Regarding the friendly disagreement between the Bard and myself, Bush and Cheney already enjoy undeserved folk hero status, and within the far right realms, they will always enjoy such status regardless of outcome.
I appreciate the debate.
For me it's coming down to what we are preserving- or attempting to preserve- I think the bad far outweighs the good here- and I believe that if Obama sidesteps this it will be his downfall.
President Obama will forever be linked to the Bush Torture Coverup and our great victory over the establishment will be torn down.
"It's a trap are you blind?" (Hamish) ~Braveheart
http://www.truthout.org/061009A
I understand the arguments and how our troops in additional harm's way and additional stain to our national image at a time when we are just starting to recover face in the world's eyes does us no justice.
At the same time, this has to be addressed-
The American taxpayer paid for and is still paying for Iraq...
When I read the latest revelation, and we will hear more and more as the days go by,
I ask myself what kind of people these must be.
Taking a great nation such as this to a long ride, making us look like fools.
Are we going to allow them to get away with this ?
Finally President Obama, we ASK you to take action against these perpetrators of crima against humanity in no uncertain terms.
READ: WE NEED JUSTICE, WE CRY FOR JUSTICE in the name of those who were maltreated, raped, tortured, killed, and sodomized by animals who call themselves humans.
MORE here - at last the truth will come out.
Seasonal Forgiveness Has a Limit. Bush and His Cronies Must Face a Reckoning
Heinous crimes are now synonymous with this US administration. If it isn't held to account, what does that say about us?
by Jonathan Freedland - Published on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
'Tis the night before Christmas and the season of goodwill. The mood is forgiving. Our faces warm with mulled wine, our tummies full, we're meant to slump in the armchair, look back on the year just gone and count our blessings - woozily agreeing to put our troubles behind us.
As in families, so in the realm of public and international affairs. And this December that feels especially true. The "war on terror" that dominated much of the decade seems to be heading towards a kind of conclusion. George Bush will leave office in a matter of weeks and British troops will leave Iraq a few months later. The first, defining phase of the conflict that began on 9/11 - the war of Bush, Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden - is about to slip from the present to the past tense. Bush and Blair will be gone, with only Bin Laden still in post. The urge to move on is palpable.
You can sense it in the valedictory interviews Bush and Dick Cheney are conducting on their way out. They're looking to the verdict of history now, Cheney telling the Washington Times last week: "I myself am personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road.".........
ENTIRE COMMENT - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/24/george-bush-guantanamo-bay-us-government
by Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith - Published on Thursday, December 18, 2008 by The Nation
As the officials of the Bush administration pack up in Washington and move into their posh suburban homes around the country, will they be able to rest easy, or will they be haunted by the fear that they will be held accountable for war crimes committed during their reign?
Some of Obama's own top appointees would undoubtedly receive scrutiny in an unconstrained investigation--Obama's reappointed defense secretary Robert Gates, for example, has had responsibility not only for Guantánamo but also for the incarceration of tens of thousands of Iraqis in prisons in Iraq like Camp Bucca, which the Washington Post described in a headline as "a Prison Full of Innocent Men," without even a procedure for determining their guilt or innocence--unquestionably a violation of the Geneva Conventions in and of itself..........
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/17/douthat/
by Glenn Greenwald @ salon.com
The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:
The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections.........ENTIRE POST - http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/15/rumsfeld/index.html
The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections.........
ENTIRE POST - http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/15/rumsfeld/index.html
Exclusive: Pentagon Pro-Troop Group Misspent Millions, Report Says
By Noah Shachtman @ wired.comDecember 12, 2008 | 4:12:00 PM
While the Pentagon preps for a new administration, a scandal from an earlier era is rearing its head.
A Defense Department project, supposedly designed to support U.S. troops, was used instead to channel millions of dollars to personal friends and allies of its chief. The "America Supports You," or ASY, program was led in a "questionable and unregulated manner," according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report, obtained by Danger Room. At least $9.2 million was "inappropriately transferred" by the project's managers. Much of that money served only to further promote ASY, instead of assisting servicemembers......
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/12/asy.html
by Joby Warrick
The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain......
