“The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.”—former White House official Ann Lewis, Senior Advisor for Hillary Clinton for President.
Official White House proclamation:
The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as “Loyalty Day.” This Loyalty Day, and throughout the year, I ask all Americans to join me in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2007, as Loyalty Day. I call upon the people of the United States to participate in this national observance and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day as a symbol of pride in our Nation.
Coming soon: The Three Minute Hate, every night at 6pm on FOX News!
Update for the sake of clarity: No, this stupid idea was not invented by Bush and crew. Given that Congress is controlled by the Democrats, it’s unlikely they would go out of their way to pass laws asking people to be loyal to the President; sorry if I led anyone to believe otherwise.
For some time now, in place of the usual lorem ipsum text, I’ve been using the following text:
Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
It’s taken from a White House transcript, of course.
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.
It’s US election day, and you don’t need to be The Amazing Kreskin to predict how things are going to go: badly.
Barring a miracle, we’re going to end up with another statistical dead heat, with Kang and Kodos splitting the popular vote and electoral college vote almost 50/50. Unfortunately, there are a lot of black box voting machines in marginal areas—with no tamper-proof audit trail and no way to re-count the votes. So in a close finish, we’re going to be left with literally no way to determine who actually got the most votes, or who actually won closely-fought states with electronic voting machines.
Yes, it’s going to be worse than 2000. In 2000, at least there were ballots that could be examined to determine who the voters really intended to vote for. The fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t let that be done and instead handed the keys to the White House to Bush was regrettable, and it wasn’t exactly surprising that the corporate media decided to bury the actual vote results when they were finally tabulated by independent journalists. Nevertheless, there was at least the sense that we knew what was going on. This time, we’ll never know. No matter who wins, the other side will have entirely justifiable grounds for considering them fraudulently elected.
Election officials love all-electronic voting machines, precisely because there’s no way to do a recount. Recounts are boring, embarrassing, and can be disrupted by rioting partisans. If there’s nothing to be done but read the computer’s totals off the screen again, the supervisors are guaranteed that they’ll be at home in bed by midnight. So what if it means the results are meaningless? That’s somebody else’s problem.
But let’s look on the bright side. As a result of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the Iraq war, most people in the world hate America as a political entity, but love American people. If it were possible to re-elect the people who approved the torture, there’s a distinct danger that Americans would do so, and suddenly being American would be about as socially uplifting as being (say) a white South African in the 1980s.
So, when the polls fail to reach a conclusion, I say celebrate—it means you’re off the hook for another four years.
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.”
Seymour Hersh is the journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre, a Pulitzer prize winner. He’s got a new book out. Expect to see it rubbished extensively on TV.
Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today.
The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would “fuck with [detainees] as much as we could” by inflicting pain on them.
[...]
Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects—considered by many to be in defiance of international law—an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
[...]
A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh.
[...]
A senior intelligence official told Hersh: “I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia.”
The secret “special access programme” facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners—widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention—was established after a direct order from the president.
Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: “I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”
But in case there’s anyone out there thinking “Well, Americans raping Iraqi children is OK if it makes America safer”, consider the following insightful comments from a CIA analyst about Guantánamo Bay:
Two former administration officials who read the analyst’s highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst’s disturbing conclusion was that “if we captured some people who weren’t terrorists when we got them, they are now”.
So, who’s going to vote for torture this November?
Take a copy of Microsoft Office 2003, fire up Word, set the font to Times New Roman and start typing. Enter the text of the document released by the White House to CBS News to prove that Bush didn’t shirk his National Guard duty. The result? Your new document appears identical to the original.
Which is odd, because the genuine document was supposedly written in 1973, long before Word existed. Did the military routinely use proportional width typewriters with Times New Roman font and support for superscripts? Did military typists just happen to use the same default layout as Word?
Another document supposedly written in 1972 also appears to have a Word-like layout.
(Hint to document forgers: use Courier New.)
(Oh, and even if the documents are genuine, he still failed to carry out a direct order and dropped out.)
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.
Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation’s air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
[...]
For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports and widespread Internet speculation about its purpose.
But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA officials have confirmed that the flight did take place and have supplied details.
The odyssey of the small LearJet 35 is part of a larger controversy over the hasty exodus from the United States in the days immediately after 9/11 of members of the Saudi royal family and relatives of Osama bin Laden.
The terrorism panel, better known as the 9/11 Commission, said in April that it knew of six chartered flights with 142 people aboard, mostly Saudis, that left the United States between Sept. 14 and 24, 2001. But it has said nothing about the Tampa flight.
[...]
The Saudis asked the Tampa Police Department to escort the flight, but the department handed off the assignment to Dan Grossi, a former member of the force, Unger said. Grossi recruited Manuel Perez, a retired FBI agent, to accompany him. Both described the flight to Unger as somewhat surreal.
“They got the approval somewhere,” Perez is quoted as telling Unger. “It must have come from the highest levels of government.”
[...]
The 9/11 Commission, which has said the flights out of the United States were handled appropriately by the FBI, appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight.
“What information, if any, do you have about the screening by law enforcement personnel—including law enforcement personnel affiliated with the airport facility—of individuals on this flight?” the commission asked TIA.
The TIA Police Department said a check of its records indicated no member of its force screened the Lear’s passengers.
So there we have it. Official confirmation that immediately after the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Saudi Arabians, the Bush administration organized a secret airlift of Saudis, including Osama’s family—and there was apparently absolutely no security screening.
Take note, as this will no doubt be one of the things Michael Moore is accused of having made up.