The media celebration of Al Zarqawi's alleged death last week is uninformed, stupid, obscene. No one ever said Zarqawi was a boy scout. The media ignores some important facts. The "insurgency" could not target U.S. troops if they weren't there! Bin Laden —about whom this war we were told was begun —was never said to have been in Iraq, but, nevertheless, Iraq was Bush's first choice for attack. Iraq had better targets, it was said. That's the logic of the drunk who searches for his lost keys under the street light because the light is better. It's also Bush's logic. Bin Laden is most certainly safe in the mountains of Pakistan secure in the knowledge that Bush's second statement about him is correct: Q But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?Earlier, September of 2001, Bush launched his fraudulent war on "tuhruhrr" with one of his first broken promises. Bush called upon the Afghan people to break with the Taliban and help him "...smoke [Islamic "terrorists] out; get them running so we can get them." Bush promised to "...bring them to justice".THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.
—George W. Bush, Press Conference by the President, The James S. Brady Briefing Room, March 13, 2002, 4:00 P.M. EST
None of that happened! Secondly, I would like to know when Bin Laden ever took over a country. When did Bin Laden call the "...shots for the Taliban"? When is the MSM ever going to challenge Bush's seemingly endless string of lies, absurdities, stupid remarks, and inanities? George W. Bush has most certainly murdered more Iraqi citizens than Al Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein together.
It's hard to believe that it was in the year 2004 that the Washington Post reported that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion.[100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq, Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16] On January 9, 2006, Bush himself estimated Iraqi civilian deaths may be well over 180,000. By now, possibly, half a million. Deaths attributed solely to Zarqawi are not nearly so high. Moreover, Zarqawi most certainly would not be in Iraq had not Bush invaded that country to begin with. Tragically —Bush cannot be trusted to sort out the dead. He merely delivers them up and leaves to bereathed families the task of burying his victims.
Oddly, Donald Rumsfeld told the truth —however inadvertently. "It [insurgency] was more than had been predicted," Rumsfeld told CNN. He blamed the insurgency itself on "imperfect intelligence" and acknowledged that the American presence had been been "feeding" the "insurgency".
The word "insurgency" is Bush newspeak. Bush won his first propaganda battle when the MSM picked up the word and repeated it without questioning its appropriateness. It's called "framing". Insurgency does not describe a situation characterized by sectarian violence, possibly civil war. Insurgency does not describe a chaotic anarchy fed and purposefully aggravated by the very presence of U.S. troops. U.S. troops now appear to have waged a deliberate war of atrocity against the civilian population; the word "insurgency", therefore, sounds hollow, disingenuous, purposefully untruthful. Better terms to describe Iraq are "civil war" and "resistance to an aggressor".
The fact never reported by MSM is that the U.S. attack and invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation, was from the very start an illegal war of naked aggression, a capital crime under U.S. law. But, I am wasting my breath. When Bush is charged under 18 § 2441, a packed, GOP appeals court will uphold his decree that if " the President does it, it's legal!". Why didn't Hermann Goring and the hanged Nazi war criminals think of that? They might have survived to advise the GOP!
Already, the United States has unilaterally exempted U.S. troops from war crimes prosecution in the Hague. A bill entitled To protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States Government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party was introduced by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) as an amendment to H.R. 1646, The Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2001, on May 8, 2001. It passed the House 282-137 on May 10 and introduced as S. 857 in the Senate on May 9 by Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC), Zell Miller (D-GA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), John Warner (R-VA), Trent Lott (R-MS), Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Frank Murkowski (R-AK).
The bill authorized Bush "...to use all means (including the provision of legal assistance) necessary to bring about the release of covered U.S. persons and covered allied persons held captive by or on behalf of the Court [International Criminal Court, ICC, in the Hague]. Some highlights:
The President is authorized to invade The Hague. Specifically, the bill empowers Bush to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release from captivity of U.S. or Allied personnel detained or imprisoned against their will by or on behalf of the Court. Dutch cartoonists have depicted U.S. paratroopers dropping down on the international court; U.S. assault forces hitting Netherlands beaches like D-Day!Here's some more ancient history. Forty-four members of the U.S. House of Representatives on July 19, 2001 urged Bush "... to remain engaged with the Court, and demonstrate America's commitment to the often-difficult and complicated international effort to promote justice and human rights", the Bush administration, nevertheless, rejected the ICC treaty. A letter from US envoy Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that Washington had no intention of ratifying the treaty and considered itself “...no longer bound in any way to its [the treaty's] purpose and objective.”No U.S. governmental entity --including State or local governments and court of any U.S. jurisdiction --may cooperate with the ICC in arrests, extraditions, searches and seizures, taking of evidence, seizure of assets, or similar matters.
