Sleaze, Deceit and Torture

 

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of UN trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly.”

— Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson.

“American and British [soldiers] are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years. What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?”

— Riverbend’s Blog, November 8, 2005.

“They arrested me in my house in front of my family, covered my eyes, and tied my hands to the back on October 5, 2005 . . . They occupied the hospital for 8 days and made it their office. The first day they beat me on my eyes, nose, back, hands, legs . . .”

— Doctor Walid Al-Obeidi, Director of Haditha General Hospital, quoted in Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches, November 7, 2005.

Few people in the world trust anything George Bush says on any subject. But there are still some True Believers in the US who would applaud him and emit animal squeals and hoots of approval were he to declare he was the embodiment of the Second Coming of Christ.

His credibility is zero among thinking people, but the domestic and international damage he can still do is immense. This third rate fellow and his vile cohorts are now circling their wagons, and some of us remember with despair what happened in the Nixon administration when it had a similar siege obsession, because what little moral sense had obtained in that sleazy empire vanished entirely and the White House became even more remote and detached from the world. The announcement that members of Bush’s staff are to be counseled in ethics is not funny (so please stop laughing : stop at once, I beg . . .), but it is indicative of the last-ditch mentality — because the stinking crumbling bunker must be defended at all costs.

Bush cannot deny what was revealed about oil-planning by Colonel Wilkerson, and it is little wonder that the content of Cheney’s Energy Task Force discussions have been declared a national secret, not to be disclosed on any account. Because as sure as fate the record would show that Wilkerson was only touching the surface when he recounted the lunatic (and criminal) scheme to “take the oilfields in the Middle East”.

Which brings us to Riverbend’s wise observation that Bush and his zealots have succeeded in bringing Iraq ever closer to becoming a theocratic regime closely allied with Iran — Bush Washington’s worst enemy on the planet apart, possibly, from North Korea. And when the oil weapon becomes serious, there won’t be a drop for America from two of the world’s biggest producers, because Bush has destroyed the trust and admiration for his country that so many people in the region used to have.

Think about that, Cheney, you nauseating blot, because this is where your malevolent scheming has led your country.

In the course of pushing Iraq towards a government of extremist Islamists who will delight in denying oil to the US should the fancy take them, Bush’s occupying troops have discarded even a pretence of humanity, as their disgusting treatment of Doctor Walid demonstrates. This is but one of thousands of instances of hideous brutality against Iraqis by ill-disciplined and vengeance-seeking soldiery whose vicious excesses have created hatred of their country that will last for generations.

But to Bush, this is nothing. It is not important. Because everything is going to plan, according to the White House.

You doubt he really thinks this? But reflect : you are of sound mind and aware of what is happening in the world. He receives no real news of what is happening outside his fortress. Both domestic and international news is filtered through morally-challenged zealots who cannot, will not, and — we are told, now — dare not, present unpleasant facts to this bullying coward.

One of the most theatrical and deceitfully misleading political speeches ever delivered by George W Bush, the patron and patsy of the neocons, was staged in Virginia October 28.

His address was entirely political in intent and content. So it is sad that in the audience, mindlessly mooing ‘Hooo-ahhhh’, were dozens of gung-ho veterans of past wars and a bunch of senior military officers who sat there and reinforced the conviction of the draft-dodging Bush that he is a macho ‘War Commander’.

These senior officers were worshipping at the feet of their Commander-in-Chief. They were mentally prostrating themselves at the decayed and festering trotters of a porcine prat who has sent men to die for nothing.

Bush announced “I want to thank the military commanders who are here, Lieutenant General Anthony Jones and Lieutenant General Mark Curran, Lieutenant General Bob Wagner, Major General Jim Solligan. Thank you all for being here. John McCarthy — Major General McCarthy of the Marine Corps, Rear Admiral John Acton, Rear Admiral Steve Turcott. I’m honored you all took time to come.”

This was despicable and tawdry stuff. His naming of these pathetic puppets was aimed quite flagrantly at the patriotism nerve of America, which is a very sensitive fiber. These military officers attended a Republican Party political gathering of their own free will. Even given the limited savoir faire of many senior US officers, they must have known what they were letting themselves in for, which was a requirement to demonstrate enthusiastic approval of a man whose orders have caused the deaths of over 2000 of their comrades and the hideous maiming in body and mind of thousands of others.

The presence of senior officers at an entirely Republican cheer-fest was bizarre. They may be Republicans — and they have every right to be, should they choose — but to publicly support a rabidly Republican political jamboree was bizarre. The example they set to thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines is that supporting the Republican party is Good. Perhaps they think that this is what they are paid for. Well ; happy promotions, guys. Don’t you just love the medals?

And after his sword-brandishing patriotic beginning Bush gave the predictable and mandatory lead-in about 9/11, like a desperate dog drawn back to its cold and congealing vomit.

