beginning of this war, and his fantasy now that  
an honorable outcome remains possible, the president is a taunting  
killer, caught in the act. He lacks nothing but the black hood. Stop  
this man.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

http://tinyurl.com/y7tdzg
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