No classified national security information can be transferred directly or indirectly to the ICC or to countries Party to the Rome Statute.
These provisions are in addition to existing U.S. law (the 2000-2001 Foreign Relations Authorization Act) which prohibits any U.S. funds going to the ICC once it has been established unless the Senate has given its advice and consent to the Rome Treaty.
Clearly —this represented at the time an unprecedented rift between the United States and its European allies; American isolation has only increased since then. Over the five years or so since Bush declared the U.S. above international laws that the U.S. had, in fact, insisted upon, Bush continues to thumb his nose at the civilized world while the United States plays the roll of a rogue, out of control nation dominated by a militant, extremist, right wing junta.
Iraqis are worse off under Bush —an undeniable fact glossed over by a kool-aid addicted American media. It's time to connect the dots. The United States is building permanent bases in Iraq. The observable permanent state of turmoil and chaos in Iraq is as good a pretext as any for a continued U.S. aggression and war crime. After all, there is little chance of appealing to law and treaty when it is the "President" of the United States who thumbs his nose at them. Denial and delusion are more palatable than truth: Bush invaded Iraq in order to steal its oil for his base back home: big oil! Additional resources:
- UN panel condemns U.S. torture
- The Logic of War Crimes in a Criminal War
- Rumsfeld: Iraq timetable wouldn't 'do any good' (Except, maybe, save lives!)
- How Many Iraqis Have Died Since the US Invasion in 2003?
- Iraq death toll 'soared post-war'
- International Shame for Bush
Iraq
Bush
War
Democrats
15 comments:
Len, Adam Brookes, the BBC pentagon correspondent wrote a piece on that a few months ago;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4678942.stm, and the heading is "U.S. Military plans for a 'long war'". So...there's proof in the puddin' or as one of my Hungarian friend used to say; that's the secret to the sauce.
They are unbelievable fools but then, no offense, you have the American people who are and will swallow anything whole or at least in bits and pieces because their comfortable lives are not disrupted. An act of God alone can expose all of this..or a high ranking officer or a 'I converted to Jesus' torturer confessing all his sins... people wil keep dismissing what you say as 'conspiracy theory'... it's too uncomfortable to look into..
wish it weren't so..
disillusioned I am, I guess.
Ingrid
great piece Len, appreciate your passion about this.
Len, Adam Brookes, the BBC pentagon correspondent wrote a piece on that a few months ago;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4678942.stm, and the heading is "U.S. Military plans for a 'long war'". So...there's proof in the puddin' or as one of my Hungarian friend used to say; that's the secret to the sauce.
They are unbelievable fools but then, no offense, you have the American people who are and will swallow anything whole or at least in bits and pieces because their comfortable lives are not disrupted. An act of God alone can expose all of this..or a high ranking officer or a 'I converted to Jesus' torturer confessing all his sins... people wil keep dismissing what you say as 'conspiracy theory'... it's too uncomfortable to look into..
wish it weren't so..
disillusioned I am, I guess.
Ingrid
great piece Len, appreciate your passion about this.
This Rummy is truly amazing in judging that our quagmire in Iraq is solely due to "imperfect intelligence". Furthermore, I remember Rummy having the affront to declare before an Army troop in some training base in the US soil, last month, that he, Rummy, wasn’t “in the business of intelligence”.
Rummy is rather deep into “the business of intelligence” in having built –it’s a first- a whole military department of intelligence within the Pentagon, that rivals –and annoys – if not the mighty NSA yet, at least the good old CIA itself. It’s no wonder if an air Force Three star has been given the CIA chairmanship. It’s just the latest intelligence fad.
And the military intelligence engine is working full throttle. Who do you think paid the $25 millions to the informer who got us the location of Zarqawi? The tax-payer? It goes without saying. But who signed the check? The CIA? Nope: The Pentagon.
Rummy want us to believe that civilian departments are the sole responsible for our demise in Iraq; and that the pentagon has been rather exemplary in giving us our deserved “catastrophic success”; while the CIA and FBI warned Bush so many times that no WMD’s were to be found in Iraq to the point that Dick Cheney himself had to show his menacing smirk inside the bureau in order to get the Photoshop crew in line with the (vice) president’s hubris.
