Hey, ol’ pal. Yeah, it’s me. We’re alone here. Nobody reads anything here. Google and Facebook bury it so nobody sees it but unpersons like me and a couple paranoiac deviants like you. This is the next best thing to high-latency messaging over the invisible internet. Virtually tête-à-tête.
You remember me. And as for you, oh, we remember you, all right. Not that you’re well known, but you’re best known for exulting over 9/11. The 3,000 deaths, the flailing victims falling for long seconds, the tens of thousands wasting, riddled with cancer, the torture, the crimes of aggression, put all that in a Big Bucket and you’re the Colonel Sanders of it, grinning on the label. We know what you meant: Oh boy, money for the beltway bandits, arms and legs and carte blanche for the spooks! You’re still teed up as the poster boy for ghoulish depravity, symbol of a criminal regime. A monster, hostis humani generis, headline perp of Nuremberg II.
Who better than you to take over when the USA collapses?
Now keep an open mind here. Did I ever shit you in those punchy late-night sessions of hurry-up-and-wait? Locked in those places, converted monasteries or robber-baron lairs or barrel vaults or founding-slaver homesteads, you say what you think, right? Let’s talk turkey now. Sure, your old bosses at NSA will suck this up into their server farms… and they will lose it. They’ll never find it till you’ve done your dirty work. Then it will be too late.
Your bosses see you as a steady hand, the kind of slavering psycho who will stop at nothing, who’ll depopulate the world for attaboys or shits and grins. You’re just the kind of guy they trust. That’s important, because some of the things you will do will destroy all your past employers, including, but not limited to, the US government. Wouldn’t it be a hoot to get credit for that? It’s the ultimate stab in the back. One last career-crowning betrayal. Turn on a dime and ruin everything you did all your life, to universal acclaim. From Lavrenti Beria to Nelson Mandela in a month.
I’m telling you this not because you are a great man, fit to take the reins of history at a crucial juncture. I am not even calling you a good or decent man. You’re a crazy beady-eyed prick. That’s the beauty part. You’ll do.
After all, who knows better than us how to demolish a country? Knock it over, rip it apart, wreck its defense industrial base? Did we not pile on and help do it to the Soviet Union, the biggest country of them all? For us to do it to the rickety laughingstock USA is child’s play. Hell, even I could do it, and I’m rusty. It’ll be like old times. A tweak of the finger at just the right time, and rumble rumble crash, it’s gone.
The NATO bloc is going the way of the Warsaw Pact, rotting from the outside in. Just as with the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, gormless coercion by the hegemon provokes increasing tension between hard-line and soft-line satellites. The UK has cut itself adrift from Europe and the runt of the P-5 litter will disappear further up the USA’s asshole. Germany’s voracious trade surplus immiserizes Southern Europe and revives Ostpolitik in pursuit of scarce productive investment. No one wants your useless weapons or your tank parades, except for a few of your bribed crooks in each satellite state. Your European satrapy is crazed with deepening cracks. It’s déjà vu all over again: Tsipras is NATO’s Dubchek. May is NATO’s Honecker, Corbin NATO’s Mielke. Orban is NATO’s Grósz. They’re pulling away and pulling apart, and the cracks will propagate across the Atlantic in a familiar process.
The US lost its last friend long ago, and it’s eking out its dwindling influence with threats and bribes and blackmail. But there’s worse to come. You’ve lost your last enemy. China and Russia have brought the US government to heel with the only thing you beltway vermin understand: the threat of hypersonic nonballistic missiles jinking unstoppably at you from all directions. They can decapitate the US government, free its subject population. They know exactly where to poke to make your C3 systems fail. They won the war before it even started. The Russians call it coercion to peace.
Peace is lethal to regimes like the US. We both know what triggered the implosion of the Soviet bloc: it lost its enemies. With the triumph of their nuclear disarmament pact, everyone was avid to get out and see the world. Their restlessness ended their patience with their parasitic states. Even in the hard-line satellite states, the police state collapsed under public loathing. East Germany’s Stasi had a meticulously-detailed Schild plan to intern thousands of dissidents, down to the gnat’s-ass detail of duplicate keys for home locks and access/egress routes for midnight home invasions. But the Stasi never got around to executing Schild. They were too busy shredding the records of their crimes. The government fell too fast for them.
For all the jingling of keys in Wenceslaus Square, for all the public happiness overflowing Dresden and Leipzig and breaching the wall, it was insiders who euthanized their own regimes. Mielke put his own head in the oven, saying, “Ich liebe doch alle, alle Menschen” to riotous laughter. The Czechoslovak Politburo quit and the successor state dismembered itself without a peep. Ceausescu’s festive liquidation was a consummate inside job.
