imprisonbush.com

While Bush is gearing up to exhort us all to “stay the course” in Iraq, and Condi comes on TV telling us about the “quiet process” of democratization in Iraq, keep reading page 10 of your local paper. That’s where you’ll read about the other “quiet process” going on in Iraq–the slide toward civil war. The Washington Post (6/15/05) reports that the Kurds, often touted by the Bush administration as the model Iraqi minority, have been snatching people off the streets and holding them without due process of law. Estimates of the number of captives range as high as 600, and the U.S. military admits to 180.

U.S. General Alan Gayhart has said, “I can tell you that the coalition forces absolutely do not condone it.” And what do they do to stop it? He didn’t say…

And who are these captives, grabbed off the streets in violation of Iraqi law? Mostly ethnic minorities: Sunnis, Shiites, and ethnic Turks. The very north of Iraq, sometimes referred to as “Iraqi Kurdistan,” or “Kurdistan” for short, has been autonomous for years. They’ve got their own army, their own police, even their own currency. What’s the major holdup on the constitution? The Kurds don’t want to give that all up.

So what’s wrong with an ethnic group banding together and forming its own government after the collapse of an authoritarian regime? Well, remember the former Yugoslavia? Lots can go wrong. It’s called Balkanization.

Right now, there are conflicting trends toward unification and Balkanization in Iraq, and it’s not at all clear which will eventually triumph. And just for the record, regardless of what Tom “Let’s-Escalate-The-War-Against-an-Insurgency-Because-That’s-Been-a-Good-Idea- Historically-Oh-By-the-Way-Isn’t-Enron-Fabulous” Freedman (my new name for him) says about my secret wishes, I really do want peace and democracy to prevail, everywhere. It’s really better for people than war and chaos. Of course, that won’t convince Tom “I-Know-What-Liberals-All-Secretly-Think-Even-Though-None-of-Them-Say-It” Freedman. But he’s on crack.

In any case, is this all Bush’s fault? How could he have possibly imagined that a multi-ethnic nation, in which an authoritarian central government is suddenly removed, might descend into civil wars of ethnic cleansing between enclaves divided along ethnic and religious lines? Gosh, I don’t know, you’d have to go all the way back to the 1990′s to see an example of that.

Why didn’t anybody warn the Bush administration about this? Oh, wait. They did.

Here’s what some people said before we invaded Iraq: “By decapitating the Iraqi dictatorship, we run the risk of Iraq as a nation collapsing into warring factions aligned around religion and ethnicity.”
Here’s what the Bush administration heard: “Blah, blah, blah. Henny Penny! Henny Penny! The sky is falling!”

Now here’s what people are asking the Bush administration: “What are your strategies for preventing Iraq from descending into full-scale civil war, and how do you plan to respond if it does?”
And here’s what the Bush administration hears: “Blah blah blah. Things were better under Saddam. We don’t believe in America or have confidence in its military.”

The Bush administration has pretty much made a policy of not grounding itself in the facts, listening to warnings, or learning from history. They say they don’t have to, they’re above that. Maybe we should all chip in and buy them a hearing aid, a history textbook, and a reality check. Oh, yeah, and a frickin’ clue.

Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld perfectly expressed the mess that the Bush Administration has gotten America into. In contradiction to the years of pro-war propaganda that the Bush White House hs been pumping, out, the Secretary of Defense admitted that the war in Iraq will probably go on for many years to come. When asked to estimate an actual figure, Rumsfeld speculated that a year of 12 years would not be out of the question.

At the same time, Rumsfeld concluded that the United States cannot win the war. “We’re not going to win against the insurgency,” he said.

So, the Bush Administration started a war it new would be illegal, and is now pushing for permission to continue that war for as long as a dozen years, in spite of the fact that Bush Administration officials admit that the war cannot be won.

It’s bad enough for the Bush Administration to commit war crimes. It’s downright pathetic that the Bush Administration cannot even see those war crimes through to some kind of victory.

12 more years of war leading the United States to defeat – that’s a recipe for the ruination of America.

We don’t have to follow Bush down this path of criminal failure. The crimes have been committed, and the Congress now only has to gather the courage to start the process of prosecution in motion. The damage is mounting. Before it becomes fatal, we need the Congress to investigate, impeach and imprison Bush.

A new report based on interviews with former interrogators indicates that Medical doctors working at the Guantanamo Bay American military base helped American prison guards there inflict psychological torture on prisoners there. In one case, for example, a physician told guards that a particular prisoner had a severe phobia of darkness. Thanks to the doctor’s tip, the guards threw the prisoner into the dark until the prisoner was compliant with their demands. Not only did that physician merely inform the guards of the existence of the phobia, but, according to the New York Times, “suggested ways in which [the phobia] could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.” The New York Times also states,

“…authors of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine this week said their interviews with doctors who helped devise and supervise the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo showed that the program was explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees as a means to obtaining intelligence.”

One former interrogator who used to work at the Guantanamo prisons explained the physicians’ job as follows: “Their purpose was to help us break them.”