True, no one can really blame Donald Rumsfeld, however, for its "imperfect intelligence":
How can something that does not exist be imperfect?
Yeah, Dante Lee, the "imperfect intelligence" tag is a load of equine output! In fact, it's been almost "perfect" intelligence up and down the line. The Oct 2002 National Intelligence Estimate provided unequivocal evidence that the case for WMDs in Iraq was no good. I'm not sure if it was 14 or 16 different agencies all said the same thing. No matter, Bush was determined to have his Iraq invasion, so he took the Niger forgeries and lied to Congress in his SOTU address in 2003.
The intelligence has been well and truly "perfected" under Rumsfeld. The alleged CIA "failures" never occurred. This is the lie so Bush can mislead the American people on EVERYTHING!
It's no secret that the DOD and NSA budgets dwarf that of the CIA (I think the Navy may even have a bigger intel budget.) They're humungous budgets, and all off the books. And, of course, these powerful tools are being focused on US citizens (the latest technique is social networking). Whistleblowers get targetted and real information gets concealed. I'll give just two examples:
- Carlyle owned Investigations Services (USIS) has unfettered access to all US federal employee service records and the security details on Iraqi contractors. Col. Ted Westhusing was 'suicided' for threatening to uncover USIS illegal killings and the torture of Iraqis and for discovered links between USIS principals and events dating from Iran-Contra. 1 2 3
- Former NSA signals intelligence analyst Kenneth Ford Jr's May 2003 analysis of Iraqi communications concluded that the presence of WMDs in Iraq was not proven. He was subsequently set up by the NSA, the FBI, and Justice Department in a sting operation that saw a classified document placed within his home by a former criminal turned FBI informant - all of this with the approval of the NSA's then Director Michael Hayden." 1 2
There's twenty good articles that can be done specifically on the increased military control of US society through intelligence. Whether the intelligence is "fixed" to serve the interests of foreign policy, or of domestic control, the result is still the same: it may not be "perfect" but if these guys have their way, it will be.
Ingrid, great link. Indeed, the U.S. learned nothing from the seemingly never ending conflict in Viet Nam. And when you think about it, the U.S. has been at war almost continuously since our founding. Now, our economy depends absolutely upon our killing folk abroad. Every nation that becomes an empire finds itself in a state of perpetual war. Augustus, though he had said he would restore the republic of Rome, never did so and, in fact, could not. Was his an empty promise. From someone like Caligula or Nero, I would say of course. But Augustus may have been sincere but later, disillusioned. Tacitus may have been the first writer to pose the question: is empire inherently incompatible with a democratic republic form of government? Those who say not will point to the British Empire —but the power of the British Empire, though vast, was always held in check by other European powers. The U.S. seems more analogous to Rome about which the book of Revelations may have referred to when it asked who could oppose the beast. (I will leave the theological interpretations to religious folk; they were once protected by the First Amendment and will soon be sorry they help conspired to kill it.)
Dante, you wrote: How can something that does not exist be imperfect?
Indeed, the converse would sound like an argument for the existence of God. A variation of the Ontological argument states that God is, by definition, a perfect being. That which is non-existent cannot be both non-existent and perfect. Therefore, God exists. Neat ...but it ignores the definition of definition, from which it follows: existence precedes essence. I am, after all, an "existentialist".
Doubleplusgood coment Fuz
My, my, my... if the our reputation wasn't already deeply wounded by Abu Grhaib and Haditha, the last commentary from a US official regarding the suicides in Guantanamo has probably achieved to give to the America reputation the final coup de grace:
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=2162&&edition=2&ttl=20060612015046
A Republican once told me that "All Republicans are liars". But that statement is true, if and only if, the speaker was lying and being Republican, he must have been. But, if he lied then his statement was true. But, if true then he —a Republican —could not speak truth.
There is a way of this conundrum that will not be found in a book by MIT's Rudy Rucker: "Infinity and the Mind". It is simply this: any sentence is meaningless that cannot be verified at least in theory. The truth or falsity of any statement depends upon what it means. Rucker, for all his brilliance, had not considered the possibility that the problem (as paraphrased above with a GOP cast) is just a common run o' the mill false dilemma. Rucker had not considered the third alternative: Republicans are not confined to lying; they also utter the absolutely meaningless. Cases in point: Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter.
By the way, Rucker's explanation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem [Infintity and the Mind] is among the two most lucid explanations to be found in print. The other is found in Godel, Escher, and Bach.
