Tag: George Bush

Chris Hedges visited a soldier in his home.

I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.”  He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq.  He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him. . . .

This “telling of a soldier” is very sensitive and I think should simply be read without “pieces” so to speak.

Here, then is his (Chris’) article:  “One of First Iraq Veterans to Publicly Oppose War Will Die for Our Sins” Monday, 11 March 2013 09:44  By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

Chris’ article so gripped author, William River Pitts, that he responded in

“Waking From My Moral Coma,” Wednesday, 13 March 2013 09:07, Truthout | Op-Ed

In this article, Pitts questions his own moral fibre:

I’ve been having trouble with mirrors lately. When I look these days, I see a bastard staring back, a stranger, a guy who should be ashamed of himself.

He is.

A long, long time ago, I wrote this: “America is an idea, a dream. You can take away our cities, our roads, our crops, our armies, you can take all of that away, and the idea that is America will still be there, as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind.”

I still believe that, and therein lies the problem. I am a sucker for that dream, that idea, and for the last few years I allowed it to seduce me. . .. .

But Pitts takes it much further from there:

and when I look in the mirror, I cannot meet my own eyes. I spent all those years fighting against everything that is ending Tomas Young’s life, I made documenting their serial crimes my life’s work…and then I let it slide, because Bush was gone, and I couldn’t summon the necessary energy to remain outraged over the fact that they all got away with the crime of the millennium scot-free.

It is enough.

I am finished with the moral geometry that says this is better than that, which makes this good. This is not good; this is, in fact, intolerable. Allowing the perpetrators of war crimes – widely televised ones at that – to retain their good name and go on Sunday talk shows as if they had anything to offer besides their ideology of murder and carnage is intolerable. Entertaining the idea that the billions we spend preparing for war cannot be touched, and so the elderly and the infirm and the young and the weak and the voiceless must pay the freight instead, is intolerable.

Read the rest of Pitts’ article ‘here’!

Every single American should be compelled to read the foregoing article by Chris Hedges, as well as William Rivers Pitt commenting on the article and himself.  

Former Chief of Staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson is now adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. Wilkerson is also Professorial Lecturer in the Honors Program of the “National Security Decision Making” senior seminar at George Washington University.

His last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02).

Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army, including as Deputy Executive Officer to then-General Colin Powell when he commanded the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and as Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997.

Here Wilkerson discusses with Real News Network’s Paul Jay what he terms “the culpability, the negligence of the [Bush] administration” over what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Former Presidential Senior Advisor turned Fox News Political Analyst Karl Rove interviews former President George W. Bush six months from today at his Crawford Texas ranch, and finds a broken, pathetic ex-president who’s reverted to his former days of booze and cocaine since leaving the brightly lit world stage he inhabited for eight years.

Rove finds the venerable ex-president who sacrificed so much and made it his life’s mission to protect America from the hordes of evil terrorists world wide swimming across the oceans with knives in their teeth to kill American babies in their beds has sunk into a paranoid hallucinatory state in which he’s broken all the mirrors in his house out of fear that they are “looking at me” every time he passes one, and who lives in the sad, pathetic delusion that President Obama and the Democrats fully intend to have him arrested, charged, and finally held accountable for what he terms “all my sins” – his war crimes.

Today is Friday, January 29, the year 2010.  Remember this full moon evening.  

According to Newsweek’s Declassified Blog, http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs…

two Department of Justice anonymous sources said that a Senior DOJ official who finalized an Office of Professional Responsibility report, changed the assessment of the torture memo’s creator’s  Jay Bybee and John Yoo’s behavior to “poor judgement.”

But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.)  The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action-which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.  

/snip

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo-including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture-were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

John Yoo, a graduate of Harvard and Yale law school, who clerked for SC Justice Clarence Thomas, and served as a torture enabler in the Bush administration at the Dept of Justice from 2001 to 2003, is currently a law professor at the University of CA at Berkeley. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/ph…

Jay Bybee, a graduate of Brigham Young University and BYU’s J Reuben Clark Law School, helped John Yoo write the torture rationalization memos for President Bush during his Dept of Justice Office of Legal Counsel tenure from 2001 to 2003.  Bybee currently serves on the US Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGe…

It is not known at the current time when they will be displaying “poor judgement” again, nor how many fatalities might result.

Like everything else the Bush administration touched the capture or attempted capture of Osama Bin Laden was a complete failure. As the world watched the U.S. military had pursued Bin Laden and his deputies to the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. Trapped in the caves there  Donald Rumsfeld then U.S. Defense Secretary decides that Bin Landen’s capture should be handled by the Afghan army while the U.S. army watched. Osama Bin Laden and his deputies escaped into Pakistan where they are still believed to be.  Think about the consequences of that decision. Al Qaida though weakened at that moment would not only continue to exist but draw recruits as extremists saw Osama Bin Laden’s escape as a victory over America and its allies in the so called War on Terror.

Even if they had captured Bin Laden would that have destroyed Al Qaida of course not but they wouldn’t be the potent symbol they are today thanks to the complete incompetence of George Bush and his advisors.  

So you can bet this will be completely underreported in the United States, or not at all.

I find it almost humorously ironic that a man who stole an election in the United States then invaded a country where he set up a faux Democracy, and the puppet that he installed has now proceeded to steal his own election.

All the while we spend $133 million dollars a day — $5.5 million bucks an HOUR, 24/7 to have our military in said puppet’s country, loading taxpayer money into Big Corporate’s pockets.  

It’s almost a perfect perpetual-motion machine of corruption.

This from The Toronto Star:

Afghan vote called ‘mockery’

On the videotape, a couple of mooks are shown blithely filling out a slew of ballots for President Hamid Karzai. Tick-mark. Tick-mark. Tick-mark.

Says one to the other: “We should at least include a few for Dr. Abdullah, don’t you think?”

The man in question, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, can’t prevent a bemused chortle from escaping his lips as he watches the video clips, surreptitiously shot, that purport to show brazen vote-rigging by Karzai boosters of both minnow and barracuda variety – from anonymous foot soldiers to the head of the Independent Election Commission in Ghazni province.

It is, indeed, to laugh. It is, perchance, to cry. It might become a matter of vocal citizen demonstration, too, beyond the formal complaints – some 100 – that Team Abdullah has already registered with authorities over alleged fraud in Afghanistan’s national elections.

This presidential vote, the second-ever democratic poll in Afghanistan, but the first organized and mounted by Afghans themselves, is rapidly turning into a wreck.