Tag Archives: Bush

The half-full glass (just don’t try to drink from it)

Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Bush played the guitar while New Orleans drowned. And now this:

The good news is—and it’s hard for some to see it now—that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house— there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.

—George W. Bush, 2005-09-02

I wonder what proportion of the newly homeless poor black population of New Orleans had comprehensive home insurance? The astonishing thing isn’t that Bush would say something so tactless and insensitive; it’s that his PR minders would allow it through into an official White House news release.

There’s more good news for Bush and his buddies though. Guess who the government’s hired for the storm cleanup? Could it be Halliburton? Of course it could.

Oh, and how about using Katrina as an excuse to test some experimental sonic weapons on unruly crowds? Sorted!

In a surprising turn of events, however, even FOX News don’t seem to think they can spin this one as positive for Bush.

Adios Ashcroft

With Ashcroft’s departure, George W. Bush has a chance to make a symbolic gesture towards uniting the nation. Instead, he has chosen Alberto Gonzales as the new Attorney General.

That’s the Alberto Gonzales who wrote the memo urging that the president declare the US exempt from the Geneva Convention, because otherwise US behavior could lead to war crimes prosecutions. If you had any doubt that a vote for the Bush administration would be rewarding those who supported torture, that doubt should now be dispelled.

It was also Gonzales who ignored a subpoena to turn over documents relating to Enron. Not exactly surprising, since he was one of Enron’s corporate lawyers when he worked for Vinson & Elkins.

Gonzales was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court by Bush in 1999, where he took cash from Halliburton while overhearing a case against them. Surprise, surprise, the case was denied. He also defended the Texas practice of not bothering to alert consulates when foreign nationals were arrested in Texas, stating that international law did not apply to Texas.

Finally, Alberto Gonzales was the guy Bush relied on to summarize the death penalty cases in Texas for him, so he could decide whether to grant clemency or just have ‘em executed. We all know how that turned out.

So, let the healing commence!

Political joke

One night George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing beside him. Bush looks up and asks, “George, what’s the best thing I can do to help the country?”

”Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did,” Washington advises, then fades away.

The next night, Bush is astir again when he sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving silently around the bedroom. Bush calls out: “Tom, please! What is the best thing I could do to help the country?”

”Respect the Constitution, as I did,” Jefferson advises, and then dims from sight.

The third night sleep still evades Bush. He sees the ghost of FDR hovering over his bed. Bush lowers his voice and asks, “Franklin, What is the best thing I could do to help the country?”

In that golden voice of his, FDR replies, “Help the less fortunate, just as I did,” and then he disappears.

Bush still isn’t sleeping well the fourth night. He tosses and turns, and suddenly another figure moves out of the shadows. It’s the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. “Abe,” Bush pleads, “what’s the best thing I can do right now to help the country?”

Lincoln pauses, then replies, “Go see a play.”

Medical ethics and US torture

This month’s edition of The Lancet features an extensively footnoted article by Dr Stephen Miles which describes some of the issues of medical ethics in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

A few lowlights:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found that the medical system failed to maintain internment cards with medical information necessary to protect the detainees’ health as required by the Geneva Convention; this reportedly was due to a policy of not officially processing (ie, recording their presence in the prison) new detainees.

[...]

Two detainees’ depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner’s lacertation from being beaten.

[...]

In another case, an Iraqi man, taken into custody by US soldiers was found months later by his family in an Iraqi hospital. He was comatose, had three skull fractures, a severe thumb fracture, and burns on the bottoms of his feet. An accompanying US medical report stated that heat stroke had triggered a heart attack that put him in a coma; it did not mention the injuries.

[...]

In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of “natural causes…during his sleep.” After news media coverage, the Pentagon revised the certificate to say that the death was a “homicide” caused by “blunt force injuries and asphyxia.”

Homicide from blunt force injuries, peaceful death of natural causes during sleep… it’s a fine line, isn’t it?

In November, 2003, Iraqi Major General Mowhoush’s head was pushed into a sleeping bag while interrogators sat on his chest. He died; medics could not resuscitate him, and a surgeon stated that he died of natural causes.42 6 months later, the Pentagon released a death certificate calling the death a homicide by asphyxia.

