Tag: George W. Bush

Apr 06 2009

If War Is Hell

What does that make the Bushes?

Photo by Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

New York Times:

For the first time in 18 years, the Pentagon granted the press access on Sunday night to cover the arrival of a coffin to Dover Air Force Base from overseas.

The coffin, draped in a flag and bearing the body of Air Force Staff Sgt. Philip Myers of Hopewell, Va, was unloaded from a government aircraft by the military honor guard. The 30-year-old Mr. Myers was killed by an improvised explosive device near Helmand Province in Afghanistan on April 4, according to the Defense Department.

A ban on news coverage of returning war dead, which had been in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, was lifted by the Obama administration following a review of the policy by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Mar 29 2009

Splitting the Sky Tried Arresting “The Decider”

 The United States of America gave its president the power to decide if anyone, including US citizens, were enemies of the state or “enemy combatants” during the Bush Administration.  Henceforth, the CIA kidnapped people from their homes or off streets. Against International Law, human beings were: forced into vans, taken to CIA prisons, tortured and detained indefinitely without trial and without a lawyer, ripped away from family, ripped away from friends, ripped away from work, and ripped away from everything that they had ever worked for in their entire lives.

ertijjcs Pictures, Images and Photos

Mar 07 2009

It’s always just a few bad apples…

 

“It’s such a disservice to everyone else, that a few bad apples can create some large problems for everybody.” – Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, May 4, 2004.

The war in Iraq has brought much shame and dishonor to the United States. The Bush administration, for example, blamed the prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib on a “few bad apples”. While the evidence shows that senior officials in the Bush White House planned and authorized the use of torture, only those “few bad apples” have been held accountable.

Another such alleged “bad apple” is now on trial in Portland, Oregon. This time the trial is for theft.

The Oregonian reports U.S. Army Capt. Michael Dung Nguyen is accused of stealing more than $690,000 in cash from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program while stationed in Iraq between April 2007 and June 2008. Nguyen is 28 years old and a 2004 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

How is it that our government is able to hold men and women lower down on the chain of command responsible for their actions, but not hold accountable the men and women who are responsible for sending more than $690,000 in cash to Iraq in the first place?

Mar 07 2009

Internment Camps: Is It All Too Much For Us?

While the footage below may or may not be of the internment camps in question (and I think it probably isn’t), I applaud its producer’s efforts in the face of the main media’s failure to inform the public.


That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney’s Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

Feb 13 2009

Scott Horton: Yes, They Hid Torture Evidence from Obama

Scott Horton has followed up on the UK Guardian story, which I also wrote on last night, describing how Reprieve attorney Clive Stafford Smith, whose organization is helping defend Guantanamo detainee and British resident Binyam Mohamed, had information he was sending to President Obama on Mohamed’s torture censored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

At Daily Kos, a number of readers were incredulous at the claims I, and by implication, Stafford Smith was making about Obama being kept out of the information loop, suggesting that I was prone to conspiracy theories, or a dupe for grandstanding by Mohamed’s attorneys. Some suggested either the Guardian or myself or both had completely misunderstood the situation.

But Horton, who has been following this story carefully, and is known to have excellent sources, reported on the Guardian article much as I had, and added this:

Feb 03 2009

Obama Backpedals on Torture, Renditions, State Secrecy (Updated)

The Los Angeles Times had an article over the weekend by Greg Miller, describing the decision by the Obama administration to maintain, in some form, the secret rendition program of the CIA. The program began under the Clinton administration, and was accelerated President Bush. Full details of the program are classified.

In legal terms, extraordinary rendition is the “extrajudicial transfer of a person from one State to another.” But for most of us, rendition remains a fancy term for kidnapping, and involves snatching suspected “terrorists” off the streets, or from airports, as in the case of innocent Canadian citizen Maher Arar, snatched out of JFK airport, and secretly flown to Syria. Maher spent over ten months in a “grave-like” cell, and was beaten and tortured into making a false confession.

Jan 29 2009

The Foreign Press, Salon.com, & the Army Field Manual

On September 7, 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson and Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Lt. Gen. John Kimmons showed up at a State Department foreign press briefing on the then-new DoD Directive 2310.10E (on its detainee program) and the also then brand-new Army Field Manual on interrogations (see note at end of post re links). Only the day before, Kimmons and Stimson had held a news briefing for U.S. reporters at the Department of Defense on the same subjects, which I covered in a recent article at AlterNet.

While few bloggers paid attention to the September 6 DoD briefing (except one noted reporter, as I’ll note later), most likely that was because President Bush had one of his infrequent news conferences the same day, and this one was a blockbuster. Bush acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA prison network. He also announced he was ordering the transfer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other “high-value detainees” to Guantánamo Bay to be put on trial.

Jan 29 2009

Born With a Snake in Both of His Fists

Jokerman danced to Election Fraud’s Tune,

Stole the White House twice by the light of the moon,

Whoa-oa-oa . . . whoa-oa-oa-oa-oa . . . Jokerman.  

