GRETCHEN MOL: SPEAKING BEAUTY TO POWER

A
little
beauty
before
the ugliness
of the
Bush
administration.















BUSHITES LEAD US ON A MERRY CHASE AROUND THE KENNEL
MCCAIN SHOWS THEM FOR WHAT THEY ARE

I have been working so many months ahead, getting my posts together, that some of the news items in them are falling pretty far behind times (as far back as last year), but here’s some more about Bush’s lies and deceptions of the American people.

(November 22, 2005) we hear that Europe is in an uproar over having discovered that American CIA operatives are kidnapping and holding in secret European citizens. Some bits and pieces out of the most recent NEWSWEEK should add to any decent American’s fear that we have gone mightily wrong by electing and reelecting this criminal bunch in the White House and Congress. Of course, if they could do all this, perhaps they did steal Florida in 2000 and Ohio in ‘04. Maybe they weren’t elected.

From Newsweek, November 21, 2005:

“At one point the Bush administration told the CIA it couldn’t be prosecuted for any [torture] technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies “organ failure” or “death”. (p. 28)

About America’s standing in the world community, John McCain said, “It’s killing us. It’s killing us.” (p. 28)

But, you know? McCain is an awfully conservative fellow, and he’s stood behind these Republican dudes even though they trashed his reputation in the 2000 race with lies and innuendoes in South Carolina. Perhaps, there’s a little deal going on between him and the Bushites. Maybe, they’ve given him the go ahead to sort of argue with them over torture so that he’ll be elected and carry on their trashing of the poor, the mentally ill, the aged, the working poor, the working homeless poor and continue building an increase (with tax cuts) of the gap between the rich and the poor which is as bad as it’s been since before Roosevelt. I’d trust him a whole lot more if he’d completely disengage himself from the Republican Party.

On page 30 we read, “Sending a suspect off to languish (and possibly be abused) in the prison of a foreign country is called a 'rendition.' The CIA has done numerous renditions over the years, usually not for the purpose of seeing suspected terrorists subjected to torture, but just to get them off the street while the agency follows up leads from captured documents, laptop computers and the like. In the case of al-Libi, however, the Bush administration was only too glad to make use of the 'take' from al-Libi's interrogation, helpfully provided by Egyptian intelligence. Under questioning by the Egyptian authorities (techniques unknown, but not hard to imagine), al-Libi confessed that Al Qaeda terrorists, beginning in December 2000, had gone to Iraq to learn about chemical and biological weapons. This was just the evidence the Bush administration needed to make the case for invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In his famous, now discredited speech to the United Nations in February 2003, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the intelligence extracted from al-Libi, referring to him not by name but as a 'senior Al Qaeda terrorist' who ran a training camp in Afghanistan.

“There was only one problem with al-Libi's story: after the Powell presentation, he recanted it. Overlooking timely doubts raised by some U.S. intelligence officials, particularly at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the ideologues in the Bush administration had used information obtained by torture to mislead the world.”

On page 32: “In the summer of 2003, Rumsfeld sent a get-tough commander from Guantanamo—Lt. Gen. Geoffrey Miller—to ‘Gitmoize’ the interrogation techniques in Iraq.” Remember? We’ve already heard about his arrival at Abu Ghraib and the dog collars and what have you which immediately arrived with him. The commander of the average soldiers who guarded the prisoners, the only general to be demoted, has written a book about the general from Guantanamo and her concerns expressed to him about the illegality of some of what he was suggesting. Why hasn’t he been demoted?

How about this? Cheney’s new aide, Addington, who replaced the traitorous crook, Libby, was described by one Pentagon official like this: he “would like us to be able to pull fingernails with pliers.” p. 33

So much for the kind of men Cheney likes to have around him.

Finally, again, from a McCain piece in Newsweek, p. 36, I quote: “It is far better to embrace a standard that might be violated in extraordinary circumstances than to lower our standards to accommodate a remote contingency, confusing personnel in the field and sending precisely the wrong message abroad about America's purposes and practices.

“The state of Israel, no stranger to terrorist attacks, has faced this dilemma, and in 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court declared cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment illegal. ‘A democratic, freedom-loving society,’ the court wrote, ‘does not accept that investigators use any means for the purpose of uncovering truth. The rules pertaining to investigators are important to a democratic state. They reflect its character.’

I’ve been asked ofter where did the brave men I was privileged to serve with in North Vietnam draw the strength to resist to the best of their abilities the cruelties inflicted on them by our enemies. They drew strength from their faith in each other, from their faith in God and from their faith in our country. Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them unto death. But every one of us—every single one of us—knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them. That faith was indispensable not only to our honor but to our attempts to return home with honor. For without our honor, our homecoming would have had little value to us.

“The enemies we fight today hold our liberal [sic, that’s right, ‘liberal’ values] in contempt, as they hold in contempt the international conventions that enshrine them. I know that. But we are better than them, and we are - stronger for our faith. And we will prevail. It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.

“Those who return to us and those who give their lives for us are entitled to that honor. And those of us who have given them this onerous duty are obliged by our history, and the many terrible sacrifices that have been made in our defense, to make clear to them that they need not risk their or their country's honor to prevail; that they are always—through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss—they are always, always, Americans, and different, better and stronger than those who would destroy us.”