So let’s be clear about this: we’re talking about US forces deliberately torturing prisoners of war, and accidentally murdering a few. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s the conclusions of the Pentagon.

Furthermore, it was official White House policy that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Bush himself signed the memo. Rumsfeld himself approved signed a memo approving use of degrading and torturous techniques including “stress positions”, 20 hour long interrogations, 30 day spells in complete isolation in solitary confinement, removal of all clothing and personal items, and use of “detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress”. The latter, of course, is straight out of 1984, the infamous Room 101.

So let me be blunt: if you vote for the Bush administration, you are voting for torture, and I wish you many sleepless nights.

Politics

Wednesday’s Guardian had a story with the headline Bush names rightwing Republican as CIA chief. I half expected to see a story elsewhere on the page saying Study confirms bears defecate in woods or Pope announces he isn’t Jewish. Yes, I’m talking about the guy who says he’s not qualified for a job at the CIA.

Also yesterday, Wikipedia’s featured article was MKULTRA. I must admit, I was amazed by some of the details. It makes me realize that the Church of Scientology’s rabid hatred of psychiatry makes some kind of sense, in the 50s and 60s context of the cult’s growth. Did L. Ron Hubbard know that the leader of the World Psychiatric Association was carrying out experiments that involved deliberately putting people into comas and giving them electroshock at 30x normal voltage? Or did he merely suspect?

Thirdly, a quick pointer to Jeff The Pacifist Bomb, written back before the Iraq war but not posted until now.

In case you missed it:

The retrial of a Moroccan man convicted of involvement in the September 11 attacks appeared to be in doubt last night after the Bush administration refused to allow two key al-Qaida suspects to give evidence.

On the first day of the new trial of Mounir el Motassadeq, a court in Hamburg was told that the US had refused to allow its al-Qaida suspects to be questioned in Germany.

Mr Motassadeq, 30, is accused of plotting the attacks in 2001 together with Mohamed Atta and other members of Hamburg’s al-Qaida cell.

Washington’s announcement came as Mr Motassadeq’s defence lawyer tried to have the case thrown out. Josef Graessle-Muenscher told the court it would be impossible to find out what had really happened on September 11 because al-Qaida suspects in US custody had probably been tortured.

“In this swamp of torture and prison camps, no court can ascertain the truth any more,” he said in an intervention detailing US abuses of prisoners, especially at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba

—Guardian 2004-08-11

Yup, you read it right—one of the guys who the German government believe helped plan the 9/11 attacks may walk free because the Bush administration won’t let suspects held in Guatánamo Bay give evidence.

Remind me, why are they there again?

Reality catches up with Bush

Choice statistics from last week’s CBS poll of the average American:

  • 61% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq.
  • 65% believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
  • 81% think the torture at Abu Ghraib was unjustified.
  • 51% think the Pentagon tried to cover it up.
  • 20% think the Bush administration has increased jobs, 49% think they’ve decreased jobs.

There’s more in this week’s poll:

  • 80% thought Bush was either “hiding something” or “mostly lying” in his statements on Iraq.
  • 55% think the war in Iraq has created more anti-American terrorists.
  • Only 13% think America is safer as a result of the war.

And rounding off a fairly solid victory for reality, only 29% of people have a favorable opinion of John Kerry.

Attacked by Saudis? Invade Iraq!

I’m sure there are some people who still doubt that Bush decided to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11, in spite of the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian and Iraq had nothing to do with it at all. So:

PRESIDENT George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after the strikes using hijacked jets, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal—dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Meyer claims Bush replied: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.

Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair ‘said nothing to demur’.

Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was ‘obsessed’ with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.

—Observer

So about those weapons of mass destruction…

I know it’s churlish of me to keep harping on about this, but:

…investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen—combining pox virus and snake venom—that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

[…]

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad’s Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

[…]

The most significant point in [Hossam] Amin’s letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons.

—Washington Post

So Saddam’s brother-in-law, #1 in charge of weapons programs, personally defects and sings like a canary. The story says he told us about “major programs”; what it doesn’t mention is that he told us they were all shut down. However, the government didn’t want to believe him, and we went ahead with the war anyway. Now we discover from the reports of Iraq’s #1 guy in charge of intelligence, that Saddam’s brother-in-law was telling the truth. Well, duh.