Karl Rove RIP Pictures, Images and Photos

Jan 21 2009

The End

George W. Bush slinked quietly out of Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. Bush’s send off, much like his campaign stops, were closed to all but the most loyal few.

So for the histories of the past eight years, here is the final chapter of George W. Bush, or Occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

From the Washington Post:

Following the inauguration, Bush and his wife, Laura, boarded a Marine helicopter for Andrews Air Force Base, where they attended a private 20-minute going-away rally in one of the cavernous hangars used to store presidential airplanes…

Bush was headed for his boyhood home town of Midland, Tex., the site of a welcome-home rally intended as an echo of a goodbye celebration held there in January 2001…

The Andrews rally and the flight from Washington were closed to the press corps, with whom Bush had a rocky and often distant relationship. Only a handful of journalists and photographers showed up for a former president who once lured the attention of planeloads of correspondents. About 1,000 people gathered in the hangar and heard extensive remarks by the departing vice president, Dick Cheney, who was in a wheelchair because of a moving-related injury.

The traveling party was a gathering of old friends, including former commerce secretary Don Evans, former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales and former political adviser Karl Rove. Bush’s father and mother, daughters and other relatives were also on the flight.

From the Wall Street Journal:

On board, they watched a surprise 30-minute video including clips of speeches and memorable moments, as well as comments by aides – some funny, some sad. Mr. and Mrs. Bush spent the rest of the flight walking around the plane’s cabins chatting, as supporters dined on crabcakes and sipped beers.

Approaching Midland, the presidential jet flew low over the city’s downtown, so the occupants could get a look at the crowd — and the crowd, estimated at about 20,000, could get a look at the big plane.

And finally from the LA Times:

Late Tuesday afternoon, Fox News was the only major national TV outlet that carried a live telecast of former President Bush’s homecoming speech to cheering supporters in Midland, Texas…

The rest of the networks, however, did not see the Bush address as news fit to broadcast.

Jan 20 2009

The First Official Act

When Barack Obama becomes president, tomorrow, his first official act should be to ban torture. Nothing else would more clearly delineate the full and final break this nation is making from the legal and moral turpitude that was the Bush Administration. For logistical and practical reasons, Obama cannot immediately end the war or shut down Gitmo- although both must be done as quickly as is possible. He cannot immediately stop our economic free-fall. He cannot immediately begin to repair the possibly irreversible damage done by Bush to the environment. But he can ban torture. He can order all government entities that are in any way involved with torture to stop immediately. He can make clear that any government officials still involved with torture will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and possibly turned over to international officials for possible war crimes violations.

Corporate media and other Beltway types want Obama neither to end torture nor to prosecute the Bush officials who signed off on it. The law necessitates that he do both. And in this ostensible nation of laws, no one should be above the law. If we are, indeed, a nation of laws.

Last Friday, Big Tent Democrat wrote the following:

…the Beltway wants the torture policy of the Bush Administration swept under the rug and forgotten…

With all due respect to one of my favorite bloggers, I don’t think he goes far enough. The Beltway doesn’t just want Bush’s torture regime swept away and forgotten, it wants Obama to be complicit in it. Because the enabling of the Beltway and the corporate media made them complicit in it.

The best thing our newly inaugurated president can do, tomorrow, is to attempt to begin to establish a fundamental sense of moral and legal integrity in this nation. And to stop hurting people for no reason. As of tomorrow, solving and resolving all of Bush’s countless messes, crimes, and disasters becomes Barack Obama’s responsibility. Barack Obama’s first act as president should be to ban torture.

Jan 17 2009

Lie to Me – Go Ahead and Lie to Me

On the eve of a new and historic Presidency, one I have yearned for and supported, I find myself increasingly unable to savor our victory.  We are still at war, still killing innocent people for bogus reasons, and there is every reason to believe that we are not about to stop our militaristic bullying of our neighbors on this planet.  Otherwise we would not be escalating that idiotic and immoral war in Afghanistan – or opening a billion dollar embassy bigger then the Vatican in Baghdad, along with fourteen ‘enduring’ bases across the country.  There are too many indications that not nearly enough has changed.  We are still firmly entrenched in the idiotic war business, people are still being tortured, there is too much money still being stolen and too many lies are still being told.

Jan 16 2009

Failed Nation -The United States Of America

In the immortal words of Pogo “We have met the enemy… and he is us” That prophetic little possum utter those words in 1952, back when we were still mostly the good guys. Before the South American Death Squads and regime change and invading a sovereign nation for oil and murdering 1.3 million innocent people in the process.

Now that Bush and Cheney have admitted to torture and our new AG has reaffirmed what we already knew, torture is a war crime, illgal, forbidden and a useless occupation, will they be prosecuted. Before we get all silly about the change Obama brings, the new America, the return of the rule of law, understand we really have no choice but prosecute them for their crimes. Follow me below the fold for why it isn’t an option and there is no moving forward, no future and no hope, no redemption until we do.

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