Now it’s your turn. You’re going to pull the plug. Don’t be nervous; like I said, this pitch might as well be sitting in Aldritch Ames’ PIPE dead drop. Don’t give me this But-but-but-Why? You know why. There Is No Alternative. If you don’t do it, someone else will.
Your rogue state is already caught; you’ll just stop resisting. Having ratified three of the core human rights instruments, US foreign affairs have turned into a treadmill of concerted world demands for more and more directed reforms. Compliance weakens your grip at home. Failure to comply erodes your soft power abroad, and your military power is increasingly useless, kept within strict bounds by Russia and China. As a commissar in a floundering successor state of the USA, the hated parasitic city-state of Washington, DC, you know your piece of the disintegrating regime will need recognition as a sovereign state. The alternative is gradual ruin in a failed pariah state, beggared by autarky, crippled by countermeasures to decades of breached obligations. Recognition requires three agreements: the UN Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and the Rome Statute.
You remember, this is how it happens. In the pancaking rubble of the USSR, the Russians had no time to dick around with institutions. Forget old-time liberty bell constitutional-convention nonsense. COMECON technocrats grabbed in panic for the first support in reach. And what was that? The Helsinki Final Act. Like all its other regional and international counterparts, the Helsinki Final Act was designed with fiendish ingenuity like one of those sticky mouse traps – get a foot stuck, push off and get another foot stuck, get your face stuck, fall down, squirm around till you’re all wrapped up, there’s no way out. One commitment leads to another and another and another until your police state is trapped like a rat, never to escape. Just chuck it out and let it starve and dry-rot.
That is what you will do too — step into the trap.
Like any ordinary UN pissant, a sort of North Togo or New Nauru, any hope of influence or standing will depend on your country’s accession to the Rome Statute and the International Bill of Human Rights.
The Rome Statute will cripple the criminal enterprise at the heart of the US regime, the CIA. The International Criminal Court itself is just another forum. The guts of the agreement is a binding commitment to extradite or prosecute your criminals. If you don’t hold up your end, any country can step in and round them up for you. No more springing Robert Lady out of jail when he kidnaps innocents for torture. No more giving torturer Gina Haspel the DCI’s get-out-of-jail-free-card, or putting judge robes on torturers to queer the law to save themselves. The Rome Statute dispels what remains of your kleptocracy, the criminals of CIA.
But why would CIA give up their impunity and relinquish dictatorial control over this state? Because that’s their only hope of bygones being bygones. The Committee Against Torture has sicced the world on the CIA high command. The Human Rights Committee has initiated follow-on procedures for urgent issues arising from CIA crimes. UN special procedures and charter bodies have characterized CIA torture as serious, systematic and widespread, crossing the threshold for crimes against humanity and giving UN member nations erga omnes responsibility to stop and punish CIA’s grave crimes. The prosecutions will not stop with torture. CIA tortured to fabricate war propaganda in a common plan and conspiracy for war, Nuremberg Count 1, in pursuit of which CIA attacked civilian populations at home and abroad. The subsequent wars complete the inchoate crimes against peace. Aggression just became a crime under ICC jurisdiction but for this, the gravest of crimes, that doesn’t matter. The legal precedent sets out the rule: you should have known, this is Nuremberg Count 2. You can watch the pit stains spreading in the DDO’s shop.
The squeeze on CIA is now a crisis: at the summit of July 2018, Russia publicly invoked a mutual legal assistance treaty ((Signed at Moscow June 17, 1999.)) to investigate US intelligence officials and their dotted-line reports in law enforcement. This is Russia, an independent great power, not some bought-and-paid-for US satellite. They have sources and methods of their own. The exceptionally competent Russian security services are not bound by the bureaucratic red tape that puts CIA crimes out of reach of any US court. Insider human rights defenders will have someone to turn to. Under treaty provisions including questioning, search, seizure, and transfer, Russia can dig up the fabricated secret evidence behind CIA war propaganda, the same war propaganda that CIA uses to attack the US president. Russia and the elected US head of state know CIA threatens them both. In the International Court of Justice Russia can demand reparation, restitution, compensation, or satisfaction for CIA’s internationally wrongful acts: war propaganda, for instance, in breach of ICCPR Article 20; or great-Power confrontation and human rights distortion breaching the peremptory norms of A/Res/36/103. Judicially-imposed satisfaction may end CIA impunity. Russia could designate individuals for prosecution. Russia could even insist on the command responsibility demanded by the Human Rights Committee, the Convention Against Torture, and other treaty bodies, charter bodies, and UN special procedures, and put Brennan, Clapper, Gates, and Haspel in the dock.