It compels me to think that something is drastically wrong when you see a human smiling over the massacre of another human, as seen in your double photo "Bush Legacy in Iraq."
That gal bending over an apparent corpse and grinning from ear to ear tells me that either she is completely delusional and brainwashed, taking some freaky drug, some evil witch, or she is not human.
In all this war on terror, is it really more a war on humanity itself? Have we lost all sensitivities to our fellow humans in this world?
When all is said and done, we as a civilization, might someday look back on this decade and wonder how civilized we really were.
Humanity's greatest asset lies not in bombs or buildings, oil or land, but in people. When we lose that ideal to treasure the people around us, we all are affected and it is a grave detriment to our peaceful coexistence.
Jen, what you have seen is the very face of evil itself. You will also see this face in George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and in Darth Va...uh...Dick Cheney. This is not mere rhetoric. I recommend "Nuremberg Diary" by Dr. Gustave Gilbert, the American psyhologist whose job it was to keep the Nazi war criminals alive until they could be hanged. Gilbert believed that evil was the total absence of empathy.
Abu Ghraib is very nearly swept under the rug. The depicted corpse is just one murder that took place under the Aegis of the U.S. occupation and hence: George W. Bush. I would put money on the proposition that numerous murders were committed at Abu Ghraib and that is to say nothing of the gulag archipelago of U.S. torture centers throughout eastern Europe.
What is appalling about the Bush administration is that it just doesn't care. This administration doesn't care that it's been caught red handed, holding the smoking gun NUMEROUS times; it doesn't care about the bad publicity; it doesn't care about the sagging approval ratings.
So —what does Bush know that we don't? Bush knows that the "fix" is in. He controls the judiciary and had even assumed much of what had been the purview of the federal and high court; and he literally rewrites the laws passed by the spineless, kiss ass Congress.
Bush most certainly does not behave like someone who believes that he is accountable in any way and he does not behave like someone who knows that he will be leaving the office in 2008. I don't think Bush has any intention of leaving. All he need do is sign a declaration of a national emergency and there will be no elections. Jeb Bush, it must be remembered, signed an executive ordering declaring a state of emergency in the state of Fla just a few days before 911.
I wish someone would prove me wrong.
Great post Len...MCMiller pointed that out some time ago, the PNAC wish for permanent base + endless war scenerio thing. They are on someting, cause when you tell Joe warmonger this, they deny it, and if they are honest, they will say: "Don't give a damn"...not alot to work with there.
The "Don't give a damn..." is working less and less. It peaked when "they" outshouted the critics, shut up the Dixie Chicks, boycotted French wine (which the cretins didn't drink anyway) and took pot shots at Michael Moore because Moore told the truth.
Times change. Dixie Chicks are back —armed, selling millions, and still pissed. As for wine, I drink whatever I damn well want to drink. If I eat fries at all, I specify FRENCH fries and exercise my FREEDOM to do so.
Tom DeLay's brownshirts attacked a peaceful rally recently. An elderly woman was knocked to the ground ...simply because she dared to support someone OTHER than DeLay. It was captured on video tape, BTW. It was a felonious assault and it was done on behalf of the GOP in Texas. If they do it again, they will be met with armed resistance.
The screw turns.
I smell panic among Bush's regulars. It will go one way or the other: Bush and the entire cabal will dissolve in an ugly rout, ignominiously; Bush will be removed in a Constitutional showdown; criminal charges will eventually cap the Plame affair.
Or —the people of the United States will simply belly up and submit to intolerable tyranny.
Give me liberty or give me death —Patrick Henry
You're a brave man, Len. Don't do anything foolish. This thing has a way to go. People are wising up. And the Bush cabal have their own atrocious behaviour working against them. And we need you to write the blog. :)
It finished about 2am our time. The game was almost over when I left and Australia was down 0:1 to Japan. I should have stayed. We got three goals in eight minutes. The aussie supporters at the game went wild. As every pom knows, fuzzflash,the aussies are like weeds popping up everywhere, their unbridled self-confidence and disrespect for tradition a thoroughgoing pain in the ass. By the way, if you have never read Clive James' "Unreliable Memoirs" from his three part bio I recommend it. It's an absolute hoot. Good luck for your team in the games. We play Brazil next so that will be the end of us. Cheers.
Don't worry, guys. I'll never do anything foolish and I'll never compromise my freedom for a cockroach like Tom DeLay. If I'm to go to jail, it'll be for something more significant than a "has been" from Sugar Land.
Post a Comment