The Mickey Mouse Dictatorship

You know all those comedies about dictators where the ruler of a country says something like "but I want my name at LEAST three times on EVERY PAGE of EVERY speech!"? Pretty funny aren't they? I mean, you might expect that from say, Saddam Hussein if he were not dead, maybe Kim Jong Il, maybe a few of the African despots, possibly someone like Hugo Chavez. But the person who actually has asked for it is none other than.... well, I'm sure you've all guessed by now! As reported by Gardiner Harris in the New York Times:

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.


Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona also went on to testify that the reports that came out of his department were effectively censored and altered by Bush Administration officials and that important public announcements were suppressed due to political considerations.

Dr. Carmona's sworn testimony went on to say that the administration would not allow him to speak or issue public reports on the following topics:

• stem cells
• emergency contraception
• sex education
• prison
• mental health issues
• global health issues and also from the same NYT article:

Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Now whilst the first part, about El Duce wanting to be mentioned three times in every speech makes me laugh, the second part I find more than mildly disturbing. It verges on the criminal. It is so unbelievably dictator-like that the mind boggles. The right, who just dream of being ruled by a dictator are probably going to lap this up of course. The perversion of the surgeon General’s office to pander to the Republican Neocon agenda should have everyone up in arms, but the Ann Coulters of this world will no doubt find a way to justify it.

It all points to a runaway Presidency, all the more dangerous because of its, now almost total, impotence. No one takes Bush seriously any more, not even Republican Senators, and every day, is a day nearer when this excuse for a leader is going to need another 9/11 just in order to go out with a bang so that someone, somewhere, can raise an eyebrow and exclaim: "Oh that old fool's still around?"

Gonzo ensnared yet again.

What does one have to do to get rid of a bumbling liar passing himself off as an Attorney General in this country? No seriously. Alberto Gonzales has proved himself to be so phenomenally inept that I really question the fact that he ever studied law at all. He is the most blatant public liar I have ever come across and yet...and yet, he remains Attorney General. In a piece published today in The Washington Post, John Solomon discloses a bombshell – Gonzo lied again:

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

But guess what? Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act now shows that the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that effectively said that there had been exactly that - verified cases of civil liberties abuses - six days prior to that statement. The copy of the report sent to Gonzales by the FBI said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

I know the right thinks "to hell with civil liberties," but civil liberties are actually the cornerstone of the United States Constitution that George Bush, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have collectively been in the process of shredding. The abuses that were reported to Gonzales range from erroneous wiretaps and surveillance carried out on the wrong person because a phone number was wrongly transmitted, to information about particular individuals being sent by mistake to third parties. In some cases, the FBI retroactively wrote new national Security Letters, that instrument which now allows them to basically avoid having to obtain warrants to listen in on your conversations or read your emails, after they had blundered in order to cover up their tracks.

All this Gonzales knew when he proclaimed that he knew nothing. Having used up his one form of defense, the hot-shot lawyer that he is, he will almost certainly reply to inquiries about this matter with that second, most cunning of answers to difficult questions, gleaned by years of law school and practice: "I don't recall."

"I Tried to Stop The War"

Extraordinary how these people are coming out of the woodwork. First former CIA Director George Tenet writes a book about how he didn't believe his own intelligence, or rather, the intelligence he gave Bush was correct but Bush made him skew it to fit his case and because he was being waterboarded at the time he was unable to resign, unable to speak out and unable to refuse. Now Powell is starting his 'save my own skin' campaign as reported by The Raw Sory:

It was revealed today that prior to the Iraq war, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell spent two and a half hours trying in vain to convince President George W. Bush not to invade.

Two and a half hours? 150 Minutes? By Jove! That's an effort if ever I saw one. My god - and I thought the Democrats were spineless. You have to do more, Mr. Powell to stop a war than speak for two hours. You have to resign, you have to go to the public, you have to be prepared to burn bridges to stop a multi-billion dollar war machine from creaking forward and massacring people!