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/11-7
Decade of the 1970's -
Sergio de Castro, Pinochet's 'Friedman Schooled' economics minister, said he could never have done it without Pinochet's iron fist backing him up. (Referring to the implementation of a brutal policy for 'Wiping the Slate Clean' in order to make way for the new religion of a U.S. sponsored, 'Free Market' ideology. The economists taught their students to look upon the population as a psychiatric patient, requiring 'Shock Treatment' in effort to cleanse it of its 'collective' cancer, simply because it - the population mindset - didn’t fit Friedman's free-market model.)
It was Nixon who would give the Friedman Chicago Boys and their professors something they had long dreamed of: a chance to prove that their capitalist utopia was more than a theory in a basement workshop – a shot at remaking a country from scratch. Democracy had been inhospitable to the Chicago Boys in Chile; dictatorship would prove an easier fit. – Klein
Chile’s coup, when it finally came, would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would reemerge, three decades later, in Iraq. The shock of the coup; financial shock; the other, Ewen Cameron’s shock, drug and sensory deprivation research, codified as torture techniques in the ‘Kubark’ manual and disseminated through extensive CIA training programs for Latin American police and military. – Klein
This is the same Free Market formula Reaganomics and Thatcherism, whole heartedly, imbued itself in. Amongst the Chicago Boy Institution’s professors included such luminaries of destruction as George Shultz, and Donald Rumsfeld; Rumsfeld describing Friedman and his colleagues “a cluster of geniuses.”
In 1985 John McCain visits Pinochet. McCain described the meeting with Pinochet “as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism.” Gee, I wonder who planted that bug into Pinochet’s psyche? Today, the commies have morphed into: Al Kaeda Everywhere, under the ubiquitous and pervasive - Global War on Terror. Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption.
In 1985 John McCain visits Pinochet. McCain described the meeting with Pinochet “as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism.” Gee, I wonder who planted that bug into Pinochet’s psyche? Today, the commies have morphed into: Al Kaeda Everywhere, under the ubiquitous and pervasive - Global War on Terror.
Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption.
Friedman's, Chicago Boys, during the decade of the 70's, had already proven their greed based markets worked in test beds such as Chile and Argentina, but only through the process of 'Cleaning the Slate' through Shock and Torture, where hundreds of thousands were 'disappeared', along with U.S. - CIA and Corporate complicity.
Friedman himself was forced to admit that his free-market ideology does not fit comfortably within democratically established Societies - which is why the 'CULTURAL SLATE MUST BE ERASED' to make way for the new free-market religion, a medicinal cleansing is required. In Friedman's world - the architect of Reaganomics - Democracy and Free-Markets are a contradiction in terms; diametrically opposed and at odds with each other. Its results: a small elite grow far wealthier while large portions of what had been the working class are discarded from the economy althgether and turned into surplus people.
What should be even more worrisome is that Friedman style, free-market ideology was sold to the Chinese. The Chicago Boys having deemed Democracies as inhospitable to their formula for quenching insatiable greed, China certainly would prove quite the opposite. Just look at the praise it received via the, so called, Olympics. Look where the free-market multi-nationals tend to find attraction and tend to gravitate towards - China and Dubai.
'Operation Iraqi Freedom' should be seen in its true light, for what it really is, a Neoconic cleansing, or 'clearing of the slate' in preparation for Iraqi Friedman!!
See: Negorponte - The Death Squad Ambassador
A lot of folks have criticized, questioning Obama's character for having rubbed shoulders with folks from the same institution from which Freidman launched his bloody counter-revolution against New Deal policies. But what people don't bother to check is that Obama is completely anti-Friedmanism. Having infiltrated the den of vipers, having discovered the enemy’s strategy, Barack of all peoples is the only one poised to expose them, or at least use their own tools against them for the greater good. I can still hear Barack's words, ringing in my ears, calling for transparency. Although Barack may have brushed shoulders with Friedman's school of financial thugs, does not make him one.
Friedman, along with, Nixon’s Secretary of State, Kissinger should be pointed out for what they are: Criminals wanted for murder! In fact, if Kissinger were to set foot in certain areas of South America, he would immediately be arrested as such and he knows it, thereby forcing him to utilize his 'Free Market Miles' frugally.