Republicans may not like the comparison, but the plain fact is that the Nazis also used medical doctors to design systems of torment at their prison camps. The twisting of medical doctors who are supposed to help make people healthy is a sign of how morally decayed the American system of laws under the Bush Administration has become. The physicians who collaborated with prison guards to torment prisoners at Guantanamo Bay ought to be fired, and then ought to be stripped of their legal right to practice medicine in the United States.

I know this for sure: There is no way in hell I would take my kids to be treated by any doctor who participated in engineering systems of fear, pain, and despair in a military prison camp. What part of First, do no harm do these jerks not understand?

Read the article yourself, and cringe: http://nytimes.com/2005/06/24/politics/24gitmo.html?hp&ex=1119672000&en=17f38087d71bd912&ei=5094&partner=homepage

It’s bad enough that most members of the US Congress defaulted on their responsibility and gave George W. Bush a blank check to invade Iraq without provocation.

Now, a truth even more disturbing is emerging. It seems that the Bush Administration actually began the Iraq War well before the Congress gave him permission to do so.

For example, a full month before the US Congress gave permission for a war against Iraq, one hundred American and British aircraft flew into Iraqi airspace and unleashed a fury of bombs and missiles against Iraqi anti-aircraft positions. This action, we now know, was part of a strategy devised by Tony Blair and George W. Bush to provoke Iraq in order to provide an excuse for going to war. This covert strategy to artificially create the excuse for an invasion of Iraq has since been revelead in the Downing Street Memos.

Air Force Generals have been boasting that they “began taking out assets that could help in resisting an invasion at least six months before war was declared.” Reports of American missiles destroying infrastructure in Iraq began coming out in early 2002, a year before the war officially began, and well before the Bush White House even asked the US Congress for permission to invade.

It’s illegal for the White House to start wars without congressional approval, yet that’s exactly what it seems that the Bush Administration did with Iraq. That makes the Iraq War an impeachable offense.

The Republicans in Congress are doing nothing to call President Bush to account for this crime. The congressional Republicans are not even calling for an investigation into the matter. The Republican Congress seems content to sit back and ask no questions, and merely do what it is told to do by the Bush White House.

America needs more than that. America needs a Congress with the resolve to think and act independently, and demand accountability when the Executive Branch breaks the law. On Election Day in 2006, America will have the chance to form such a strong Congress, by kicking out the complacent Republican representatives and senators and replacing them with leaders who will demand answers for the American people.

I have to admit this about the Bush Administration: When it commits acts of corruption, it doesn’t bother with the little stuff. It’s big big big all the way.

Visualize this: 363 tons of one hundred dollar bills. To tell the truth, I can’t even imagine what that looks like. Yet, that’s exactly what the Bush Administration has had flown over to Iraq. In one day last year alone, the Bush Administration flew 28 tons of hundred dollar bills in an armada of military cargo planes to Iraq.

Congress learned yesterday that, in total, 12 billion dollars of paper cash has been sent to Iraq. The Bush Administration says that it cannot tell Congress exactly where all those hundred dollar bills have ended up. They claim that some of the cash might have gone to pay for “services” – provided by Dick Cheney’s company, Haliburton. Oh, but the Bush Administration cannot say for sure.

How convenient for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that cash money cannot be tracked.

The Pentagon is refusing to provide audits of the distribution of the cash to Congress. More convenience for the Bush Administration.

The Republicans who control Congress are refusing to demand that information on the missing 12 billion dollars from the Bush White House. Convenient, convenient, convenient. Convenience is is flowing through the Republican government in Washington like… oil.

A tip to those who want a better understanding of what the Bush Administration has really been up to with its new powers to eavesdrop on the personal and private lives of ordinary Americans: Watch the fight in the United States Senate over the John Bolton nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations.

Currently, John Bolton’s nomination is stalled because the Bush White House refuses to provide information to the United States Senate about some surveillance operations conducted by the National Security Agency against officials of the United States government who were expressing disagreement with elements of Bush Administration foreign policy. Senators have serious concerns that John Bolton intended to use the surveillance for political purposes, like a modern-day J. Edgar Hoover.

The Bush White House says that it wants John Bolton to be confirmed. However, if the confirmation was the true goal of the Bush Administration, then all it would have to do would be to release the information. After the release of the information about John Bolton’s maneuverings with government eavesdropping efforts on American citizens, the Democrats would stop their filibuster, and the Republican Senate leadership could then initiate a vote, which would be sure to approve the Bolton nomination.

So, the Bush Administration is actually behaving as if it does not want to choose the direct route to a confirmation of John Bolton as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Why?

There is reason to believe that the primary motivation for the Bush Administration is to avoid releasing the information about how the National Agency is eavesdropping on the personal and professional lives of United States government officials. It looks like the Bush Administration is willing to sacrifice the Bolton Nomination in order to keep the information secret.