How ridiculous to come out now and plead innocent when you were one of the men, like Tenet, who could have done something about it. Had you had the courage of your convictions to stand up to the Neocon war hawks all salivating about Saddam Hussein's oil, you could have done something. You could have changed history.

But now you are but a footnote. You tried to stop the war? Well good for you. You didn't 'try' hard enough, by any means, to save your reputation and your career as a politician. Your preposterous demonstration at the United Nations which so many swallowed wholeheartedly because they were desperate to believe was a major piece of acting and duplicity.

To come back now, sniveling and pleading that you 'tried' to talk the president out of it doesn't cut it. Not by a long way. Take a good long look at Iraq and the Iraqis dying every day. You could have prevented that if you had the foresight, as so many had, that it was not going to work. But you chose to toe the line. That, dear sir, will be your albatross forever.

237

237 is the number of Iraqis killed as reported by AntiWar.Com this past Saturday, July 6, 2007. They died while the McCains, Giulianis and Liebermans of this world slept and while G.W. Bush rambled on about the surge and the need to win “so that they don’t follow us back home.”

One hundred and fifty died in a single truck bomb explosion. Every person who supported this war should have these people's deaths on their conscience. This war, this toppling of a regime, this ongoing futile attempt at parsing the Middle East to the pleasures of the West is, has been and will be recorded as a crime against humanity.

How do Iraqis see us, we in the West with our lofty ideals of democracy and our righteousness? I’m pretty sure I know how we see Iraqis. Last night a friend told me that there were videos posted by the military showing eerie night vision scenes of men engaging in sex acts with animals coming out of Iraq. I’m sure for half a trillion dollars I could obtain similar material from the mountains of Tennessee or the Kansas plains but this material confirms our deepest desire that we are better than them and their deaths are unimportant. How do Iraqis see us?

Three American soldiers were kidnapped recently by Iraqi nationals, unleashing the biggest manhunt in Iraq since the war started. Thousands of troops comb through fields, rivers and brush to find a trace of the missing men, because every man counts. ‘No man left behind’ is the credo.

A bomb goes off and a soldier is wounded. Helicopters arrive as if from nowhere to evacuate him whilst he is tended to by several men. The world news reports the incident. He is awarded a medal.

A soldier dies and his body is recuperated. The men in his platoon pay homage to a small shrine in his name and weep at his passing. His body is placed in a casket and flown home for around $20,000 to his relatives, where a large gathering of people including men at arms who never personally knew him gather. They speak about the loss and the dreams that will not be fulfilled. His remains are lowered into a grave to the tune of a bugle and the flag that draped his coffin is accurately folded and handed to his family whilst seven men fire their weapons three times into the sky. At his head is a carved tombstone stating who he was and when he lived and died.

237 Iraqi civilians are shredded by bombs, bullets and knives. Their deaths are reported in a small article which does not, can not even mention their names. They are carried in trucks to the morgue, heaped upon each other like animals dying of a plague, nameless and numberless. They are not even a statistic. They lie in rows, blood drying on them, flies and maggots infesting them until some relative somewhere can identify them. They are wrapped in rags or whatever is at hand and laid to rest in makeshift, sometimes common graves with a misshapen lump of rock as a headstone.Why do we still think that these people can understand what we want? How can we tell Iraqis that what we did was for them? How do we have the gall to even face them and look them in the eye? In the corridors of power people bandy words around like "benchmark" and "milestone" and "democracy". But in the small village of Amerli in Iraq, a mother just wants to know why her son has been reduced to a smoldering corpse and why no one in the West cares.

Rhetoric and The Voice of Freedom

Bush's Fourth of July Speech was full of it. I mean the stuff that is expelled from a Bull's behind.

Analyzing the collection of inane phrases doesn't take long and the core of it is two lies and a veiled admission, found in the White House release of the July 4th speech:

Lie No. 1: "It's a tough fight, but I wouldn't have asked those troops to go into harm's way if the fight was not essential to the security of the United States of America."

