Why Are Our Leaders Behaving Like Psychopathic Killers?

By James Donahue

The latest estimates suggest that our invasion of Iraq and the subsequent bombing campaigns over more than four years have left an estimated one million Iraqi men, women and children dead. That is genocide comparable to anything Hitler or Stalin did in their time, yet as Americans we don't seem to be losing any sleep over it.

Now we get word that the Bush Administration is preparing to speed up the executions of death row inmates in prisons all across the nation, by eliminating several layers of appeals now available through the federal courts. The object is to put them on a "fast-track" to the execution chambers.

It seems that during their last few months in office, President George W. Bush and his sidekick, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, drafted new regulations via recent anti-terrorism legislation that will allow states to allow the Justice Department to be the key arbiter in deciding the fate of prisoners on death row.

That puts the killing power right in the hands of Mr. Gonzales, or whatever executioner Bush appoints to fill his shoes. It is with a great sigh of relief that we noted the Gonzales resignation . . . although not before the damage concerning prisoner executions was done..

For those of you who don't know his history, Gonzales is a Texas boy who served as top legal advisor to Mr. Bush during the years Bush served as governor of Texas. Those were also the years when Bush and Gonzales were on an execution spree of Texas inmates.

In the six years he served as governor of that state, Bush presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. A story in the Atlantic Monthly noted that Bush routinely denied last-ditch appeals for clemency on execution day by "systematically hearing no evidence, seeing no evidence and sealing himself away from any tragic possibility that any evil was done at all."

The story noted that on execution day in TExas, Gonazles would give Bush a brief summary of the case. During his tenure, Gonazles provided 57 summaries to Bush. Author Alan Berlow obtained copies of these summaries under Texas public information laws, and found that the summaries "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand, ineffective council, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence."

Now this "fine Christian" team, which won't allow American science labs to use tax dollars to help in stem cell research for fear of aborting a living cell, is setting up a killing machine that threatens to march thousands of American prisoners off to execution chambers by stripping their rights of appeal.

And we all know that there are a lot of innocent people sitting in death row cells all across the land, who are slowly being discovered and set free by small investigative groups willing to do the extensive research their "court-appointed lawyers" failed or refused to do on their behalf. The biggest new tool for proving innocence has been DNA testing of blood, urine and semen samples taken at crime scenes.

There have been so many of these people found to have been wrongly convicted that we have had a growing cry for abolishment of the death penalty altogether in the United States, for fear that we might be killing innocent people.

Yet here we have a president and his top legal council moving to rush the convicted killers and rapists off to their awaited fate by lethal injection, electrocution, hanging or whatever, rather than assuring everyone that the right person has been charged and that all of the facts have been heard.

The United States is already ranking among the top six countries in the world in terms of the numbers of people we put to death. A total of 52 Americans were executed last year and thousands are awaiting this same fate all across the land.

We believe there is something mentally wrong with any president or high-ranking official who would preside over so much death and misery. We suggest psychiatric testing for Mr. Bush to see if he is fit to continue leading our nation. While they are at it, we believe Mr. Gonzales might be subjected to the same testing.

Something is clearly wrong with two guys who appear to get so much delight in the destruction of their fellow man. What is so troubling is that we have a nation of people who appear to be either oblivious to what is going on, or are secretly supportive.