In watching the Bush Administration, we’ve learned that the greater the efforts to block access to information, the more politically damaging that information is. On a large number of fronts, the Bush Administration has spent the last two years fending off inquiries into its activities, including activities that may well be illegal. The Bush Administration’s bizarre efforts to keep the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance secrets suggest that White House is very worried about the what the information about Bolton’s activities would reveal.

Given that the information remains a tightly kept secret, we cannot say for sure what that information would reveal. However, all the signs point in one direction: That the information that has been requested by the Senate about National Security Agency’s programs to conduct spy operations within the United States against American targets would reveal intentional and systematic efforts to break the law.

Watch the Bolton nomination battle, just one more aspect of the Bush Administration’s efforts to erect a barricade to thwart upcoming investigations and movements toward impeachment.

Last Thursday, I wrote about the congressional hearings held by John Conyers into the evidence of Bush Administration crimes as revealed in the Downing Street memo.

As an update, I want to inform our readers of what happened as a result of the Conyers Hearings:

- First, the mainstream media has finally started to pay attention to the scandal of the Downing Street memos. All through the weekend, newspapers and even cable TV news channels have been discussing the evidence in the British memos that George W. Bush intentionallly defrauded the US Congress in order to start a war with Iraq. The memos show that Bush knew that the war would be both unnecessary and illegal.
- Second, the Democrats in Congress are now actively organizing an effort to begin the process to impeach President Bush. Democratic Party veterans like Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman Charles Rangel are now openly discussing impeachment.
- Third, President Bush has been forced to hide out in the White House like a man trying to avoid being served a subpoena.

When the Conyers Hearings were completed, John Conyers led a delegation to the White House. He was carrying a document with 5 basic and easy questions for President Bush, signed by one quarter of the US Congress and endorsed personally by over half a million private American citizens.

The White House refused entry to Congressman Conyers. They didn’t even allow him past the gate on the street. Even though John Conyers is a senior member of Congress, the Bush White House treated him like a criminal, and would not even allow him the privileges enjoyed by Washington D.C. tourists.

Bush refused to talk to Conyers, and told him to go away.

To understand what this means, imagine what it would be like if President Bush were to visit Capitol Hill and was turned back at the door and told that he would not be allowed inside. This kind of thing simply does not happen in American government. President Bush is beginning to act as if Congress has no power at all, as if he can do whatever he wants to do, and ignore the Constitutionally-established power of the US Congress to oversee and limit his authority.

When a national leader takes such a dramatic step as this, it’s time to watch out. Power corrupts, and seizures of power lead to additional power grabs. George W. Bush is proving that he cannot be trusted with the power of the Presidency, and freedom-loving Americans need to get organized quickly to bring Bush to justice – before it is too late.

Well, some of us here at imprisonbush may have gotten tired. I got something else.

It’s that kind of feeling played out in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or 1984, or one of those zombie flicks. You find yourself surrounded by a world full of people who don’t make sense, who you can’t relate to, and a sense of dread starts to come over you.

And you know it’s not particularly politically wise or politically correct to say this about people you’re trying to win over or convince, but right now the American people–as a whole–have turned into nothing but a shambling horde of inhuman monsters.

Think back just a few years to how we used to define the most despicable of governments: They come and take people away with no charges, no lawyer, no due process. They torture people. They start wars of aggression based on lies. Well now America has done all that, and more. And the crowds that hit the streets two years ago vowing never to stand for it are gone. And if you tell another American about all this they shrug and grunt like a zombie.

Theologians, trained to counsel us on grand truths and what’s best in human nature, conspire to reduce questions of right and wrong to issues of sexual behavior between consenting adults. The better angels of our nature fly off to preoccupations with the supernatural, leaving shambling amoral soulless beasts to interact with our fellow men. What about torture? Wars of aggression? Why, what preacher in his right mind would stand in a pulpit in America today and speak truth to these issues? Only one who was committed to morality, and the truth, and willling to do what’s right. That is to say, none of them. Grunting, mindless zombies.

An American citizen named Jose Padilla is taken and held by the American government for years: no charges, no trial, not even allowed to see a lawyer for months. A federal court finally decrees that he must be released or charged, and gives a deadline of 45 days. 45 days come and go with no action. And not a peep from the press. Not a damn word from anybody. Grunting, mindless zombies.

Supposed experts come on TV lying and bellowing randomly at each other. Grunting, mindless zombies.

Sure, it’s easy to blame Karl Rove, or Pat Robertson, or one of the other more visibly demagogic leaders.”They’re deceiving us!” It’s not “the people’s” fault. But that only goes so far. At a subconscious level–which is now no longer really subconscious because the American people have turned into mindless zombies with no consciousness at all–we WANT to be deceived. Fact is, these leaders only find themselves at the top because they’re floating on a sea of willfully ignorant, amoral, soulless grunting zombies.

I hear there’s another zombie movie coming out this summer. But don’t bother going to see it. You’re living it.

Anyhow, that’s how I get when I start contemplating the present state of politics in America. For better or worse, there you have it.

Cheers