Wrong. You asked those troops to fight because you and your little group of evil-doers had an agenda. That agenda was Iraq and Iraq's oil fields. It also settled an old score for you so you killed two birds with one stone. Iraq was a broken country, Saddam Hussein a paper tiger. You've squandered billions on a war you fought for comfort - so that people could continue driving enormous SUVs - not for their security.

If you wanted to do something for people's security, you would have pushed through a bill for stem cell research so that people like my acquaintance Bill, who has suffered from cancer for years and is now cancer free thanks to stem cell intervention.

With 500 billion dollars you could have beefed up port security so that more than the continuing 5% of containers could be checked. With 500 billion dollars you could have transformed the relationship between this country and Arab Muslims so that they didn't believe you were on a crusade to destroy them. maybe if you had spent that 500 billion wisely, they would believe you and not their Imams ranting about the evil West.

But you chose bombs and men at arms and in doing so have jeopardized the security of the United States, not defended it.

Lie No. 2: Many of the spectacular car bombings and killings you see are as a result of al Qaeda -- the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th. A major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day.

Wrong. The people planting bombs in Iraq are anywhere between disenfranchised Sunnis whose country you took away from them, frustrated fanatical Shia who were not handed the entire country on a platter and a faction that likes to associate itself with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but does so unilaterally. There is no evidence that anyone associated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is funding, helping or guiding the so-called "Iraqi Al Qaeda."

If Al Qaeda did attack America on 9/11 then they did so before you blundered into Iraq with your army. They did so before Al Qaeda had even considered setting up shop in Iraq. Now you have given them not only a pretext to do so but the tools to do it with. You have now given them a country in which they can, by your own words, operate pretty much without hindrance and you have given them, above all, thousands of new recruits.

So what did Bush say that was right, if anything? Well, he did mention the three letter word: 'oil.' From his speech:

If we were to allow them to gain control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves -- which they could use to fund new attacks and exhort economic blackmail on those who didn't kowtow to their wishes.

So here we have the kernel of the whole thing again. Basically, the United States invaded Iraq so that it could fund new attacks and exhort economic blackmail on those who didn't kowtow to its wishes. How else do I interpret that. Because before the invasion, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq - there was just Saddam Hussein and the oil was his. There was no one who would be funded or who wanted anyone to kowtow to anything - just a dictator. But there are plenty of those - just not many with half a billion barrels of oil beneath them.

Oil is something that is sneaking up more and more often into speeches by Cheney and Bush with regards to Iraq. It is a very subtle and insidious process by which slowly, they introduce 'oil' as an invasion argument, their Casus belli and in Australia, the Defense Minister simply blurted it out as reported by the BBC:

Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has admitted that securing oil supplies is a key factor behind the presence of Australian troops in Iraq. He said maintaining "resource security" in the Middle East was a priority.

The fundamental importance of that statement is simply this: time has now worked its magic. WMDs are a long forgotten thing in our attention deficient society and the truth that surfaces every now and then bubbles up like some demonic black mold that we all know is there but only a few are willing to face as fact and is briefly reported on before being pooh-poohed by someone else as not being the "only" reason for having invaded Iraq. So Bush was able to say "oil" and "Iraq" in the same breath in his July 4th speech and no one is really shocked.

The effect is a ripple by which this becomes the accepted rhetoric and soon, they'll be able to say "we always said it was about the oil." That, my dear friends, is the message when you peel away the semantics about the War of Independence and all that stuff about purple hearts and brave soldiers. Funny that Bush should wax so lyrical about purple hearts when he was at the centre of the purple heart band-aid scandal that was aimed at Kerry in 2004.

No, oil is a touchy subject and we are experiencing an insidiously planned campaign to feather out that fact that everyone knows but which the right wing has forcefully rejected: Iraq was invaded for oil and we have to win the war so that we get to keep the oil. That's what American and British soldiers have been dying for in that country far, far away.