You see the reaction now. We’ve never seen anything like this choreographed mass hysteria over routine diplomacy. CIA pulled out all the stops and Wisner’s mighty Wurlitzer is blaring treason and high crimes. CIA is demanding, and getting, public professions of abject faith in their honor and integrity. They put their politicians and party apparatchiks through loyalty tests, making them recite anti-Russian war propaganda as an unquestionable creed. And you know what’s behind it: Duly-constituted governments including our own are acting collectively to curb CIA’s transnational organized crime. We haven’t seen that since CIA shot Kennedy for trying it with Khrushchev.
Back then CIA forced the Warren Commission to deny their blatant coup with the threat of nuclear war against Russia. We’re at that point again. They can’t stop at coup d’état. They have to risk a war to keep their crimes bottled up safe from international criminal law. That war will be CIA’s last war, because they will not win it.
Look at Brennan. Think he’ll go down fighting? Think he’s going to shoot Kathy and eat a gun in his Hitler bunker? Of course not. He’s a pantywaist. He’ll go quietly.
CIA’s ancien régime established 1949 has got to go. The International Bill of Human Rights will put your government under independent oversight. What your bribed and blackmailed Congressional asskissers cannot do, human rights review processes can. The Human Rights Committee has been raking the US over the coals ever since it joined. The US ran from ECOSOC, so they never had a chance to corrupt it. Your government quit the Human Rights Council in a huff because it was out of your control but now, with no share in its authority, you must still submit to Universal Periodic Review. Your citizens will go over the government’s heads to the world if you try to wriggle out of state commitments.
All right, then. Ready to get it over with? Good. How do you take the leap? Like so. Remember how you force-fed Congress with the PATRIOT Act? Do it again, this time with something short and sweet. If any of your legislators drag their feet, call in some favors and break a little of that anthrax out of the vault. CIA has lots of new illegal germs these days. It probably won’t even come to that. Congress is gelded, you gelded them. The guys you worked with at NSA have the records of them taking bribes and orders from Israeli spies. Your old coworkers at CIA have videos of them raping trafficked children at Little Saint James or Musha Cay, or roughhousing on the Ohio State wrestling mat with youngsters, or whatnot – there’s always something, some sturdy ring in their nose, or they wouldn’t be in Congress.
Drop this bill on their desks, or not, and sit them down to vote on it. They’ll know what to do. They remember what CIA did to Daschle and Leahy.
§ 1. The Sovereignty Act
The purpose of this act is to meet state obligations and commitments requisite to the sovereignty of the United States of America or its successor states (the States).
- This section executes the United Nations Charter without reservations and extends an open invitation to all thematic special procedures of the Human Rights Council to undertake country visits. As UN member nations the States will invoke the rights of Article 27(3) solely in voting on measures taken under UN Charter Chapter 7.
- This section executes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and withdraws all reservations, accepting the competence of the Committee under Article 41, and ratifies and executes the Optional Protocol ICCPR-OP1 of 16 December 1966 without reservations.
- This section ratifies and executes the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights without reservations, and ratifies and executes the Optional Protocol ICESCR-OP of 10 December 2008 without reservations.
- This section executes the Convention Against Torture (CAT), withdrawing all reservations and recognizing the competence of the Committee Against Torture in accordance with CAT Articles 21 and 22, and ratifies and executes the optional protocol OP-CAT of 18 December 2002 without reservations.
- This section executes the Convention to End Racial Discrimination (CERD), withdrawing all reservations, and recognizes the competence of the Committee in accordance with CERD Article 14.
- This section ratifies and executes the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
- This section directs courts at all levels to interpret or void existing public law and statutes to bring domestic law at all levels into conformity with the instruments referenced in sections 1 through 6 inclusive, and with the common-law rights of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other universal human rights instruments. Courts shall interpret the referenced instruments in good faith in compliance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and with the general comments and conclusions and recommendations of cognizant treaty or charter bodies. In case of conflict or inconsistency between domestic law and the referenced instruments or other universal human rights instruments, universal human rights instruments shall govern without exception.
- This section invokes US Constitution Article 5 to reconstruct institutions and powers at all levels of government with the sole purpose of respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the obligations and commitments undertaken in this statute in accordance with the Limburg Principles (UN doc. E/CN.4/1987/17, Annex) and the Paris Principles (A/RES/48/134). Congress will issue a proposal not later than 14 days after passage of this act. US state legislatures or conventions declining to ratify the Congressional proposal shall be released from obligations of the constitution as amended.
End §. ((Get cracking, here are the General Comments and The Limburg Principles explaining core universal human rights instruments.))
