Dear John,

Are you tired of watching House Democrats defend imperialism?

Last week, the House Democratic leadership penned a letter condemning Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for her comments encouraging the United States to finally recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which our leaders have long rejected to insulate American officials from facing justice for any number of international crimes from torture to initiating wars for profit.

Ilhan said, quite thoughtfully: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan and the Taliban.”

That was enough to inspire the ire of the entire Democratic leadership, which—led by Nancy Pelosi—united to call Ilhan’s comments “offensive” and demand clarification.

Thankfully, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, fired back on Ilhan’s behalf:

"We cannot ignore a right-wing media echo chamber that has deliberately and routinely attacked a Black, Muslim woman in Congress, distorting her views and intentions, and resulting in threats against Rep. Omar and her staff. We urge our colleagues not to abet or amplify such divisive and bad-faith tactics".

We have long stood with Ilhan, and write mostly to note conflicts of interest pervading the Democratic leadership which remain largely unreported.  

Can you chip in a few bucks so I can stand with Ilhan, and up to the Democratic leadership?

Ilhan was right.

First, there’s nothing offensive about asking for justice for victims of state-sponsored terrorism. To pretend that the U.S. has not exported terror for decades through the serial—and continuing—machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency is frankly foolish. All Ilhan did is speak the straightforward truth.

The only reason anyone could claim “offense” is if they disregard the facts, history, and reason to instead believe that the United States can do no wrong. In well-documented fact, our nation remains responsible for dozens of coups across the Global South over several decades, engineered in one country after another in order to essentially steal other countries’ resources for extraction by U.S.-based corporations.

No one at the Agency has ever paid a price for its violations of international human rights, and they are legion. Our nation’s intelligence agencies have deposed democratically-elected governments around the world, from Iran to Bolivia. They have installed puppet dictators, “tortured some folks,” trained the networks that later rebranded as al-Qaeda in order to fight the Soviet Union as a proxy force, and ran drugs into the U.S. to fund its rogue foreign policy, which included mining harbors in Nicaragua in violation of international law.

Beyond our intelligence agencies, our military has been repeatedly deployed to commit human rights abuses en masse. From the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the massacres from Mai Lai to Falluja, blood drips from the hands of the American empire.

We're eager to continue supporting Ilhan. Can you help us join her?

If this narrative sounds alarming to you, it’s because news media take their cues from the bipartisan Washington establishment, rather than more legitimate sources. One might be the lived experience of people who have survived state violence, many of whom have found their way into concentration camps at our nation’s borders. Alternatively, international law provides a baseline, but our nation violates it openly.

That was the point of Ilhan’s tweet. Washington has long refused to accept the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.

Why?

American exceptionalism has no basis in international law.

The entire leadership of the Democratic Party claims that the United States and its proxy allies should for some reason be excused for the very same offenses that we have cited as reasons to invade other countries and force regime changes.

But might does not make right.  Can you chip in to fix this?

Censorship undermines democracy.

On the one hand, defenders of the establishment might perceive Pelosi’s rebuking Ilhan, calling her remarks offensive, and demanding clarification as innocuous, falling short of the standard of formal state censorship (that the First Amendment at least theoretically) protects us from. That claim, however, is misguided.

First, it’s true that the First Amendment formally constrains only state action, that is, action by the executive branch. But when congressional leaders punch down and left to silence critics within their caucuses, that plays the same role in undermining freedom of thought as when whistleblowers are silenced.

Moreover, the First Amendment is supposed to protect the rights of citizens to petition our government for the redress of grievances. If our elected representatives can’t even challenge military industrial corruption without facing retaliation, what does that suggest about the vitality of the First Amendment?

There was a time Democrats at least claimed to stand for democracy.

Can you stand with us to help make the Democratic Party a voice for democracy, instead of bipartisan authoritarianism?

Pelosi stands on thin ice.

There’s another angle to this saga that the press has not widely reported, which I encourage you to raise in your conversations with friends, family, and particularly any journalists you might know.

Pelosi and her colleagues in the Democratic leadership wrote to censor a Black Muslim woman who spoke a rare truth in Congress. But they didn’t disclose the profound conflict of interest that likely drives their supposedly impartial opinion.

Unlike domestic criminal law, international human rights law permits no space for prosecutorial discretion. That means that prosecuting violations of human rights is mandatory. Failing to prosecute, or investigate, are themselves violations of international human rights.

Moreover, torture is internationally recognized as a strict liability crime, meaning that there is no defense. If someone does it, they’re guilty. Period. It doesn’t matter if they were “just following orders,” or if they thought there was a ticking time bomb. There is no exception for national security.

We fought a World War to establish those principles, and sent a Supreme Court Justice to prosecute the case at Nuremberg that made it the law of our planet. The establishment of that rule was a world-historic achievement.

The loss of that consensus did not come through a military defeat at the hands of a foreign power. The erosion of international human rights happened in the United States, at the hands of Democrats who were unwilling to pursue the uncomfortable international mandate to hold accountable government officials and agencies that have committed human rights abuses in our names.

The Democratic leaders who wrote to silence Ilhan could themselves be held responsible for violations of international law. Pelosi, in particular, has been publicly reported to have known about the CIA’s internationally illegal “enhanced interrogation” programs as early as 2006, but participated in the ongoing coverup decried by even conservative Senator Dianne Feinstein as “a constitutional crisis” nearly a decade ago.

It was never resolved.

Are Democratic leaders silencing Ilhan in order to protect themselves from international criminal liability?

Why has that conflict of interest not been widely reported?

We encourage you to help us set the record straight. We’re proud to stand with Ilhan—and our Constitution—against the bipartisan military-industrial corruption of our corporate Congress.

Thanks for standing with us,

Shahid