**STOP** and get a copy of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, read and re-read it while we await election day to arrive. Because, what Naomi brings to light within the pages of her expose, is precisely what WE are voting against in this election; decades of ruthless, predatory abuse of power, with greedy Corporatarch bottom-lines that are soaked with innocent blood, everywhere. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost.
Naomi does an excellent job in removing the haystack, exposing the piercing needle hidden within and explains everything.
Video of Naomi Klein speaking at the University of Chicago, invited by anti-Freidman group against erecting monument to Freidman. Naomi says each time Obama criticizes the current failed economic policies, his ratings shoot up.
Naomi Klein: Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for Communism
Have we met our enemy yet? Or, are we still unable to see the forest for the trees?
Proper education and sunlight are the BEST disinfectants!
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
The memory of the American public and media is very short. The current election climate underlines it well, as the man who was calling himself a "true conservative" and boasting of his support of Bush only months ago is now getting away with portraying himself as a 'maverick reformer'. - But that's not what I was going to soapbox about today. Rather, I was thinking about the quagmire in Iraq, and how we got there in the first place. Here's how I see it.
...there was consensus about Iraq's weapons program. Well, foreign minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer prominently spoke out about his doubts before the war to Donald Rumsfeld.
If Senator McCain would have read the NIE in 2002, they might have agreed with members of the Intelligence Committee that the evidence is very thin.
C-Span showed McCain talking to his supporters. He was practically reading from a prepared text. I’m thinking McCain is not just going to be Bush’s third term. He is another republican puppet.
GW Bush had been the puppet of Karl Rove and Don Rumsfeld. With their departure, only Dick Cheney remains the puppeteer. Bush’s voice is still that of Condelezza Rice. It is not clear who McCain’s puppeteers are just yet, and whose voice will speak on his behalf should he become the second puppet in the White House.
Bush and McCain remind me of the Hollywood movie, Dumb and Dumber, even though it is hard to say who is the dumber. I think, in reality, the Republicans are trying to have us live through a Dumb, then a Senile administration back to back.
“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With a brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone; our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary is closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” “An average American family works an entire year to generate$6,000 in income taxes. Here we spill many times that amount every hour by duplication and by inattention.” “Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” “We must change for a simple reason – the world has – and we have not yet changed sufficiently. The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable, to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.”
“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With a brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone; our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary is closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”
“An average American family works an entire year to generate$6,000 in income taxes. Here we spill many times that amount every hour by duplication and by inattention.”
“Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” “We must change for a simple reason – the world has – and we have not yet changed sufficiently. The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable, to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.”
Spoken by Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, in an address that announced an end to the S.O.P. of waste and fiscal mismanagement at the Pentagon, delivered on September 10, 2001; the day before the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What would have been an excellent, long-called-for policy shift (from a most unexpected quarter), tossed out with the ‘Ba’ath’ water, so to say.
In the days immediately following, George W. Bush called for $20 Billion to fund the ‘War on Terror’. Since then, he has demanded and gotten a blank check for debacle after debacle, all sanctified by ‘them-or-us’, anti-terrorist bluster and approved by a spineless, bi-partisan, rubber-stamp Congress.
(The cowards in Congress just approved another $257,000,000,000 (two-hundred-fifty-seven billion dollar) emergency supplement to fund the wars through the end of Bush’s term. )
(Any wonder there is no money for universal health care, education or infrastructure projects such as reinforced levees on the Mississippi River? That astronomical figure – more than a quarter of a trillion dollars - is only to help pay for the next 7 months of these hateful wars which so rapaciously destroy lives. Someone should check the Congress for drugs or implants. )
From being on the verge of tightening federal purse-strings to the current open-vault-door policy of hysteria-driven defense spending - financing the building of new nuclear submarines to counter the non-existent Al-Qaeda navy and new super-sonic jet fighters to combat the air force that Al-Qaeda doesn’t have – was a most fortuitous swing of events for the Pentagon and its contractors. This catastrophic bit of malevolent serendipity is what author and journalist, Robert Scheer refers to as the ‘gift of 911’ to the military-industrial complex.
