First Blood

By Michael I. Niman, AlterNet. Posted March 9, 2004.

In what is fast becoming one of the most unsavory aspects of American culture, elected leaders today have a need to order the spilling of blood, thus exercising a sort of remote control machismo. For George Bush Senior, it was the Iraq War that helped him shed what the media dubbed, his "wimp factor." Conservative UN estimates claim that war and the ensuing sanctions cost at least a half million lives. Bush's life and the lives of those close to him, however, were never on the line. But to read the press reports, it was high noon at the OK Corral. Bush Senior, having celebrated the first major bloodletting of his presidency, was now a man.

Bill Clinton followed suit, ditching his cumbersome "draft dodger" cognomen somewhere between Kosovo and Serbia. Clinton gave the command, Wes Clark mobilized the troops and missiles went a-flying into bridges, trains, TV studios and damn near anything that moved, including columns of fleeing Kosovar refugees. When it was all over, the former Yugoslavia, like Bush Senior's Iraq, was littered with "depleted" uranium. But Clinton, like Bush Senior before him, had his bloodletting, and was dubbed a "man."

Killing by proxy was nothing new for George W Bush. As governor of Texas, he presided over the nation's busiest death row. Control of the White House, however, allowed the younger Bush to unleash a bloodbath befitting an emperor. His Gulf War has so far cost the lives of over 500 US service personnel (while seriously wounding over 3,000), 300 Iraqi collaborators and over 10,000 Iraqi civilians, while dousing downtown Baghdad with the DU radiation of countless "dirty bombs." The media quickly applauded Bush, who never put himself or his kin in harm's way (despite a half hour at the Baghdad airport), as making tough decisions. For a moment in time, he too achieved the veneer of machismo that seems to come from ordering the death of innocents.

This brings us to the "action hero" turned governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. First off, Schwarzenegger ain't a real action hero. He's actually nothing more than a brand. First, he was the "Terminator," now he's the "Governor." As an actor, his every move and line was scripted by Hollywood writers. As governor, his lines seem scripted by the energy industry, to which the burly Austrian seems to have handed California's fiscal future.

Schwarzenegger's handlers, however, seem to have a hard time corralling the aging party animal. As long as the energy industry is satiated, Arnold seems to be allowed to play at will in the governor's mansion. This is where Kevin Cooper comes into this story.

Cooper was convicted of murder 19 years ago, sentenced to death for the brutal killing of three members of a family and their houseguest. The problem is, however, that by all indications, Cooper had nothing to do with the crime. An eight-year-old witness and survivor of the attack reported that his family was attacked by three intruders, all of whom were either light-skinned Latinos or white. Cooper is black -- a point the child made at the time when police asked him to identify Cooper.

One of the victims was still clutching strands of long blond hair when police found the bodies -- a fact that would support the young witness' account of the crime. Cooper, of course, did not have long blond hair. This evidence, however, was never shown to the jury. And it was never shared with a frenzied public that called for Cooper's execution -- with one racist mob going as far as to hold a mock lynching of a toy gorilla outside of the courthouse during the trial.

Coroners identified three separate weapons used in the murders, which they claim all took place within two minutes. This feat, according to one pathologist, would be "virtually impossible" for one man to commit alone, as the prosecution alleged.

At the time of the trial, a women contacted the police and told them that she suspected that her boyfriend was involved in committing the murders. To back up her story, she supplied them with a pair of bloody coveralls that he came home wearing on the night of the murders. The police, however, deliberately disposed of this evidence. The defense never called her in to testify. The same woman identified a bloody shirt found at the scene of the crime as belonging to her boyfriend. The boyfriend, years later while locked up in jail on another charge, confessed to the murders, providing details that only the assailant could know. Prosecutors, however, refused to follow up on the confession. A lone drop of blood near the crime scene linked Cooper to the murders, but that blood was "recovered" by a police officer who, it turned out, was dealing heroin at the time, which he stole from the evidence lockers.

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