He repeated the mantra of his faltering, last-gasp, faux patriotic neocons by declaring :

“On the morning of September the 11th, 2001, we saw the destruction that the terrorists intend for this nation. We know they want to strike again. Our nation has made a clear choice. We will confront this mortal danger to our humanity, and we will not tire and we will not rest until the war on terror is won. (Applause.) In the four years since September the 11th, the evil that reached our shores has reappeared on other days, in other places, in Mombassa and Casablanca . . . and Baghdad and elsewhere.”

Yes indeed ; there have been many atrocities round the world. But the only reason there are atrocities in Iraq, and especially Baghdad, is because Bush invaded that country, which had done America no harm and posed no threat whatever to the US or its people.

It is forgotten that for three years before the Bush War dozens of US and British strike aircraft scoured two thirds of Iraq every day, photographing every square inch and trying to provoke reaction from the Iraqis in order to provide justification for them to attack. Each time an Iraqi radar was switched on, they obliterated it, to make things easier for the forthcoming war that Bush had already ordered. They killed only a few goat herders and suchlike nonentities in their live-fire yippee excursions. What the hell? — they were only ragheads. They had wives and children, maybe ; who knows? And who gives a damn, anyway? What’s a human life to a jet-jockey who is given open slather to unleash a radar-seeking missile whose effectiveness the crazed scientists want to analyze?

For years there was 24/7 surveillance of Iraq by US technical means that can hear an ant fart from fifty paces and see a bee pee at five hundred.

The US electronic interception capability is mind-blowing in what it scoops up and records. You want to know the precise place on a map of a Mongolian Army postal section? Or what the officer commanding the 503rd Mobile Bath and Laundry Unit in the Third Military District of Kyrgyzstan said to the colonel of the 871st Death’s Head Regiment on the phone at 0933 hours on Saturday July 9? —- It’s all there. And lots more. And we are expected to believe, after all that surveillance of Iraq, over years and years of recording Saddam’s conversations (and millions of others) which produced absolutely nothing about any sort of weapons, never mind the Cheney-Rice ‘Mushroom Clouds’, that the neocons’ interpretation of national intelligence was more accurate than that of expert analysts. But Bush cannot admit that his cronies were wrong in every statement they gave him to spout to justify his war on Iraq.

In similar fashion, in no speech his speechwriters give him to deliver can Bush admit that hundreds of atrocities in Iraq have been committed by the troops who so blindly follow him. (Hooo-Ahhhh.) The fact that an enemy who had nothing to do with Iraq carried out an atrocity against America on 9/11 does not make it mandatory for American troops to beat up doctors or kill other civilians in Iraq, although the attitude of thousands of soldiers is that the lives of Iraqis don’t matter and that their slaughter is justified by “9/11”. Back to the Bush dog vomit.

The Big Lie has worked, and thousands of ingenuous GIs have been made to believe that they are at war in Iraq to avenge the Twin Towers. To be sure, they are of limited intelligence ; but what about the “military commanders” who Bush so publicly welcomed to his war-justifying tirade in patriotic, freedom-loving Virginia? Are they stupid, as well?

The president who made the choice for war is now disapproved of by 60 per cent of the citizens of his country. Fifty-five per cent of Americans say “the Bush administration intentionally misled the public in making its case for war [on Iraq]”. 68 percent state that their country is on the “wrong track”.

Millions of Americans and many outsiders have known that Bush is on the wrong track for years. He entered that track when he obeyed the neocons and chose to confront the world by ordering every nation to follow Washington or be deemed an enemy.

Some of his closest supporters are being charged with gross financial irregularities, lying on oath, and other squalid crimes. His vice president is pressuring Congress to approve laws permitting torture by a cabalistic crew of clandestine cowboys. His secret agencies are out of control, are subject to no laws, and have interrogation camps around the world that would have been admired by the semi-human inquisitors who worshipped and followed Stalin and Hitler.

In May this year the White House scorned an observation by the head of Amnesty International that the US was operating “the Gulag of our time”. The foolish spokesman for Bush, the incompetent liar Scott McClellan, declared that Amnesty’s statements were “ridiculous and unsupported by the facts.” But now we realize the CIA gulag is not only extensive but a suppurating sore on the body of America’s democracy.

The soldiers of Bush have committed and continue to commit appalling atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. They burn, kill and destroy without fear of judicial proceedings, and their jamborees of torture and murder, when they cannot be disguised, are met with derisory lenience. They try to disguise their excesses by lying. Then they try to cover up the facts once their lies are revealed for what they are, which is dishonorable practice by the very people who should live by a spotless code of honor, and in whom there should be ultimate trust by their country and indeed the world. But they, in turn and as a result of their savagery, are subjected to ferocious retributive attacks by equally barbaric resistance forces on a scale that beggars description, which is kept from the public by the Pentagon’s knaves of spin and fabrication and their allies in the media.

The entire Bush administration is rotten. It is vile, stinking and corrupt to the depths of its malevolent inner being. It is ever-ready to attack, smear and destroy anyone who does not agree with every one of its vicious policies. It relishes and encourages sleaze, deceit and torture. It has alienated most of America’s formerly closest allies.

But all true friends of the United States hope that the American public will vote in the 2006 mid-terms to restrain, fetter and curb this evil regime.

BRIAN CLOUGHLEY writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

 

 

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.