The Nothing-to-Lose President

It was surely a tough call for Bush. Relegated to absolute meaninglessness by the events of the past four years, Bush is on the sidelines watching the world drift by as his Presidency devolves into a mish-mash of abject failures, disasters and catastrophes. The Plame affair I am sure haunted him for months with the specter of Fitzgerald hanging over Rove, Cheney and Bush. So when Libby was caught lying and went to trial, the trio sat watching their nightmare unfold and then Libby was nailed and he was sentenced.

Libby was to go to jail for having lied under oath. It’s called perjury and the Republicans have not ceased to tell the rest of us how bad that is. Because Clinton lied under oath about oral sex, the right was up in arms, ready to bring down the Presidency and anything else with it. Libby lied under oath and was sentenced and now Bush had to decide what to do. He didn’t hesitate for long – either way he was going to lose yet again.

The man who can’t even go fishing without getting his boat stuck off the Kennebunkport coast as recently reported in the Huffington Post, had to make a decision and that decision, was to let a perjurer off the hook. The choice was not a hard one to make because Bush has nothing left to lose. A presidency in tatters with a legacy tainted by a 500 billion dollar war fiasco, an entire city virtually obliterated by a hurricane with a floundering Federal Agency unable to help its inhabitants and a failed Immigration Bill leaves Bush on the gangplank of life with nothing left to do but jump. So Libby’s sentence had to be commuted. In his position, you need all the friends you can get.

Is this the action of a “decider”? Is this the judgment of a “Commander Guy”? No, this is what you do when you are bailing out. Bush has only one hope and that is to make it to the end of his Presidency without the sky falling on his head. Like Indiana Jones, a rather over-flattering comparison I’ll admit, who runs out of the temple he has just plundered with rocks and boulders falling from the ceilings and walls crashing down behind him, chased by a fireball of disgust and a tidal wave of mistrust, Bush is scampering out of the hidden temple having defiled it. But unlike Indiana Jones, he hasn’t got the relic tucked into his waistband; he hasn’t got the treasure packed under his arm. He is empty handed, disheveled and beaten.

The only thing he can do is pull all the ‘get out of jail free’ cards for himself and his friends that he can lay his hands on. No one doubted that Bush would grant Libby a pardon. It’s the only thing he can still do that demonstrates that he is still President. It’s his Daseinsberechtigung and without it, he would vanish like a tiny soap bubble, bursting soundlessly as the world moves on, recovering from that disastrous era stained by a presidency so repulsive that no one wants to even touch it.

Wholesale Slaughter

Desensitization to multiple killings in foreign countries is nothing new. Fighting in Iraq kills around 100 people every single day. But it is a vaguely defined enemy or even a vaguely defined insurgency that is doing the killing. Factional fighting and infighting; nothing to do with ‘us.’ But what happens when it is ‘us’ that are killing hundreds of civilians? Griff Witte and Javed Hamdard report of such a massacre in today's Washington Post Foreign Service Section:

Afghan officials reported Saturday that possibly 100 or more civilians had been killed in a NATO and U.S.-led assault.

"More than 100 people have been killed. But they weren't Taliban. The Taliban were far away from there," said Wali Khan, a member of parliament who represents the area. Another parliament member from Helmand, Mahmood Anwar, said that the death toll was close to 100 and that the dead included women and children.

Sometimes collateral damage is just a nice word for massacre. "Oops" is just not good enough and the military's continuing lackadaisical mumblings about being "deeply saddened by any loss of innocent lives," just doesn't cut it.

It is not feasible to uphold an ethical code condemning Taliban attacks on civilians when your own military is killing even more of them. The repeated claims that these women and children are being used as human shields is not an excuse to then target and kill them.

The Afghans have had thirty years of warfare in their country - we have taken over where the Russians left off. A sense of shame however, would be too much to ask from the belligerent, all knowing, all seeing, holders of the supposed moral torch that we in the West have become.