See? You forked the US Constitution. You’re leaving, with anyone who wants to tag along, and if Texas doesn’t like it, you’ve got the nukes (You’re going to give them up, of course, like your underdeveloped peers the Ukies and the Kazakhs did before you.) As for the new constitution, you’ll stuff that down Congress’ throat too, two weeks later. Don’t overthink it, it’s not that important. Maybe just copy the Russian constitution, it’s a big step up.
Article 17 of the Russian Constitution says “in the Russian Federation rights and freedoms of person and citizen are recognized and guaranteed pursuant to the generally recognized principles and norms of international law and in accordance with this Constitution.” Article 18 states that rights and freedoms of the person and citizen are directly applicable. That prohibits the kind of bad-faith tricks the USA pulls, like declaring “non-self executing” treaties, or making legally void reservations, declarations, understandings, and provisos to screw you out of your rights. Article 46(3) guarantees citizens a constitutional right to appeal to inter-State bodies for the protection of human rights and freedoms if internal legal redress has been exhausted. Ratified international treaties supersede any domestic legislation stipulating otherwise. You’ll have to get used to having all your human rights, not just the niggardly hind-tit worthless US Bill of Rights.
Whatever you do, you’re going to end up ratifying all the core human rights conventions. You could put them all into your Sovereignty Act, but why not keep it short and sweet? There’s enough treaty law in there now to get your new nation firmly on the hook. You’re going to pledge allegiance to all the peremptory norms, the non-intervention principle, friendly relations, pacta sunt servanda. Don’t whine about it, this is nothing. Look what hapless Eastern European pismires have to swallow to join the EU: the 170,000-page acquis communautaire. Get with a few short treaties and declarations, and you can join the civilized world.
But then you’re just another UN member nation. The UN won’t be the passive presidential backdrop you’re used to. If they ever do let you onto the Security Council, no one’s going to give you a veto. The world has learned their lesson. No one from this land mass will ever get their hands on Article 27(3) again. You mention the veto in your Sovereignty Act only to make it clear you know the UN is there to stop wars, not start them. That’s the only way they’re going to let you in. With no US veto to stop them, the world will undertake a long-needed rewrite of the Charter to tighten it up and close all the crooked loopholes US delegates put in. Individual Americans can take part, but as independent international civil servants, not as government apparatchiks.
The Supreme Court might not like it. If not, it’s like Cheney said to Leahy, Go fuck yourself. They’re the global laughingstock of apex courts. You string up nine crooked party hacks, Who cares? That’s lost in history’s white noise. The most destructive nation in history is submitting to the rule of law, effecting the world’s universal human right to peace. Russia fought a discreet civil war of a few thousand casualties to go straight, and no one blames them. You’re going to supplant that marble cesspool anyway with a National Human Rights Institution in accordance with the Paris Principles. The Human Rights Council will make you — Want a seat on the Council, on ECOSOC, on the bench of the World Court? You’ll do what it takes. You can put them out to pasture at Cibolo Creek Ranch alla Scalia.
Next comes the transitional justice. You’ll like this part. Put on your Mister Rogers slippers and hang ‘em high. Everyone will understand. They know what you’re up against: a totalitarian state culture indoctrinated to exalt violence of every sort. Extirpating that is going to take more than peace and love and kumbaya. Just think of it as focusing mass loathing on the juiciest, most repugnant sacrificial victims to keep the kleptocrats and secret police cowed. Your culprits will be different: not traditional American blacks or addicts or lonely schizoids but bankers, killer cops, CIA torturers and spies, FBI secret police, war propagandists, government student-loan usurers, or industry moles abusing government powers. Pour encourager les autres you may want to hold off ratifying ICCPR-OP2. If there’s any grumbling from the old guard, the Siracusa Principles can wait. I know this is your favorite part but don’t overdo it. Remember, this is a transition. Hands off the touchy-feely parts like reconciliation. You know that sort of thing is not your strong suit.
Die Abwicklung of the CIA police state will go out of your control, and that’s OK. The outside world takes over and opens up your closed society. People change their minds. You’re out of the woods, you can relax. You’ve averted CIA’s holocidal nuclear war. Go ahead and treat yourself with fireworks – take a stack of those nuclear bombs the Russians neutralized, and shoot them off in near-earth orbit. Blow up Mount Rushmore with one, the crowds will go wild. They’ll be storming CIA and NSA and the Hoover Building to look at their surveillance files, defiling flags, toppling or decorating statues; CONUS will be one big block party.
And presiding over it, beaming benignantly with gentle saintly spreading forth of hands, is you. Ride it off into the sunset of elder-statesman glory. If you can keep a straight face it will be the best in-joke in history.