The military-industrial complex; since Eisenhower used that cumbersome phrase in his farewell speech, it has seen plenty of use. Though its initial axiomatic power still resonates, it’s a stock phrase, shop-worn. Moreover, from its inception it has been inadequate. Its failing, despite its power as an axiom of unalloyed truth, is that it hides the people who operate this complex and extremely profitable relationship between government bureaucracy and big business.
It is time to put a face on these people in the Pentagon, in the Congress and in the Defense Department. It is long past time to strip the mask of anonymity from leaders of the arms industry, their lobbyists and their agents. What is needed is a more pertinent, personalizing epithet which exposes the active players of the military-industrial complex.
Pentacrats (noun) 1. The autocrats and oligarchs of the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense and arms industry who in concert advocate robbing the taxpayer to fund boondoggles, pork-barrel spending and bloated defense budgets for personal profit and political gain. 2. Their agents and functionaries.
Pentacrats (noun) 1. The autocrats and oligarchs of the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense and arms industry who in concert advocate robbing the taxpayer to fund boondoggles, pork-barrel spending and bloated defense budgets for personal profit and political gain.
2. Their agents and functionaries.
Pentacrats have usurped the power of the citizenry to influence policy and thus the course taken by the ship of state, in order to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the citizens of the United States; deeply effecting, most deleteriously, nearly every aspect of the daily lives of the American people. Furthermore, the effect of Pentacratic policies on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and every other country around the world where armament and weaponry contracted and manufactured by Pentacrats, furnished and financed by the Pentacrats in Washington are used to violently suppress democratic movements, insurgencies and up-risings, is even more dire. A maleficent mélange of death, terror and suffering is what those people get on a daily basis.
Pentacrats.
What the precepts of Pentacracy boil down to is the super-rich getting richer by many other, much poorer men, women and children dying bloody, horrible deaths. To paraphrase the old song, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get murdered.’
The American citizenry must demand that this complex be dismantled, boondoggle by boondoggle, pork barrel by pork barrel, until the Department of Defense and Congress answer once again to the voice of the true, absolute, constitutionally recognized and affirmed rulers of our republic: the people of the United States of America. This demand must be constant and unrelenting, not solely reliant on participation in general elections, but rather with consistent, perennial involvement from the grass-roots to the Belt-way and the National Mall.
Defeating the agenda of the Pentacrats - and in so doing, returning control of the nation to its rightful rulers - is the gift we can bequeath, not only to the children of America but to the children of the world.
It is the right thing to do, Senator Obama.
A McCain administration would likely:
A McCain administration would rule by fear, perceive right in terms of military might and subscribe to the idea of “do as I say and not as I do.” As a consequence, instead of rebuilding the image of America as a model of justce and civility, it would further sully respect for this nation throughout the world.
Read the details HERE
As a non-American, I watched the events of September 11, 2001 with horror, as did millions of us. We were all Americans that day and in the days that followed. Some in the world celebrated. I wondered why...
But as Bush and the Butchers began to rev up their Iraq invasion plans, I began to understand. WMDs? Saddam connected to Bin Laden? Are these lies ... from an American government?
The Americans don't lie, do they? Do they? I saw an Arab Iraqi engineer who had worked on Iraq's WMD programme years earlier say that he KNEW that no work had been done on this since just after the first Gulf War. He KNEW. Now I KNEW. So Bush knew, didn't he? So did Cheney, Rumsfeld and all those other neocons. And still they were going to attack Iraq?
Now I KNEW something else: Some in the world don't trust America. "Some in the world celebrated", I said above. Now I KNEW why!
It's not you, the folks, it's them, the Butchers. OK, there were attacks on the US long before 2001. But why make things one million times worse? One of the 'hit songs' of Bush and the Butchers was "It'll Make America Safer". What? WHAT? It multiplied the dangers for all of us. All of us.
In Iraq, the Iraqi Museum was ransacked, there was widespread looting, there was Abu Ghraib and civilians killed in the hundreds of thousands. Another Vietnam developed.
Then I really KNEW. America has to change it's ways. Then Barack came along. 'Nuff said. It's obvious. That's why I'm here ... from Europe.
